Who holds the vital ingredient as healthcare shifts from hospital to community?

The trusted anchor institutions that can provide pastoral care and more.

Esther Platt

Esther works as a Senior Consultant for the Good Faith Partnership. She sits in the secretariat for the ChurchWorks Commission.

A social prescribing project in full swing.

Theos.

On 11 November, the Good Faith Partnership, the National Academy of Social Prescribing (NASP) and the Bishop of London convened a roundtable discussion in the House of Lords to call for a collaborative relationship between faith groups and NHS social prescribing providers.

Faith leaders from the major religions in the UK gathered alongside senior officials such as from the Department for Health and Social Care, NHS England and arm’s length bodies.

‘There are lots of exciting opportunities with a new government in place,’ said Charlotte Osborn-Forde, CEO of NASP, adding that as part of her desire to see social prescribing available in NHS services beyond GP surgeries ‘there are huge and untapped assets in communities.’

Marianne Rozario from Theos, the lead researcher on a groundbreaking new report on faith and social prescribing, elaborated, saying that faith groups are trusted anchor institutions in local communities that are well networked, offer resources in the form of buildings and volunteers, and have expertise in pastoral and spiritual care.

Mark Joannides, Deputy Director for Community Health in the Department of Health and Social Care, added that: ‘Faith groups are going to have to be part of this,’ when referring to the government’s health mission and the three big shifts from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention.

The conversation focused on how this integration could take place, particularly through securing shared investment funds for faith groups, co-locating healthcare services into faith buildings, and integrating faith groups into the NHS 10-year healthcare plan.

A range of ideas were shared by those present including the importance of investing in faith groups to provide palliative care, focusing on reducing health inequalities, and investing in local infrastructure.

On 30 January, Good Faith Partnership and Theos will publish the first ever report into the role of faith communities in the social prescribing system. This timely report collates research into the role of faith groups in social prescribing and aims to facilitate further discussion on how collaboration between faith groups and the NHS can support the needs of the most vulnerable in our society. Alongside the report, two ‘How To’ guides will be published, providing faith leaders and social prescribing link workers with a step-by-step process for building relationships with one another.

To hear more about the research recommendations, explore next steps and to access the practical ‘how-to’ guides register for a free hour-long webinar on 30 January using this link:

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

Article

Comment

Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.