AN INITIATIVE by the Church of England to raise £24 million by hiring out steeples for use as mobile phone masts has provoked opposition among parishioners angered by the commercial exploitation of churches.
Safety fears have led Kent County Council to ban mobile phone masts from its land and property while Phil Willis, a Liberal Democrat MP, has started a campaign to make planning permission for masts more difficult to obtain.
The Church, however, is seeking bids from mobile phone companies to place transmitters in more than a quarter of its 16,000 steeples.
Opposition is growing. A Glasgow congregation boycotted its church last year when an Orange mobile phone mast replaced its cross. Orange paid the Pentecostal Victory Christian Centre £6,000 to install the transmitter.
Protests began in South London yesterday when the Vicar of St Barnabas in Beckenham gave his blessing to a project that would allow the mobile phone company Hutchison 3G to install a transmitter inside a glass fibre cross on the church roof. The Rev Peter Marr declined to to say how much his church will receive if the mast is allowed.
Eric Richard, who played Sergeant Bob Cryer in ITV’s The Bill for 17 years, is leading local opposition. He said: “I’m not a Christian and I don’t belong to any organised religious group, but I think that selling the symbol of Christianity, of God on Earth, to Mammon is the height of hypocrisy. It is immoral and obscene.”
Mr Richard, who has two children, is also concerned about the health impact on a nearby primary school of any radiation generated by the mast, although no health risk has been proved.
Congregations are also worried that the new generation of mobile phones will allow users to view pornography and take part in online gambling. Mobile phone companies are developing “age-related services”, allowing users to download pornographic colour photographs from the Internet and to bet online.
With the number of mobile phone users in Britain reaching about 40 million, operators need masts to promote the new services offered by “third generation” phones. Operators need to sell Internet services to recover their huge investment in the network.