Church of England to take on payday lenders Britain's booming payday lenders - seen by critics as "legal loan sharks" - have met a new adversary in the form of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has promised to allow rival credit unions to set up on church property. Justin Welby, a former finance executive in the oil industry, has described lenders such as Wonga as "morally wrong" and has compared the industry to Old Testament usurers. Now Dr Welby, leader of the world's Anglican community, intends to combine his sense of moral indignation with his business experience by putting the church in the frontline of providing affordable loans to the poor. The Archbishop told the magazine Total Politics that he had already met Errol Damelin, founder and chief executive of Wonga, and had said the church would put its "money where its mouth is." The industry, which has grown rapidly from being worth about £900m to £2.2bn in the past three years, is now a prominent feature on the high street of many British towns. Dr Welby has criticised the sector in the past but has now laid out plans to help 500 financial co-operatives, which already provide small loans, to expand their reach by using the Church's 16,000 premises. Stella Creasy, a Labour MP who has campaigned for a cap on credit costs and a wider crackdown on payday lenders, welcomed Dr Welby's intervention, but said: "It should not take divine intervention to deal with this problem. It is very easy to fix.