Stephen Timms MP gave a speech in Stoke-on-Trent about the growing grassroots movement of faith-based social activism and the need for more partnership between politics and faith-based organisations and churches.

So that's the covenant that we've drawn up and we've had quite a lot of interest in this. We've got furthest with the City of Birmingham, which is the biggest local authority in Europe, and they think - like every local authority they've got huge financial pressures and challenges ahead as austerity works through over the next few years - and they think working with faith groups in the city will be one of the ways that they can get through that. So the Bishop of Birmingham has been bringing together all of the faith organisations locally, Sir Albert Bore, the leader of the city council - and I'm hoping that this will be adopted and that it'll be helpful for them and for others as well.

I wanted to give a very different example. There was a newspaper article a while ago about the impact of Fairtrade on the Caribbean island of St Lucia. This was just after Sainsbury's had announced that they were going to be buying only Fairtrade bananas, 100 million per year of which were going to come from St Lucia. "Today," said the article, "the island, where bananas are not so much a crop but a way of life, is celebrating. Just about every St Lucian banana sold for export now commands the premium price and European supermarkets are queuing up for more. Money is going into run-down schools, the banana sheds are being repaired, the farmers can scarcely believe the turn-around in their fortunes."

Now, Fairtrade was started in Britain by Tradecraft plc - I'm the chair of the trustees of Tradecraft. Now at the time that started, nearly 40 years ago, the idea of supermarkets stocking goods on Fairtrade terms was frankly inconceivable. The change came about because Tradecraft was sustained by an army of committed volunteers who were willing to sell its products - and that is the reason why the Fairtrade movement first of all survived and then it prospered. Now, who are those volunteers? Well 80 per cent of them are from the churches. Fairtrade has prospered in Britain because enough people, frankly running church bookstalls, were willing to put a few Fairtrade items on the edge of the table alongside the books. Now, you could be forgiven for thinking that a bookstall in the corner in a draughty church hall was never going to make very much difference to anything - but actually that is the reason why run-down schools are being repaired in St Lucia. And, you know, that 80 per cent figure of the proportion of volunteers coming from the churches struck me because the organisers of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which you might remember around the time of the Millennium, the Make Poverty History Campaign: the organisers of both of those told me that 80 per cent of those who made up the human chains, who sent postcards to their MPs, who turned up at the great demonstration in Edinburgh for the G8 summit in 2005, 80 per cent of those also were from the churches. And the impact on our political culture and our market culture in Fairtrade, and therefore on the world, has been enormous.

I think there is today amongst people like Rob Flello and me, politicians, a new recognition of the importance and the value of faith in our society. Our society has enormous challenges ahead. We need people of faith taking advantage of this new recognition, working in their communities, contributing to formulating the answers just as happened very effectively in the past. And we need them to go further as well: we need people to get involved in politics, to join political parties, to work alongside others, to come up with our society's answers to the challenges that we face. When believers are involved in the lives of their community, worshipping, yes, and serving their community as well, they are bringing invaluable qualities in their service and those are qualities that modern Britain urgently needs. And it isn't just people of faith, like me and Rob and those who are here, who are saying that. There's a guy called Neal Lawson, who runs a left-leaning think-tank called Compass, who wrote a newspaper article a while ago, which I largely disagreed with because it was mainly a stinging attack on people like me who were ministers in the last Government. But the key point he made I did agree with and I think it's a very important truth about modern Britain and this is what he wrote:

"They don't just talk: they do. Religious communities are among the increasingly few places that bring people together as citizens rather than as consumers fighting for a living wage and against poverty. For me," he wrote, "as an atheist and a full-time politico, this is unsettling. I'm a secularist," he says, "I believe in the disestablishment of church and state. In particular," he says, "I want to see the end of faith schools. And of course religion has been the cause of terrible deeds, although none perhaps, in recent years, as abhorrent as those of atheists. But in words and deeds," he wrote, "in the world I see around me, the positive role faith plays far outweighs the negatives."

And I think that is going to be the view of a growing number of people looking around at what's happening in our communities, looking at the huge challenges that we're facing and some bad things that are going on. As they look around seeing that there are, in every community, people of faith, people who believe, who are worshipping together and also being active in their community. I think when people do that: when they look at what's happening and look at this movement, this growing movement of faith-based social activism, I think what they will see increasingly is a movement which is of enormous value today but of even greater potential in the years to come.

Thank you.