The challenges of government in the modern world are legion, but the most obvious way in which politicians can reconnect with voters is by focussing on the priorities of real people, rather than those of shrill campaigners.
A few years ago we picked up growing concern in the countryside about rural crime and, when we dug into that, we discovered an unreported epidemic of crime at churches and other places of worship.
A theft or burglary from a village church has a huge impact on an entire community, yet there were thousands of these crimes taking place every year. These were largely unreported and unaddressed by politicians more interested in riding the latest niche hobby horse which someone had persuaded them was ‘progressive’ or ‘brave’.
Yesterday we released a new investigation, which reveals that nearly 4,000 crimes were committed on church property as well as other religious premises last year. Freedom of Information requests were made to all 45 police forces in the UK, which show that there were 3,637 records of theft, burglary, criminal damage, vandalism and assault at churches and places of worship in 2025. Add in additional categories of crime and this means that, on average, more than 10 crimes took place at churches and places of worship every single day last year. The true figure will likely be even higher, given that a number of police forces refused to provide data for recorded crimes at churches in their areas.
Amongst the churches targeted was St Margaret’s in Barley, Hertfordshire, where £25,000 worth of historic silverware including chalices, a communion flagon and a communion plate were stolen, and St Mary and St Martin’s in Blyth, Nottinghamshire, where criminals kicked in a historic stained glass window to break into the church - costing thousands of pounds to replace. This sort of crime has real impacts on real people, yet successive governments have taken no action to address it. Indeed, at the same time as church crime is going up, funding for churches is going down.
As the National Churches Trust said in its response to our report: "Already this year the government has imposed VAT on 21,000 historic places of worship. By further demoralising volunteers, and causing chaos for ongoing restoration projects, this leads to churches becoming more vulnerable. We should be helping those who wish to safeguard our national heritage, not making their lives more difficult.”
I make no apologies for returning to the words of the great Labour figure Nye Bevan who defined politics as "the language of priorities". In the cauldron of modern politics, every politician in every political party should be asking themselves every day whether their agenda is really the language of voters’ priorities.
Photo by Graham Robinson, St Mary and St Martin Church, Blyth