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Chancel repair should have been abolished years ago, but that is no justification for the three specimens of anticlerical paroxysm that have already appeared on this thread. The Aston Cantlow PCC did not want to claim on the Wallbanks' farm but were compelled to do so by a secular heritage body to which they had applied for assistance, and which insisted that they claim off the Wallbanks.

Pastorally, in Aston Cantlow, this has doubtless been disastrous, which was why most PCCs do not want to have to enforce these.

What is also unreasonable in that case was that a lot of the cost was to meet expensive requirements imposed by heritage bodies that would not have applied and did not exist when the charge was first created in the Middle Ages. The Wallbanks were not allowed to say, 'right, we'll send round a local builder with some stones, mortar and a bucket of whitewash, and if you say you're entitled to insist on anything more, you pay for it, not us'.

The people who really make money out of this are dodgy insurance companies in cahoots with mortgage bodies who sell over-expensive single payment policies against theoretical liabilities that can neither be proved to exist or not to exist, and which usually do not. As one cannot prove a negative, they have house purchasers by the ***** .