In this week’s File on 4 documentary, on BBC Radio Four – The Priest and the pay-off – the BBC’s religion editor, Aleem Maqbool, explored the case of the Revd Canon Andrew Hindley.

Hindley, who was Canon Sacrist of Blackburn Cathedral, was subject to numerous police investigations and official church disciplinary processes over allegations of sexual abuse and assault – including of minors. But he wasn’t found guilty.

Formal risk assessments were carried out, including by the NSPCC. Despite not being found guilty, he was found to “present a risk of significant harm to children and young people, both through his role in the church and through his contact with children and young people in the community.”

Despite the concerns he remained in post for three decades until he was removed under the Church Dignitaries (Retirement) Measure 1949. This is a rarely used law that gives bishops the power to convene a special meeting of a cathedral’s governing body – the Chapter – to consider whether a canon is “unable through disability arising from age or infirmity (whether bodily or mental) to discharge adequately the duties attaching to his office.”

The process was followed and, in 2021, Hindley was removed from office. He sought a judicial review in the High Court and instead of fighting it, the Church caved in and agreed a financial settlement with Hindley. The details aren’t known but documents obtained by the BBC as part of Aleem Maqbool’s investigation show that a sum of £240,000 was offered by the Church to Hindley in 2022.

For the details of the case, you’ll need to read the BBC News story or listen to the File on 4 documentary. It is available on the BBC Sounds app.

In this blog, I will be looking at the Church of England’s response: reactive, proactive and non-active!

Reactive Response

In a statement, the Archbishops’ Council says that: “The Church of England is currently reviewing the disciplinary procedure for members of clergy (Clergy Discipline Measure), as recommended by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, IICSA and a review of the risk assessment regulations and guidance is under way.”

I know I have a habit of saying this about the Archbishops’ Council, but this statement is a big, fat, lie!

The draft Clergy Conduct Measure, which will replace the Clergy Discipline Measure, is due before the General Synod for final approval in February next year. It had its revision stage last month in York.

There is NOTHING in there that would provide a bishop with power to take action after a risk assessment in cases like that of Andrew Hindley.

And the review of Risk Assessment Regulations? The review is over. New Risk Assessment Regulations were approved by the General Synod – without debate under deemed business – in York in July. And, again, there is NOTHING in there that would provide a bishop with power to take action after a risk assessment in cases like that of Andrew Hindley.

So why is the Archbishops’ Council mentioning these in response to the circumstances raised in the BBC investigation? The only reason for doing so is to pull the wool over people’s eyes and to give a suggestion that things are being done?

The Archbishops of Canterbury and York also issued a statement. In it, they said: “We absolutely believe that there is no place in ministry for people who are a risk or pose a risk to others and continue to work to ensure that our systems are made ever stronger and more robust.”

In their joint statement, the two archbishops says that the case “highlights the complexity of our structures and processes” and describe it as “just one example of why we asked Professor Alexis Jay, the former chair of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, to provide options and recommendations for how further independence of safeguarding within the Church of England might be achieved. This work is now being taken forward.”

You’ll never guess what I’m going to say next: Yes, this is another big, fat, juicy lie.

Professor Jay was asked to “develop proposals for fully independent structure for safeguarding scrutiny”, but her terms of reference did not include anything relevant to the inability of the Church to take action in cases like that of Andrew Hindley.

And in any event, Professor Jay’s recommendations are not being taken forward. The Archbishops’ Council has instead set up a group to water down the proposals. Progress reports to Synod strongly indicate a direction of travel away from the fully independent structure recommended by Professor Alexis Jay.

The archbishops also go on to talk about “huge strides in safeguarding” made by the Church in the past decade, “particularly in listening to the voices of survivors and victims”. If they were listening to survivors and victims they would understand that the trust survivors and victims have in the Church of England is at its lowest ever level – and in the past year the Archbishops’ Council has spent more than £1 million on two reports into just one of its safeguarding fiascos.

The archbishops’ say that “this case . . . goes back many years [and] shows that we are still working to get our processes right and” – wait for it – “we must learn from the mistakes of the past.”

That final sentence needs no comment. The Church is never learning from its mistakes.

Proactive Response

It is important to note that, reprehensible as the idea of paying off a potential abuser – even a serial abuser – is, Blackburn Catedral and the Bishop of Blackburn should not be blamed for taking what they saw as the only way possible to remove the identified risk.

The Church of England is established by law. Its rules and regulations aren’t just a series of internal workplace policies. They are the law of the land: passed by General Synod, approved by Parliament and given Royal Assent by the monarch.

The bishops have to operate within the law and they have no power to simply dismiss clerics, as they are not employees but office holders – some of them with security of tenure which makes removal nigh-on impossible.

From time to time, the General Synod goes through a process to clear up and amend existing legislation through the passage of a “Miscellaneous Provisions Measure”. Part of the process of introducing any Measure is the establishment of a revision committee to go through each clause of the draft legislation and consider revisions proposed by Synod members and others.

I was a member of the General Synod when the last such MPM was passed and was part of the Revision Committee for it. We considered a letter from the previous Bishop of Blackburn, the Right Revd Julian Henderson. In his letter, Bishop Julian didn’t mention Canon Hindley or the difficulties experienced in trying to remove him. But he did set out what he saw as a major problem with the existing clergy risk assessment regulations.

The problem is this: the regulations set out when a bishop can require a priest to undergo a risk assessment; and they state that failure by a priest to cooperate with any such assessment is a breach of ecclesiastical law, for which action can be taken under the Clergy Discipline Measure.

But the regulations stop there: they do not give the bishop any power to impose any requirements on a cleric who has been risk assessed. The regulations allow for the identification of a risk, but nothing to manage that risk.

This is the problem with much of the Church of England measures and regulations – they are ill thought out and badly drawn and do not have the benefit of real scrutiny by experienced legislators in the way Acts of Parliament do – even though they have the same legal status in English law as Acts of Parliament: they are primary legislation.

The current Bishop of Blackburn, the Right Reverend Philip North, is well aware of the problem and he, like Bishop Julian, is calling for change, as can be heard in this exchange with Aleem Maqbool in the BBC File on 4 programme:

Bp Philip:	I don’t think anybody can be quite happy with the way that that situation was resolved. I think for me as the Bishop now, the important thing is what do we learn from it and what action do we take in the future.
Aleem Maqbool:	Well, unsatisfactory is one thing, but is this normal for someone who is involved, who is being looked at in multiple investigations for a settlement in that kind of case, just to be able to remove them? From their post?
Bp Philip:	For me, what really matters is the learning from that case and the steps that we must take as a church in order to be safer into the future.
Aleem Maqbool:	But what about those risk assessments we’ve talked about that weren’t effectively acted on, even though, as we’ve shown in our investigation, they highlighted serious concerns about Canon Hindley.
Bp Philip:	There is a grey area around risk assessments and so priests can have a risk assessment which can indicate a level of risk, and the powers of a diocesan bishop are limited. But that for me is a significant area of weakness. It’s very rare that this happens, but it seems to me that we need to be changing our mechanism so that when there’s a risk assessment, we can suspend and take action.
Aleem Maqbool:	There are people listening who will feel there’s no grey area there. If a risk assessment comes along and says children are unsafe around a member of clergy, that’s pretty black and white
Bp Philip:	I completely agree with you. I suppose the answer would be, but actually that priest hasn’t done anything yet. It would depend on the findings of the risk assessment.
Aleem Maqbool:	Still, an independent risk assessment has said member of clergy shouldn’t be around children. Like I say, that will sound very black and white and very straightforward to most people: that that person shouldn’t be around children; and you should do anything that you can to make sure – whatever fight, legal fight or other, will come your way afterwards – that is the priority to get them away from children.
Bp Philip:	And I completely agree. But because clergy are office holders, not employees, there are limits to what a bishop legally can do at present…
Aleem Maqbool:	…People watching this are not going to make that distinction.
Bp Philip:	That’s not an acceptable position. I completely agree. When a risk assessment indicates a priest as a risk, we should be able to take action.

he Review Committee fully understood the significance of Bishop Julian’s letter and agreed that the lacuna needed to be addressed urgently. I even took the liberty of drafting clauses which would provide the amendments needed. But we were advised by Church House lawyers that it would be wrong to introduce such a significant change at this stage of a MPM because the change “would require detailed legal and safeguarding advice”.

The Review Committee established a subgroup, supported by staff from the Church of England’s legal office and the National Safeguarding Team. We concluded that Bishop Julian’s proposal needed to be addressed urgently; but we were advised that it would require detailed policy work to ensure it was aligned with “the ongoing work on reforming the law on clergy conduct.”

In our report to the Synod, in February 2023, we made the urgency of this change very clear (paragraphs 90 to 93 of GS 2272Y/2273Y), saying: “The Committee stresses to Synod, and to those with policy responsibility, its view that there is an urgent need to address the issue raised by the Bishop.”

It was a point that the Chair of the Revision Committee, the Archdeacon of Dudley the Venerable Nicky Groake, said in her speech to Synod opening the debate. She said: “we stress our view that this must be addressed urgently.”

Non-active Response

So what has happened since then?

This will be the shortest section, because the question can be answered very succinctly: since then, the Church of England has done precisely nothing.

The situation today remains as it was when the Diocese of Blackburn spent almost three decades trying to remove Canon Andrew Hindley from his post; and it remains the same since the Revision Committee of the last Miscellaneous Provisions Measure described this as something needing to be changed urgently.

Maybe the Church hasn’t had time. It is a standing joke amongst Church leadership and Synod members that change in the C of E comes slowly; and legislative change takes too long. So maybe the criticism is unfair.

However, since Committee “[stressed] to Synod, and to those with policy responsibility, its view that there is an urgent need to address the issue”, two opportunities to bring about change have been missed.

The first is the draft Clergy Conduct Measure, which has passed its Revision Committee stage without this being considered; and the second is the actual passage of new Clergy Risk Assessment Regulations which, again, do not tackle this issue in any way, shape or form.

The Archbishops say that they want to “learn the lessons from the past” and will “continue to work to ensure that our systems are made ever stronger and more robust.” So why didn’t they in the Clergy Conduct Measure or new Risk Assessment Regulations?

The Archbishops’ Council said that “The Church of England is currently reviewing the disciplinary procedure for members of clergy” and that “a review of the risk assessment regulations and guidance is under way” – despite the fact that these have already happened without addressing this issue in any way.

For effective safeguarding, every organisation needs a culture where problems can be reported upwards and dealt with. The former Bishop of Blackburn has done that: he has highlighted a problem with the current legislation and asked for urgent action.

He is backed by the current bishop of Blackburn. He is backed by a Revision Committee which steered other legislation through the Synod which stressed the urgency of the problem.

But he isn’t being backed by the Archbishops’ Council, the National Safeguarding Team and those responsible for developing policy and legislation.

The Secretary General should have taken the advice of the Steering Committee and ensured that the issue was addressed when the Clergy Risk Assessment regulations were revised. That is the very basic of responsibilities for the secretariat for legislative bodies like the Synod and Archbishops’ Council – to hold together different threads and make sure that pieces of work are joined up.

But it is another failure by the Archbishops’ Council and the Secretariat. Echoing the words of Elvis Presley, can we please have a little less conversation and a little more action please – especially when the conversation is full of lies from the Archbishops’ Council.