WTF is going on in the UK? According to Terry Sanderson in CiF:

In an obscure little debate in the House of Lords last week, the Bishop of Carlisle, Graham Dow ((We’ve encountered him before, here and here. He’s clearly a lunatic, but that doesn’t prevent him from speaking in the House of Lords.)), let slip in passing a few of the things that are going on between the church and the government that maybe we ought to know about.
Dow revealed that the government had, for more than two years, “been in conversation with church leaders about the possibility of the church providing extensive welfare services, rather in the way that the church plays a major part in education”. Part of this, apparently, is a 20-year contract for “Christian groups bidding to deliver dentistry”.
Not only does the bishop envisage the church taking over welfare provision with the use of public money, he doesn’t want that provision to be regulated. “Church projects of course would be audited, but not controlled. My opinion is that, recently, we have been building a society that is very low on trust and very high on inspection and control,” said his reverence.