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The search has begun to find winners for the 2012 English Heritage Angel Awards. The annual competition was founded last year by Andrew Lloyd Webber to reward the efforts of local people in saving their heritage. The Telegraph is media partner for the awards.

Have you been involved in bringing a historic house back from the brink of ruin or restoring a church or chapel to its former glory? Have you perhaps reclaimed a historic garden buried beneath a wilderness or brought new life and a constant flow of visitors to a redundant industrial site? If so, English Heritage would like to hear from you!

Awards will be presented for:

• the best rescue or repair of a historic place of worship
• the best rescue of a historic industrial building or site
• the best craftsmanship employed on a heritage rescue, and
• the best rescue of a listed building, scheduled monument, registered garden, landscape or battlefield, protected wreck or conservation area.

Winners will be chosen from a shortlist of 16 entries, four in each category, and the teams involved in all shortlisted projects will be invited to a glittering awards ceremony at The Palace Theatre in London’s West End in October.

To enter, or find out more, please click here.

We are seeking an enthusiastic individual to fill the new role of Grants and Local Trusts Officer here at the National Churches Trust. For full details of this opportunity visit our Vacancies page for more information - the deadline for applications is the end of 8 May.

The Budget announcement that VAT is to be charged at the full 20% on alterations to listed buildings has the potential to make a serious impact on the estimated 19,800 listed places of worship across the UK. For many of these buildings, projects to install facilities such as kitchens, toilets, heating and extensions are vital to enable the building to serve the community and help to sustain its future. The National Churches Trust sees many such worthy projects through applications to its Community Grants programme and the potential increase of a fifth in the cost of such schemes could put off many places of worship from even attempting them.

We are therefore supporting the campaign to persuade the government to look again at this proposal. We have been working closely with the other heritage bodies and religious denominations represented in the Historic Religious Buildings Alliance on a cross-sector response and campaign on the subject, and the issue is also being highlighted on Facebook and Twitter.

We would therefore encourage all those who care about this issue to write to their local MP and sign the e-petition available here to push for a debate in Parliament.

Important links for the campaign:

• Senior figures in the Church of England have written to the Chancellor on this matter and copies of their letters can be viewed here.

• The budget document containing the proposals, in chapter 2, on page 73, para 2.179 can be viewed here. 

• The HMRC consultation document about the transition to charging VAT is here.

• The Heritage Alliance, representing the whole of the heritage sector and of which the National Churches Trust is a member, has also written to the Chancellor calling for reversal of the proposals, and their response can be seen here.

A new scheme from the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) to train volunteers and extend knowledge of good maintenance has received initial support from the Heritage Lottery Fund. Building on the success of its Faith in Maintenance scheme, SPAB has received HLF backing for a successor project designed to create and sustain a series of ‘local maintenance co-operatives’ which will link groups of people caring for places of worship and encourage them to work together to tackle common problems.

The aim of the Maintenance Co-operative Movement is to connect, encourage and support the army of volunteers across the country who are largely responsible for the upkeep of some of our most important heritage assets. SPAB will be developing the scheme as a network of mutual support, information and practical advice for volunteers who look after historic faith buildings, with the help of the National Churches Trust.

Faith in Maintenance (FiM) was launched in 2007 with the aim of taking the message of the importance of good maintenance directly to those who give their time to look after the many architecturally significant buildings throughout the country used as places of worship. In the past five years nearly 4,600 volunteers of all faiths and denominations have attended FiM courses. Through workshops for young people and lectures at other events the FiM message reached a total of 5,500 people and 150 courses were held throughout the country.

The unique project was recognised in 2010 when it was awarded a prestigious European Union Prize for Cultural Heritage / Europa Nostra Award in the Education and Awareness-Raising category. Judges described it as ’exemplary’ and ‘an inspirational model’.

For more information about the scheme and how it intends to develop, visit the SPAB website here and here.