After a day of hard meetings I laughed when I got an email with the link to this video. Most of us just moan about things like the budget, but the wife of the Dean of Wakefield got creative and made the point much more effectively.
April 4, 2012
Creative complaint
Posted by nickbaines under church | Tags: budget, George Osborne, VAT, Wakefield |[6] Comments
April 4, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Brilliant and a wonderful performance. Excellent keyboard playing. May many see this and urge the government to do the right thing by ancient church buildings.
April 4, 2012 at 10:13 pm
What a fantastic song and singer, lucky Dean!
April 5, 2012 at 9:37 am
Thanks for this – will pass it on!
April 6, 2012 at 4:23 pm
Will send to my MP who is likely to be supportive.
April 28, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Wonderful. But… how many listed buildings do we have? Does there ever come a point where we wonder if the obligation to maintain listed buildings just consumes too great a proportion of our energy? and what can we do then?
May 4, 2012 at 5:53 pm
Very good, but I have some questions:
1) She says that, by law, they must have the money in place to pay for the work before it can go ahead. Is she right? It seems most unlikely, as I have been involved in several heritage projects in both England and Wales where work has gone ahead while fundraising is still in progress. It may of course be that people have been cheerfully breaking this law for years, but since nobody has ever raised this point before it seems improbable. I would have thought that borrowing money, including borrowing commercially, would be an acceptable alternative under any necessary statutes, although I appreciate that there are all sorts of other issues surrounding that.
2) The VAT change hasn’t happened yet. Is she sure that it would apply to their works – which have already started? It seems at least arguable to me that they would be exempt, on the grounds that the change applies to works after October 2012, and these will not be works after that date.
I’m also really hoping that the Treasury will see sense and relent on this idea, which seems daft and dangerous to me – but I’m a bit puzzled by her remarks, which are at variance with my own experience. If you know any more, or could get clarification, I would be interested to hear of it