Senior bishops have been ordered to cut the lavish costs of running their palaces and mansions by more than a quarter.
The spending cap, confirmed by Church of England officials, will be lowered by a further third from 2014.
The disclosure comes in a week that has seen five bishops lead a rebellion in the House of Lords against Coalition plans to cap the cost of benefits payments.
They are among the 44 diocesan bishops who are covered by the spending restrictions on accommodation, as are the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.
The five bishops opposed a £26,000 cap on benefits, claiming it would disproportionately affect families with children and make them homeless.
Anglican economist Ruth Lea said: ‘Now the Church recognises that it has to live within its own budget, perhaps the bishops could recognise that the Government needs to do the same.Which bit of hypocrisy is it that they have trouble spelling? If they are really worried about children, perhaps they should think of the children who will have to pay off the Government’s debts in 20 or 30 years’ time.’
The bishops were also rebuked by former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, who wrote in the Mail that they would doom families to remaining benefit-dependent and workless.
Dr Carey added that the bishops had ignored the impact of taxation on millions of working people who pay for state benefits but live on much less than £26,000 themselves.
The bishop who led the rebellion – which also included the Bishops of Chichester, Lichfield, Leicester and Manchester – was the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, the Right Reverend John Packer.
The style in which he is accustomed to living perhaps gives an insight into why he and his colleagues feel £26,000 a year is too little for a family to get by on.
Four years ago he moved into a house bought and renovated by the Church at a cost of more than £1million.
Expenses included moving a colony of bats into a specially constructed outhouse run.
All 44 bishops have now been told that the total maintenance and refurbishment bill for their homes must be kept below £5million a year for three years.
The limit, which came into effect last year, is down from £7million a year over the previous three years.
It is hoped the move will dispel the impression that senior clergy are enjoying lavish lifestyles at the expense of ordinary churchgoers.
The cap means that average spending on a bishop’s home will have to come down from just under £160,000 a year to £114,000.
This figure includes the cost of buying new homes and necessary repairs.
But, according to Church documents, ‘the average ongoing maintenance costs of some houses is now well over £50,000 a year’.
Papers circulated by the CofE’s parliament, the General Synod, reveal the findings of a meeting of senior figures staged by the Church in 2009.
It concluded: ‘Some very large sums have been spent on some of the properties recently and the average cost of maintaining each property was very high.’
The CofE then proceeded to plan a spending cap. Synod Secretary-General William Fittall set out the reasoning in a paper: ‘There was recognition that the large sums spent on see houses provoked questions about the style, scale and expectations of bishops’ ministry.’
Successive attempts to curb bishops’ extravagant spending on their ‘see homes’ have failed to slow the increase in costs.
A Church review a decade ago called for bishops to live in homes with no more than six bedrooms and to restrict their use of gardeners and chauffeurs.
Yet in the three years from 2008 to 2010, spending on bishops’ accommodation rocketed to £21million, or £7million a year.
Mr Fittall proposed a total £15million spending cap over the 2011-2013 period, to be reduced to £10million for 2014-16.
The Reverend Paul Dawson, a South London vicar and spokesman for the Church’s conservative evangelical Reform group, said: ‘Everyone is having to cut their cloth and bishops are no different from the rest of us.’