There have been increasingly aggressive moves to put faith groups in charge of delivering public services.
In 2020, Conservative MP and evangelical Christian Danny Kruger published a report calling for the government to "invite the country's faith leaders to make a grand offer of help" in public services, as part of the government's 'levelling up' initiatives. This, he said, should be in exchange for a "reciprocal commitment from the state".
The idea of faith groups running community services makes many people uneasy. There are reasonable concerns that some faith groups can and do use these opportunities to proselytise to vulnerable members of the public, and that some groups may discriminate against service users, employees or volunteers on the basis of sex, sexuality, religion or belief. But Kruger's report dismissed such concerns as "faith illiteracy" and "faith phobia".
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The dangers of proselytization in the delivery of public services is an inevitable consequence of contracting out the provision of health social welfare and related services to the charitable sector.
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