- 120 -
area with problems such as bad housing and high immigrant population
should be 90p per week per giving unit, rising to 140p for the most
financially able parishes. This yields a scale at some point along
which each parish had to be located. To decide which point the
assessors seem to be guided partly by a comparison of financial
returns and partly by intuition; it appears to have been not a
difficult operation, mutual agreement being, in most cases, quickly
reached, albeit with a tendency to cluster in the band 105p to
120p, and to avoid both extremes.
The final stages were straightforward arithmetic, multiplication
of rate by number of units yields a potential income per parish,
and summation of those, a potential income for the Diocese. This
total potential income then becomes the denominator, and each
parish's potential income the numerator, of the fraction by which
the total diocesan share is multiplied to ascertain that parish's share.
