Heather Bellamy spoke to the Evangelical Alliance about the proposal to register all Sunday Schools.

Heather: With some Church schools having been downgraded recently by Ofsted in relation to these British values, as opposed to the grades pupils are getting and the teaching they received, would you have concerns that some Churches could be closed down?

Simon: That is a logical outworking. However I do think the Government would legally struggle to do that. I don't know the facts of all the cases involved, but it's not really the role of Ofsted to be assessing and judging the complexities of private religious practice.

There are real concerns because many Churches work with vulnerable teenagers, in the most challenging of settings, so there is so much scope for misinterpretation. And the Bible on our own admission as Christians, contains a lot of strong stuff that some people might be upset about. It could be about creation, or heaven and hell, or marriage. Telling a volatile young person something, they may hear it slightly differently and raise a complaint. Then there could well be chilling consequences. So not only could it lead to the withdrawal of provision, it may well also lead to unintended consequences for many people.

The problem the Government fundamentally has with these proposals is that they are disproportionate and they are unworkable. The Government are confusing a lack of power with a lack of evidence. There's no lack of power at the moment, but there is a lack of evidence.

The very sad thing about these proposals is that it's not going to catch the very people that the Government legitimately want to catch, the radical extremists who are either militarised, or sufficiently radicalised and operating in a Madrasa setting. These are highly unlikely, in our view, to go in to register with the Government. They are quite capable of stopping their lessons at five hours and 59 minutes. It's easy to evade this, or you split your provision with another institution, or you simply do it in the home. Viewed that way, it's very difficult to see what these proposals will achieve.

And now that David Cameron's said that one-off events and week-long Bible events are going to be exempt, it does somewhat raise a rather interesting question. "What makes taking a group of young children away into the hills for a week of no interest to the Government, yet open access publicly advertised Sunday Schools' buildings still come within the regulations?" What is it that makes six hours in a Sunday School, or in a Church over a week, far more risky or worthy of inspection, than having a week or a one-off private event, in a remote rural private location with young people?

It's very difficult to understand the rationale of the policy and we would invite the Government to abandon these fundamentally illiberal and misconceived plans and look at a more proportionate and focussed use of existing powers to tackle the problem of extremism in our society.

Heather: What happens now in relation to this scheme and it being put on the Statute Books?

Simon: The Government opened this consultation just before advent and gave it six weeks, which was the shortest period of time of any consultation that they were running over the Christmas period. Fiona Bruce MP asked for an extension and a pause for more time and they didn't give it.

We do know from a Junior Minister that there were 10,000 responses, which is an extraordinary number of responses for a Government consultation with very little fanfare. Most of those responses we understand were from Christians and Christian organisations.

They are currently assessing and considering the responses at the moment. We wait to see what the Government does next, whether it's going to amend the proposals in some form, or take them forward. This is part of the overall counter-extremism strategy, so there is no firm date for this that we know of at the moment. We will be continuing to brief our members on this. We will also be asking Christians to make their MP's aware of the potentially grave consequences for religious liberty with these proposals, whether they're intended or not.