- 37 -
but that the area being served has "... got to have an increase in
population of more than 5,OOO since the war"
(C4)
. In the face of such
feeling it is distinctly daunting to be suggesting the adoption of more
precise financial techniques, but that is the implicit reason for this
study. We may however surmise that the Church's failure to use more
rational techniques could be an error of omission rather than commission,
since there is some expressed feeling in favour of improvement. "We do
not think that the control exercised by the Diocese over building pro-
jects has always been sufficiently detailed ... the Diocese ought to
have some cumulative wisdom to offer to a parish which may have had
little or no experience of building"
(B13)
.
Merret and Sykes,
(B21)
considering this general theme state "As
operating costs ... typically rise with age, it seldom pays to run an
asset for its maximum physical or technical life. ... Given a schedule
of annual repair and operating costs and annual residual values, it is
possible to determine when it pays to scrap an asset and replace it with
a new one". After reasoning that repairs are nearly always possible if
the financial case is ignored, no matter how poor the condition of the
asset, they caution that "There comes a time when the repairs are so
large and complicated to carry out that, without doing any cost esti-
mates, it is clear that the repairs are not justified and may even
prove impossible to carry out." This would seem to epitomise the
Church's attitude to renewal - only do it when repair is either impos-
sible or overwhelmingly expensive and it is a basic proposition of this
section that for renewal to have optimum financial effect it should
possibly be carried out before that point has been reached. By way of
exemplification we will consider two cases, in one of which capital
investment appraisal could have been used, and in the other of which
it certainly should have been.
