The Heritage Lottery Fund and English Heritage have welcomed a report Building faith in our future by the Church of England, which sets out how important church buildings are to communities and the need to invest in them to conserve them.

The report urges government departments, regional development agencies and local authorities to acknowledge the importance of church buildings as catalysts for community regeneration and social cohesion.

Since April 1996, English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) have awarded £172.8million in grants under jointly funded schemes to repair places of worship, making the organisations England\'s biggest funders of church buildings. In the past 10 years 1,731 grants have been awarded to places of worship of all faiths.

Repair Grants for Places of Worship was launched in April 2002 as a successor to the Joint Scheme for Places of Worship programme that ran in England from 1996.

The original scheme could provide grant-aid for a wide range of activities including new facilities and extensions, but since 2002 grant-aid has been provided for a more restricted type of repair, although in addition to the Places of Worship scheme churches can apply for lottery funding under the Heritage Grants Programme for grants over £50,000.

These heritage grants are awarded to projects that conserve heritage, increase community involvement, open up heritage and enable more people to learn about it. Such grants can be given to create new facilities for social, community and/or cultural purposes.

Churches can also apply to the Heritage Lottery Fund\'s Your Heritage scheme for grants to conserve church contents and projects designed to open up and increase use of the buildings, as well as to the Heritage Lottery Fund\'s Local Heritage Initiative scheme.

Sir Neil Cossons, chairman of English Heritage, said: "This report highlights the central role that the parish churches of England continue to play in the communities they serve.

"We look forward to building a strong partnership with the Church Heritage Forum to ensure the survival of the buildings which stand at the heart of our historic environment."

Liz Forgan, chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund, said: "With £100million needed each year to care for churches this report shows the importance of continued Government and lottery funding to care for and open up these places which have a huge cultural, heritage and social value.

"We will continue to work with English Heritage and other bodies to identify the needs and priorities of places of worship of all denominations and their communities and to support them."