Mr William Nye LVO
Secretary General
The Archbishops’ Council
Church House
Great Smith Street
London
SW1P 3AZ

18 November 2024

Dear William,

This is an open letter, which will be published later today at churchabuse.uk.

The announcement this week from Justin Welby that he will resign as Archbishop of Canterbury was inevitable, following the widespread media coverage in response to the publication of the report into the Makin Review. Justin’s resignation will not make the Church a safer place. You and I both know that Justin is a collaborate leader, who makes decisions and acts based on advice.

As Secretary General of the Archbishops’ Council you are one of his principal advisers. I do not know what advice you gave him about the John Smyth case, but that is just one of many safeguarding calamities the Church of England have created in recent years. We have seen time and time again senior officials in the Church of England frequently make safeguarding mistakes and acting in accordance with bad practice.

The Wilkinson Report into the disbanding of the “Independent” Safeguarding Board shows that you, personally, were culpable for numerous errors in relation to the ISB, including not dealing properly with the February dispute notice; you restricted the ISB from fulfilling its role by withholding crucial information and impeding access to necessary data; your mishandling of survivor notifications and potential data protection issues, including not appreciating individuals’ refusal to share data; making inaccurate reports regarding survivor contacts; and structural flaws in the creation of the ISB, including failing to put in place appropriate budgeting and accounting processes.

For me, the particularly egregious error is your decision to ignore a safeguarding professional’s advice that a public announcement that the ISB was to close, without first putting in place procedures to inform those victims and survivors that the ISB were working with, and without putting in place continuity of care, would be severely damaging.

In choosing to prioritise administrative convenience ahead of the needs of victims and survivors, you demonstrate that you have not learned any “lessons” from the many lessons learned reviews that have been commissioned by the Archbishops’ Council.

This is not a mistake. It was a deliberate decision. And it was made in full awareness of the trauma that it would cause. Another deliberate decision was your instruction to the Archbishops’ Council’s communications department to mislead members of the press on Saturday 8 July 2023.

The misleading press briefing echoed your own report to Synod (which you denied was a report in an attempt to prevent a following motion); and also Archbishop Stephen Cottrell’s lie to the Synod. You were sat behind Stephen Cottrell when he falsely and repeatedly claimed that the decision to disband the ISB was unanimous, and yet you made no attempt to correct him.

Your own personal safeguarding failings are not confined to the ISB. On 3 December 2021, I forwarded to you an email chain between me and Zena Marshall, at that point the interim director of safeguarding. In it, Zena Marshall said it was “not appropriate” for her to answer questions I had raised about the NST’s handling of a complaint that I had made about the actions of still-serving diocesan bishop.

One of the questions was about recommendation five  of the Whitsey Lessons Learned Review. That recommendation said that bishops should have “no direct involvement in the management of a safeguarding case.” 

I asked whether that lesson been learned (in the context that the Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham was conducting their own investigation, including cross examining the victim, prior to submitting a complaint to the Designated Officer). I specifically asked: “Is it okay for a diocesan bishop to interview a victim of clergy abuse?”

You did not do me the courtesy of a reply.

I have been in contact with numerous victims and survivors of church-related abuse. All of them tell of the continuing re-traumatising they have suffered as a result of the ongoing re-abuse they experience from officials at Church House and in the National Safeguarding Team.

YOU are responsible for the National Safeguarding Team and its staff but do not ensure that they operate properly, accountably and transparently. 

YOU have presided over a rapid growth in NST staffing numbers and remarkable increase in budgetary spend, with no discernible benefit in terms of improved safeguarding or better treatment of victims and survivors, or a simplification of the overly complex structures.

YOU have overseen a massive rise in the spending and staffing levels of the National Safeguarding Team, with no discernible benefit in terms of better treatment of victims, consistency of approach across dioceses, or making the Church a safer place.

YOU have overseen a massive rise in the Church’s spending on lawyers with staff costs rising from £935,078 in 2017 to £1,483,801 in 2021. And in an answer to me in Synod Questions in February 2022, you said: “With respect to lawyers instructed by the NCIs but not employed by them, the information requested is not readily available and could not be obtained without disproportionate cost.”

Is that information really “not readily available” and can’t be “obtained without disproportionate cost”? You are the chief executive of a charity spending just under £200 million a year. Doesn’t some of that money go towards the cost of proper accounting software with cost codes?

How can you not know how much money you are spending on external lawyers? And with an in-house spend on layers of £1.5 million, why the need to spend anything on external lawyers?

Or is it the case that you do know how much you are spending on lawyers, but prefer to keep the information secret?

YOU oversee all Synod questions and answers, yet increasingly the answers are not answers. You evade, elude, and sidestep questions providing verbiage, but no answers.

Part of the job of the General Synod is to hold the Archbishops’ Council accountable. But you do everything in your power to prevent this.

The Charity Commission tells me that they can’t say how many complaints they have received about the Archbishops’ Council’s safeguarding failures over the past five years because there are too many of them. They can’t provide information about these complaints under the Freedom of Information Act because to review them would cost more than the financial threshold in the Act.

YOU are the person who corresponds with the Charity Commission about such complaints. So why have you not disclosed this information to the General Synod or included it in the Archbishops’ Council’s annual reports. Do you think it appropriate to hide this information from people?

YOU are the General Secretary with responsibility for safeguarding of a national charity, and yet:

• The Archbishops’ Council under your guidance has refused to provide a simple list of recommendations contained in the many “Lessons Learned Reviews” commissioned in recent years.
  
  
• The Archbishops’ Council under your guidance has refused to state whether it accepts any recommendations contained in the many “Lessons Learned Reviews” commissioned in recent years.
  
  
• The Archbishops’ Council under your guidance has refused to indicate what progress it has made in meeting recommendations contained in the many “Lessons Learned Reviews” commissioned in recent years.
  

The Archbishops’ Council’s stated reason for refusing to provide this information is that it is “too difficult”. Too difficult? This should be basic monitoring information that a Secretary General in your position would be expected to maintain.

Why spend so much money on “Lessons Learned Reviews” if you insist on never learning the lessons?

The Church of England is not a safe place. It continues to make serious errors with regards to safeguarding and is constantly re-abusing victims and survivors with its approach and its lies.

YOU must also now go too.

I urge you to consider your position and resign.

With you at the helm, the Church of England has become a more dangerous place. It will not, and can not, improve its safeguarding with you at the helm.

Yours sincerely

Gavin Drake