6 February 2025

Dear Bishop,

This is an open letter to all of the diocesan bishops of the Church of England, ahead of next week’s meeting of the General Synod. The letter will be published shortly at churchabuse.uk. Any replies to this letter will also be published at churchabuse.uk, unless you indicate in your reply that you do not wish for it to be published.

The world is watching. Journalists are digging deep to find the stories behind the scandals; MPs are making increasingly hardline statements in Parliament; the Charity Commission are finally taking an interest; and an opinion poll published today puts trust in the Church of England at an all time low.

We are told that, following the publication of the Makin Review and the resignation of Justin Welby, that the Church of England understands the depth of the crisis and that next week’s meeting of the General Synod will be when the Church takes action to start putting things right.

If the Synod does that, then victims, survivors, advocates and campaigners will have no need to keep on being “shouty campaigners”.

The real question is this: will the Church of England take this opportunity to finally do the right thing and introduce proper and effective safeguarding structures; or will it continue to prevaricate and pretend that it is changing, while changing nothing?

Your answers to the Charity Commission following next week’s Group of Sessions will become a matter of record.  If another safeguarding scandal emerges in five, 10 or 15 years’ time, you won’t be able to blame the Church of England’s processes, constitutional arrangements or structures if you are found wanting, if you tell the Charity Commission that there are no such problems.

And if there are such problems, what will you tell the Charity Commission you did about them when you respond to Mr Holdsworth’s letter?

Will the safeguarding business before General Synod make a difference?

Independence in Safeguarding

This is a clear example of the Church of England saying it is doing one thing, while not actually doing it. There has already been a failed attempt to create an Independent Safeguarding Board. The problem was, the Board operated independently, as they were told they were, but the Archbishops’ Council wanted to control it. As a result, the Archbishops’ Council abolished the ISB and the victims and survivors who the ISB were supporting remain unsupported; despite promises to them in private that reviews will be continued; and statements in public that they are underway.

When the Archbishops of Canterbury and York announced the setting up of a review by Alexis Jay and John O’Brien, they also said that they would ask them to help implement the recommendations. But before the report was handed over the Archbishops’ Council established a “response group” to water down the proposals. What will come to the Synod next week is not an independent safeguarding structure.

In the motion being proposed by the Bishop of Stepney, General Synod is being asked to “affirm its commitment to greater independence”. Up until now, the Church of England has spoken of “independence” in safeguarding, rather than “greater independence”. What does “greater independence” mean? It means no independence at all.

Legal advice – official legal advice from the Archbishops’ Council, and unofficial legal advice commissioned by the Diocese of Gloucester – has been distributed to Synod members casting doubt on the legal ability of the Archbishops’ Council, Diocesan Boards of Finance and Parochial Church Council’s to delegate their safeguarding responsibilities to a third party. This is a typical “wrecking move” by the Church of England hierarchy.

Legal Advice can only tell you what the law says. If the General Synod approves a Measure, it changes the law.

And if charities can’t delegate their safeguarding responsibilities, why do dioceses take over safeguarding issues in parishes? And why does the Archbishops’ Council (through its National Safeguarding Team)

We need to be clear what we mean by Independence. It is perfectly possible for Church charities to retain responsibility for some safeguarding functions: safer recruitment, delivery of training, policy development, and so on; while passing responsibility to investigate allegations of wrongdoing to a fully independent body.

And, if that independent body has full autonomy, authority and power to investigate what it decides to investigate, it will be able to scrutinise whether safer recruitment and training is being done appropriately.

Anything short of a fully independent body responsible for investigating safeguarding allegations and concerns will not work. The Church has long lost its moral authority to investigate itself – victims, survivors, advocates and campaigners have known this for a long time. It is only now that this seems to becoming understand by the wider Church (although I suspect that some senior staff of the Archbishops’ Council still do not understand it).

Safeguarding Risk Assessment Regulations

In addition to investigating and assessing concerns and allegations, the independent body should have responsibility for approving new safeguarding legislation and codes. Of course, the statutory processes for passing Measures, Canons and Acts of Synod must continue, but an additional step should be introduced, to ensure that the independent body has the power to comment on drafts, and to block any legislation that would make the situation worse, or which does not deal adequately with the need for legislative development.

Take the Safeguarding Risk Assessment Regulations coming for Synod next week. These provide some tinkering around the edges – but they are just that. Tinkering.

The recent high profile news coverage of cases including Andrew Hindley (Blackburn) and David Tudor (Chelmsford) have highlighted the lack of power available to bishops (and DSOs) to take action to mitigate or remove any identified risk. The former Bishop of Blackburn, Julian Henderson, raised this issue – without mentioning the case of Andrew Hindley – with the revision committee for the last Miscellaneous Provisions Measure. The committee agreed that this was an urgent issue that needed to be dealt with at speed. This was set out in the committee’s written report to the Synod, and was emphasised in her speech by the chair of the committee, Archdeacon Nikki Groarke.

I was a member of the revision committee and prepared draft clauses which could have dealt with the issue in a proportionate way, with protections for affected clergy through appeals to the President of Tribunals. But the legal advice we received – from Church House lawyers who would have been well aware of Blackburn’s difficulty with Hindley going back decades – was that a Miscellaneous Provisions Measure was not the vehicle for such change, and that new Risk Assessment Regulations were being prepared which could tackle the issue.

Which raises the question – why are they not addressed? Why did the lawyers who prepared the draft regulations not dealt with this issue. Cases like Hindley and Tudor are likely to be rare – but clearly not unheard of. Here is an opportunity for the Church to change the processes that are often blamed for a lack of action, but the opportunity has not been taken. Why?

Clergy Conduct Measure

Another example of tinkering around the edges is the draft Clergy Conduct Measure. As a bishop, you almost certainly will not need convincing that the existing Clergy Discipline Measure is not fit for purpose. And you may be satisfied that the role of bishops in the preliminary stages of formal complaints about clergy have all-but been removed.

However, while you may be more familiar with complaints about that part of the process – because of the parts that you and your offices will have had in them – they are not the only part of the current process that has been subject to sustained and justified criticism.

Ignoring the inadvisability of adding minor grievances to a disciplinary process, the main issue with the current, and proposed measure is the substantive part of the complaint process, after the preliminary scrutiny stages.

Under the existing CDM, complaints are forwarded to the Designated Officer to investigate and prepare a report for the President of Tribunals. If the President or their deputy / delegate decides that a complaint should proceed to the tribunal, the Designated Officer will “prosecute” the case.

Under the proposed CCM, complaints are forwarded to the Investigations and Tribunals Team  to investigate and prepare a report for the President of Tribunals. If the President or their deputy / delegate decides that a complaint should proceed to the tribunal, the Investigations and Tribunals Team will “prosecute” the case.

The problem here is that the Designated Officer is a lawyer from the NCI’s legal office. And the Investigations and Tribunal Team will be “one or more” lawyer(s) from the NCI’s legal office.

The only change is in the name. The process – the much flawed and highly criticised process – remains identical. After all the consultation that has gone into preparing this draft legislation, to come up with a change of name as the only significant difference is appalling, but demonstrates why victims, survivors, advocates and campaigners have no trust in the Archbishops’ Council’s and the wider Church of England’s ability to improve. It is not learing the lessons.

Another problem with the draft legislation is the continued secrecy surrounding the process – secrecy that is not supported by the common law of England.

It is telling that the secrecy clauses in the present process are not mentioned anywhere in the Measure or Rules. This is because Parliament is likely to block any Measure or Rules that contain unlawful secrecy clauses. The Code of Practice is not law, but contains a threat of referral to the High Court for anybody who dares tells anybody about a CDM complaint.

When the General Synod debated whether CCM tribunals should sit in public rather than in private, they were misled by the revision committee – both in writing and orally. Synod was told that secrecy was the norm in other tribunals, and the General Medical Council was cited as an example.

All GMC tribunals actually sit in public, with the (rarely used) power to sit in private when necessary; and with the power to impose reporting restrictions – just like every other court and tribunal in England and Wales.

This is because such transparency is the basic standard under common law, as frequently upheld by the UK Supreme Court.

It has been argued that the secrecy is to protect victims of abuse from public scrutiny. But the Measure as currently allows a respondent to say that it should sit in public. This gives (alleged) abusers the power to subject victims to the scrutiny that the Measure is said to prevent. So this argument does not work.

If this Measure is passed as it is, I will submit evidence to the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament and ask them to declare it “not expedient”. The evidence will include the lies that Synod were told about secrecy during the passage of the Measure; and how the Clergy Discipline Commission abuse their powers by adding secrecy to its Code, which is treated as law despite not having the power of law.

Final Thoughts

Next week’s Synod will face more external scrutiny that any other group of sessions in recent years; and you know that you will have

to answer to the Charity Commission after this group of sessions, how will you vote?

• Will you send the Clergy Conduct Measure back for further revision, or will you approve it and face having it rejected by Parliament?
  
  
• Will you send the Safeguarding Risk Assessment Regulations back for further revision, or will you approve them and face having to tell the Charity Commission that you approved new regulations that do not deal with the major problem that exists with the current regulations?
  
  
• Will you support a fully independent process for investigating safeguarding allegations and concerns, or will you seek to water down proposals for independence to retain the status quo – a process which is deeply flawed and not fit for purpose.

I know that a considerable amount of amendments are likely to be tabled to next week’s safeguarding business. Like you, I will not know what these are until the relevant notice papers and order papers are published.

But I know from experience that some amendments are likely to water down proposals for independence in safeguarding investigations and scrutiny. Others will be designed to strengthen processes and improve the Church’s safeguarding capabilities.

Please exercise discernment and judgment in deciding how to vote on these amendments.

The Church of England is often said to be Episcopally led and Synodically governed. Now is the time for you to show leadership in safeguarding that has been missing from the bishops, collectively, for some time.

I have lost count of the amount of times I have heard bishops say that they were “following legal advice”. Lawyers advise. Law makers decide. On this matter, you are a law maker. Please do the right thing and decide to support those things that will make the Church a safer place.

The Church of England is at crisis point. The resignation of Justin Welby following the publication of the Makin Review has been described as a “watershed moment” and “a turning point”.

The Charity Commissioners are not the only people who will be watching next week’s Synod. Victims, survivors, advocates, campaigners, parliamentarians and the media will all be watching to see what Synod does.

Just imaging what would happen if Synod does the right thing. I would like nothing more than to be to say that the Church of England’s leadership has finally got the message and is doing the right thing.

You will not be criticised for supporting a delay to final approval of the Clergy Conduct Measure and the Safeguarding Risk Assessment Regulations (just as there has been little criticism of the necessary delay to the draft measure setting up the abuse redress scheme). It is important to move speedily – but not at the expense of getting it right.

Alternatively, if Synod does the wrong thing, and operates as though it is business as usual, the campaigning will only step up – and this time victims, survivors, advocates and campaigners are being joined by the Charity Commission and parliamentarians in watching what you do and being prepared to call you out.

Your leadership now, and through next week’s meeting of the General Synod, will be a key factor in determining whether this is, in fact, a turning point for the Church of England on safeguarding; or just another step in the contusing moral collapse of the Church’s leadership.

I will be praying for you as you deliberate over these vitally important matters.

Gavin Drake