If you don’t want to read the full 1,800 words, go to the 300-word TL;DR summary

During last month’s General Synod, I published several points about different debates. I held off on the key debate about independent safeguarding. That wasn’t because I didn’t care about it, but because I cared about it too much to rush a response. I have now had time to consider where the Church of England is on its move to independence in safeguarding, and these are my thoughts.

When the Church of England’s Archbishops’ Council sacked its “Independent” Safeguarding Board (ISB) in June 2023, the Archbishops’ Council promised swift action to put something better in its place. It commissioned Professor Alexis Jay to set out what independence would have to mean if the Church was to rebuild even a fraction of the trust it has lost.

The General Synod was not given the option to debate Professor Jay’s proposals in full. Instead, in February 2025, it debated “options” put forward by an Archbishops’ Council committee. After the February 2025 debate and vote, the synod received an interim report in July 2025 and a further update in February this year.

And yet, after all that, the Church of England is still only able to talk in generalities about “direction of travel”.

That phrase has become a comfort blanket. It sounds purposeful. It feels dynamic. It allows speeches about momentum and culture change. It also enables a familiar institutional manoeuvre: kick the can down the road — make promises that it is “moving forward” while moving the decisive action point further away.

The synod that couldn’t decide what “independence” meant

The February 2025 debate ought to have been a watershed. It came in the wake of Justin Welby’s resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury following the Makin review and the John Smyth scandal — an episode that intensified public scrutiny of safeguarding failures and institutional evasions.

Moving the motion, the Bishop of Stepney, Joanne Grenfell, framed the debate as being about building “the best foundations to support the work of our excellent safeguarding professional colleagues and volunteers”.

The chamber then filled with tributes to local safeguarding staff and volunteers. Again and again, bishops and members praised diocesan safeguarding advisers, diocesan teams and parish safeguarding officers.

The problem is not the gratitude. Most people in safeguarding roles will recognise the cost and strain of doing that work. The problem is the cognitive dissonance, which the synod never quite confronts.

If safeguarding in the Church of England is being delivered by “excellent safeguarding professional colleagues and volunteers”, why does GS 2429 still acknowledge that “many survivors do not have trust in the Church of England to properly manage safeguarding matters”?

If the system is so improved, why does the Church itself concede that “safeguarding complaints processes vary widely across dioceses and cathedrals”, and that this “undermines trust and leads to delays and confusion”?

You cannot reconcile those statements by congratulating everyone for trying hard.

Trust is not rebuilt by warm words. It is rebuilt by clarity, consistency and accountability. At the moment it mattered, the synod opted for none of those at speed.

In February 2025, the synod was asked to choose between two models (3 and 4), each claiming to deliver “greater independence” by transferring safeguarding staff to an external employer and by creating an external Scrutiny Body.

The motion as tabled would have made model 4 “the direction of travel”. But the synod did not choose that route. It endorsed model 3 “as the way forward in the short term” and called for “further work to be undertaken on the legal and practical requirements necessary to implement model 4”. That, in itself, was a decision to delay.

Some members argued that moving straight to model 4 risked creating a system that was “too big to fail”, citing concerns about trustee responsibilities and the Charity Commission’s expectations that trustees must retain the ability to intervene if safeguarding delivery fails.

Others stressed that “culture eats structure for breakfast”, and argued that diocesan safeguarding professionals embedded locally were best placed to challenge unhealthy patterns day by day.

But if delay is defensible, it must be disciplined. Delay needs a timetable, milestones and a defined decision point.

The synod did not impose them.

“Excellent safeguarding professional colleagues” — and a deficit of trust

Here is the line that should make the Church wince. The Bishop of Stepney told the synod that this debate was not about saving the Church’s reputation but about supporting “excellent safeguarding professional colleagues and volunteers”.

Later, the Bishop in Europe paid “tribute to the Church’s DSAs and DSTs”, saying the synod was “deeply grateful for the work that they do”.

These are not marginal voices. They are bishops, part of the Church’s senior leadership, speaking from the platform while the synod decides what independence is supposed to mean.

Now set those tributes alongside what members also said in the same debate.

One member said survivors “feel that the Church can no longer be trusted to manage its own safeguarding”. Another argued that “only complete independence within the Church of England will do”, warning against drifting into “independence-lite”.

GS 2429 later codifies the same reality in official prose: “many survivors do not have trust in the Church of England to properly manage safeguarding matters”.

So which is it? Excellent work, or a system unworthy of trust?

It is both — and that is precisely the Church’s problem.

You can have committed, skilled professionals working within a structure that victims and survivors experience as inconsistent, defensive, slow and conflicted. You can have good individuals inside a system that repeatedly fails to act with speed, transparency and independence.

The Church keeps trying to settle the argument by praising the individuals. It should be designing a system that does not depend on heroics.

The slow-motion reforms that became a way of avoiding reform

The July 2025 interim report promised that the programme team expected to bring “a substantial report” in February 2026 “that sets out firm proposals”. It acknowledged the urgency, while warning that legislation would take “at least two years”.

February 2026 arrived. The General Synod received GS 2429. It did not receive “firm proposals” in a form that could properly be debated and decided. Instead, it was asked to “welcome this update, endorse the direction of travel … and look forward to considering detailed proposals”.

That is the long grass in legislative language.

Worse, the synod had the chance to insist on deadlines — and declined.

An amendment would have required the Programme Board and Archbishops’ Council to bring forward, by July 2027, the “legislation and Code of Practice necessary” to establish the proposed Independent Safeguarding Authority and the mandatory national complaints framework.

Another amendment would have required detailed options and costings for transferring diocesan and cathedral safeguarding staff into independent employment under the new authority by July 2027, so that the synod could decide whether and when full local operational independence would happen.

Both amendments were lost. The motion was carried without them.

So the synod endorsed a “direction” while refusing to specify when the destination must be reached and refusing to require the information that would allow it to decide whether local operational safeguarding will ever be independent.

That is what kicking the can down the road looks like in ecclesiastical governance.

The shifting goalposts since Professor Jay

GS 2378 admits that the proposals brought to the synod “differ from the recommendations of Professor Jay in certain ways”.

That ought to have triggered a disciplined explanation of why those differences were justified and what risks were being accepted.

Instead, the Church has allowed its end-state to mutate.

GS 2429 says the 2025 model proposals “would need extensive legislation” and that “current safeguarding structures would continue to operate … for at least three years”. It then notes that stakeholders “reasonably expect much swifter progress” and proposes “a new end-state model” in response.

So we have moved from implementing a synodical decision to “knitting proposals together” into something new.

What is indefensible is not change, but vagueness. The synod is being asked to bless an evolving concept, with limited detail, on the promise that detail will come later.

This is precisely the governance failure that helped to doom the ISB: leaders “failed to define what they actually meant by independence”.

And yet, in February 2026, the synod again endorsed a general direction rather than a defined model with defined functions, duties, powers and measurable outcomes.

The functions that actually matter

The Church’s credibility in safeguarding is threadbare. If it wants to regain it, it must stop talking mainly about structures and start talking about functions.

GS 2378 identifies the core needs: consistency, equitable treatment and the reduction of “actual or perceived conflict of interest”. GS 2429 is blunter, acknowledging “perceived conflicts of interest”, particularly where clergy are seen to play decisive roles in safeguarding decisions concerning other clergy.

Whatever structure emerges, it must deliver at least four things:

• A single, mandatory complaints pathway with defined stages, defined timescales and a genuinely independent end-stage resolver.
  
  
• Independent scrutiny with teeth: standards, audits, published findings and enforceable follow-up.
  
  
• Clear operational independence for professional judgement — professionals whose independence of judgement is “respected and protected”.
  
  
• A disciplined decision about local operational independence, with a decision point set in the diary.
  
  

In 2025, the synod asked for further work. In 2026, it refused to require that work to be completed by a date certain.

That is not governance. It is avoidance.

A challenge to the Programme Board — and to the synod

The Safeguarding Structures Programme Board was created with a majority of independent members and an independent chair, explicitly because of the “lack of trust in the Church of England to deliver change”.

That is welcome. It is also an admission.

But the Board must now prove that it exists to deliver outcomes, not to launder delay.

Stop asking the synod to endorse “directions of travel”.

Bring concrete proposals that can be amended, debated and voted on. Put the functions on the page: who does what, when, with what powers, with what duty to comply, with what transparency, with what sanctions for failure, with what survivor access and support.

Do not hide behind complexity. Do not ask the synod to rubber-stamp aspiration. Treat it like a legislature, not a focus group.

And the synod itself must stop colluding in the evasion. If members believe the Church has “broken trust” and that rebuilding trust requires radical change, they must stop voting for motions that endorse a mood and defer the detail.

The Church has had enough “watershed moments”. It is time for measurable action: dates, duties, powers and deliverables — and a model that can be tested against the lived experience of victims and survivors, not against the institutional need to buy time.

tl;dr Independence delayed: General Synod backs “direction” over deadlines

Nearly three years after the Archbishops’ Council sacked the Church of England’s so-called Independent Safeguarding Board and promised swift reform, the Church is still talking about “direction of travel” rather than delivering a clear, measurable system of independent safeguarding.

The General Synod never debated Professor Alexis Jay’s recommendations in full. Instead, in February 2025, it was asked to choose between alternative models produced by the Archbishops’ Council. It opted for a short-term version (Model 3) and called for “further work” on the more far-reaching Model 4. That decision may have been defensible — but it was a decision to delay.

Since then, the synod has received an interim report (July 2025) and a further update (February 2026). Yet when the moment came to impose deadlines or require detailed, costed proposals — including legislation and a Code of Practice by July 2027 — amendments to do so were defeated. Instead, the synod simply “endorsed the direction of travel”.

Meanwhile, bishops praised “excellent safeguarding professional colleagues and volunteers”, even as official papers concede that “many survivors do not have trust in the Church of England to properly manage safeguarding matters” and that complaints processes “vary widely” and “undermine trust”.

That contradiction lies at the heart of the crisis. The issue is not whether individuals are hardworking and committed. It is whether the system is structurally independent, consistent and accountable.

Structures alone will not fix this. What is needed are defined functions: a mandatory national complaints pathway, independent scrutiny with real powers, protected professional judgement, and a firm timetable for deciding whether local safeguarding staff will ever be fully independent. The Church has had enough “watershed moments”. It now needs dates, duties and deliverables — not another report about where it might be heading.

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I have today published a new parliamentary briefing on the draft Clergy Conduct Measure — the legislation intended to replace the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM). You can read the full briefing here.

This paper is addressed to members of Parliament’s Ecclesiastical Committee, the small but powerful body charged under the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919 with deciding whether a Church Measure is “expedient” before it proceeds to Parliament for approval.

Why does this matter?

Because Church of England Measures are not amendable in Parliament. If the Ecclesiastical Committee deems a Measure expedient, it typically goes through both Houses “on the nod.” The Committee is therefore one of the few constitutional safeguards between defective church legislation and automatic parliamentary approval.

Last year, the Committee found the Clergy Conduct Measure not expedient. Its primary — though not only — concern was that the draft legislation provided for tribunals to sit in private by default. Last month, the General Synod amended the Measure so that tribunals are to sit in public by default. That sounds like progress — and, formally, it is. But experience under the existing regime shows that statutory wording and operational reality are not always the same thing. The real question is this: what does “public” mean in practice?

Under the current CDM, tribunals have described decisions as being “handed down in public” even where:

• there was no public listing of the hearing;
• no notice to the press;
• no opportunity for observation;
• and the decision simply appeared online as a PDF after the event.

That is not open justice as most lawyers — or most ordinary people — would understand it.

The new Measure still leaves the crucial detail to Rules that Parliament has not seen. Those Rules will determine when hearings can be private, how listing works, what gets published, and what doesn’t. Senior figures at Synod have argued that Parliament should not see those draft Rules at all.

In other words, MPs are being asked to approve the skeleton of a system without seeing the operating manual.

That is not how constitutional law is supposed to work.

The briefing also addresses something far more troubling: how serious sexual misconduct has been framed under the current system.

In one case involving what in law amounted to statutory rape of a minor, the Deputy President of Tribunals, Judge David Turner KC, described the conduct as “an intimate sexual relationship.” The decision itself recorded the victim’s account of grooming, fear and horror. Yet the public-facing description suggested mutuality. A child cannot consent in law. Language matters.

In another case, allegations of grooming, sexual assault and indecent exposure were reframed in tribunal language around “romantic affection” from a vulnerable complainant. She had no standing to challenge that framing.

The Clergy Conduct Measure does nothing to change that imbalance. Complainants still cannot challenge charges. They cannot appeal determinations. They cannot require correction of misleading public language.

If a statutory disciplinary regime cannot accurately describe sexual abuse in its own determinations, and offers no mechanism for the affected person to challenge the wording, that is not merely poor drafting. It is a safeguarding failure.

The briefing also examines structural independence. Under the proposed system, investigators, assessors and tribunal administration sit within the Archbishops’ Council’s legal team. In response to a recent data request, it was stated that even the President of Tribunals sits within that structure.

Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights requires an independent and impartial tribunal. Independence is not a matter of personal integrity; it is a matter of institutional design.

The Ecclesiastical Committee has already once found this Measure not expedient. It was right to do so.

The amended version still leaves core safeguards to Rules not before Parliament. It still replicates the tribunal structure that has produced the very problems survivors have experienced under the CDM. It still relies heavily on assurances of transparency rather than embedding it in statute.

Parliament deserves to see how a disciplinary system will operate before it approves it.

Survivors deserve a system that does not soften abuse into “relationships” or reduce serious misconduct to opaque headings.

The Ecclesiastical Committee has a constitutional duty. I hope members will read the new briefing carefully and consider whether it can honestly be said that this Measure, as drafted, is expedient.

Because if Parliament approves it without clarity, the consequences will not be theoretical. They will be borne by real people navigating a system that once again operates behind the curtain.

• Click here to read the full briefing.

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This month marks the 40th anniversary of the attack on Ealing vicarage that shocked Britain and changed the national conversation about rape. To coincide with that anniversary – and in the days leading up to International Women’s Day on 8 March — “Rape My Story” by Jill Saward has been republished in a new edition featuring a foreword and afterword by her widower, Gavin Drake.

On 6 March 1986, 21-year-old Jill Saward was raped during a violent burglary at the west London vicarage where she lived with her family. Her father, the Rev Michael Saward, and her then boyfriend were also assaulted during the attack.

The crime and the subsequent sentencing of the offenders prompted widespread public outrage — particularly over sentences that many considered unduly lenient. The fact that longer sentences were imposed for burglary than for rape led many to argue that the law appeared to place greater importance on property than on people.

The national reaction contributed to significant legal and cultural change. In the years that followed, reforms included strengthened protections for victims’ anonymity and the introduction of the Unduly Lenient Sentence scheme, allowing certain Crown Court sentences to be referred to the Court of Appeal for review. The case became a reference point in debates about the treatment of rape survivors within the justice system.

First published in 1990, “Rape My Story” is Jill Saward’s own account of the attack and its aftermath – written with candour, faith and courage. She later waived her anonymity and became one of the UK’s most prominent campaigners against sexual violence, training thousands of police officers and speaking widely about rape myths and justice reform.

Jill Saward died unexpectedly in January 2017, aged 51, following a catastrophic stroke. This new edition preserves her original text in full, with a new foreword and afterword reflecting on the decades of advocacy that followed publication and on the legacy she leaves. Published by CrossWire Books, an imprint of Church Street Bureau Ltd, the new edition is now available in paperback (£10.99) and ebook (6.99) formats, including Kindle.

Buy “Rape My Story” from Amazon or wherever you buy your books and ebooks.

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The Bishop’s Disciplinary Tribunal for the Diocese of Southwark has now published both its determination of misconduct (17 December 2025) and its reasons on penalty (9 February 2026) in the latest case involving David Tudor.

The tribunal concluded unanimously that it was more likely than not that Tudor had penetrative sexual intercourse with a 15-year-old girl on 28 April 1984, having groomed her and exploited his position as her school chaplain, RE teacher and parish priest. The penalty imposed was Prohibition for Life, together with an indefinite injunction preventing contact.

The tribunal’s reasoning is careful and measured. Its findings are robust. Its recognition of the lifelong harm caused is clear.

But there are serious issues that arise from this case — not in the tribunal’s evaluation of the evidence, but in the language used to frame the complaint and in certain assumptions embedded in the process.

“An intimate sexual relationship”

Paragraph 2 of the determination reproduces the charge as framed by the Deputy President of Tribunals:

“…formed, while she was a child (i) An intimate sexual relationship and engaged in sexual acts with Z…”

Those words matter.

The tribunal found that the first sexual intercourse occurred when Z was 15; that it followed grooming; that Tudor locked the bedroom door; that he instructed her how to put a condom on him; and that her reaction was “absolute horror”. The penalty decision explicitly describes her as having been “groomed and abused”.

To describe those facts as “an intimate sexual relationship” is profoundly troubling.

The complainant was 15. Tudor was 29. He was her teacher, her school chaplain and her priest. She was isolated, seeking guidance, and deeply influenced by him. She described being unable to articulate how he “got inside my head”.

This was not an “intimate sexual relationship”. It was the sexual exploitation of a child by an adult in authority.

“Intimate relationship” suggests mutuality. It implies emotional reciprocity. It risks reframing abuse as romance.

The Deputy President is not a peripheral figure. He is the gatekeeper who decides whether complaints proceed to a tribunal and on what basis. The way he describes conduct shapes how that conduct is conceptualised institutionally.

We do not know how Z reacted to that wording. Under the current Clergy Discipline Measure — and under the proposed Clergy Conduct Measure — she has no mechanism to challenge it. Survivors have no standing to contest how senior judicial office-holders describe what happened to them.

Language shapes culture. Culture shapes safeguarding.

What the criminal law would call it

The determination speculates that Tudor was “most likely” charged in 1988 under section 6 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956 (intercourse with a girl under 16) and notes that he was acquitted.

Why speculate?

Why was a certificate of conviction (or acquittal) not obtained from the Crown Court record to establish precisely what charge was laid?

More fundamentally, consider the contrast in terminology.

Under the 1956 Act, sexual intercourse with a girl under 16 was a criminal offence. Under the modern Sexual Offences Act 2003, the relevant language is “sexual activity with a child”. Where the adult is in a position of trust — such as a teacher — separate offences apply.

No criminal statute would describe this as an “intimate sexual relationship”.

The criminal law calls it unlawful sexual intercourse with a child. Or sexual activity with a child by a person in a position of trust.

The contrast with the Deputy President’s phraseology could not be clearer.

The question of “consent”

The determination notes that Z “has never said that the sexual intercourse when she was 15 was not consensual”. It records that she “did not particularly invite it” but “did not refuse”.

This framing is problematic.

Under both the 1956 Act and the 2003 Act, a child under 16 cannot lawfully consent to sexual intercourse with an adult. The law does not turn on whether she refused.

But beyond strict legality lies the reality of grooming.

The tribunal itself found grooming, imbalance of power, spiritual manipulation and significant psychological harm. Z described how he had persuaded her that sex “did not mean anything” and how she absorbed his framing because of who he was.

That is not consent in any meaningful safeguarding sense.

To focus on whether she has “suggested a lack of consent” risks importing adult paradigms into a child-abuse context. Modern safeguarding practice recognises that compliance under grooming and authority is not consent.

The tribunal ultimately concludes she was groomed and abused. That conclusion is right. But the language around consent sits uneasily beside it.

A “public session” no one could attend

Paragraph 1 of the determination states:

“We announced our decision in public session on 20th November 2025 and reserved our reasons.”

Yet there was no public listing of the tribunal. No notice enabling attendance. The Church issued a press statement on 24 November referring to the tribunal process, but the determination itself was not publicised until much later.

If a decision is truly announced “in public session”, the public must be able to know it is happening and attend.

Otherwise, “public” becomes a formal label without substantive openness.

Transparency is not achieved by assertion. It requires accessibility. And members of Parliament’s Ecclesiastical Committee will need to consider this when it considers the skeletal replacement for the Clergy Discipline Measure — the Clergy Conduct Measure — when it consider’s whether the text’s deferrence to the unpublished “Rules” mean public hearings in practice.

The broader issue

It is important to be clear: the tribunal’s factual findings are serious and balanced. Its penalty decision properly recognises the gravity of the abuse and the lifelong harm.

My criticism is not directed at the panel.

It is directed at the language used by the Deputy President — a senior judicial gatekeeper — to describe the sexual exploitation of a 15-year-old girl as an “intimate sexual relationship”.

That language does not reflect modern safeguarding understanding. It does not reflect criminal law terminology. And it does not reflect the tribunal’s own findings of grooming and abuse.

If those entrusted with gatekeeping clergy discipline conceptualise child sexual exploitation in such relational terms, the Church’s safeguarding culture still has work to do — as we all know it does.

The actions of David Tudor considered by the tribunal took place in 1984. The Archbishops’ Council will repeatedly say that things have changed. Yet this post challenges something that took place now. It is now, today, that child sexual abuse was described by a senior ecclesiastical (and secular) judge as an as an “intimate sexual relationship”. And it is this that the Church of England should address now.

Safeguarding reform is not only about structural change. It is about language, assumptions and power.

Words matter.

And in cases of child sexual abuse, precision is not optional.

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If you don’t want to read the full 1,245 words, go to the 287-word TL;DR summary

Yesterday’s votes at the General Synod on the Clergy Conduct Measure were inevitable. Once the Ecclesiastical Committee concluded that the Measure was “not expedient”, the Legislative Committee had little realistic choice but to amend clause 31(3) so that tribunals sit in public by default.

The amendment was always going to pass. It did. But inevitability does not mean that the underlying constitutional concerns have been resolved.

Indeed, the debate itself illustrated the deeper problem: how much of the system Synod and Parliament are being asked to approve is not contained in the Measure at all.

Parliament’s principal concern — but not its only concern

The Ecclesiastical Committee’s principal objection was the presumption of private hearings. The amendment reverses that presumption. That addresses the headline issue.

But the Committee raised further concerns: the absence of draft Rules, the lack of visibility over operational safeguards, and whether Parliament had sufficient information to judge expediency.

Those concerns were not technical. They go to the heart of the 1919 constitutional settlement.

Under the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919, the Ecclesiastical Committee must report on the Measure’s “nature and legal effect” and on its “expediency”. That duty cannot be discharged in the abstract. It requires understanding how the Measure will function in practice.

The Rules remain unpublished. The operational detail remains unseen. Parliament has still not been given what it repeatedly requested.

“Informal discussions” and constitutional silence

Speakers referred repeatedly to “informal” meetings between the Legislative Committee and the Ecclesiastical Committee. Such discussions may be convenient, but they are not provided for in the 1919 Act.

The 1919 Act establishes a formal legislative pathway: Measure, report, parliamentary scrutiny, approval motions in both Houses, and Royal Assent. It does not provide for private pre-legislative negotiation to substitute for formal scrutiny.

In UK constitutional culture, legislative scrutiny is conducted publicly. Evidence is published. Draft material relied upon by committees is ordinarily placed on the record. Opaque reassurance is not a substitute for visible accountability.

If draft Rules were shown formally to Parliament, they should be available publicly. If they were shown informally, Parliament should not be expected to legislate on that basis.

“Not within the function of the Ecclesiastical Committee” — and why that misses the point

Sir Robert Buckland told Synod: “Presenting a full set of rules to the Ecclesiastical Committee of Parliament risks usurping the vital role of this body in receiving, scrutinising and amending those rules before they go to Parliament.”

He continued: “Strictly speaking, the consideration of rules and other secondary legislation is not actually within the function of the Ecclesiastical Committee in any event.”

He further argued that rules: “can only ever be in draft as a matter of law, because the power to make them does not come into force until Royal Assent is given to the primary legislation.”

Formally, that has surface force. The Ecclesiastical Committee scrutinises Measures, not statutory instruments.

But that is not the Committee’s concern.

The Committee has stated that it must have sufficient information about how Measures are intended to work before it can declare them expedient. Where a Measure defers substantial operational content to Rules, those Rules are not peripheral. They are the mechanism through which the Measure takes effect.

The Clergy Conduct Measure is skeletal. It establishes offices, stages, and powers. But it leaves to Rules:

• the gateway requirements for complaints,

• the mechanics of investigation,

• the participation of safeguarding actors,

• the structure and content of reports,

• the detail of procedural protections,

• and the practical operation of hearings.

When Parliament is asked to determine whether legislation affecting legal rights is expedient, it must understand how that framework will function in practice.

If the practical safeguards, investigatory mechanics, confidentiality architecture and protections against vexatious complaints reside primarily in unpublished Rules, Parliament cannot realistically assess the Measure.

This is not Parliament intruding on Synod’s jurisdiction. It is Parliament attempting to discharge its statutory duty under the 1919 settlement. Framework legislation without operational visibility undermines meaningful scrutiny.

Why the CDM experience matters

This is not theoretical.

The Clergy Discipline Measure 2003 provides the cautionary example.

The Measure itself is consolidated and updated on legislation.gov.uk. But the Clergy Discipline Rules are not consolidated there. A composite version of the Clergy Discipline Rules is produced by the Archbishops’ Council. The Code of Practice and Statutory Guidance add further operational layers.

Over time, significant aspects of the discipline system have developed through Rules and Guidance rather than primary legislation:

• An “overriding objective” imported into the Rules.

• Confidentiality norms shaping pre-penalty proceedings.

• Publication removal periods set out in guidance rather than statute.

• A “minor complaints” process created in the Code but not expressly established in the Measure.

• Vulnerability assessments structured through Rules rather than primary text.

None of those features were debated in Parliament at the point of primary enactment.

The Clergy Conduct Measure is designed to replace the CDM. Its Rules, Code and Guidance will be drafted by the same institutional actors, through the same internal processes.

Parliament is therefore not being asked to approve a closed text. It is being asked to approve a framework that will later be populated by instruments it will never see.

That is precisely why the Ecclesiastical Committee requested draft Rules.

Uneven access and unanswered questions

Sir Robert Buckland also stated that “an indicative set of rules … about 75 per cent complete” had been supplied to members of the Ecclesiastical Committee.

Yet those Rules have not been published. Most members of Synod have not seen them.

If Parliament has seen them formally, they should be on the public record. If provided informally, Parliament should not be legislating on that basis.

The asymmetry is troubling: some appear to have access to material unseen by the majority.

A debate shaped from the top

Yesterday’s debate (you can read a transcript here) was front-loaded with senior office holders: the Bishop of Chichester, the Dean of the Arches, Sir Robert Buckland, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Chair of the House of Laity — many members of the Legislative Committee itself.

When amendment 507 was debated, the Prolocutor of York spoke first. Immediately afterwards, the speech limit was reduced to three minutes.

The effect — whether intended or not — is that establishment voices frame the debate before ordinary members speak. That structure discourages dissent and narrows the space for scrutiny.

When scrutiny is already limited by the absence of draft Rules, this matters.

Public hearings “the norm” — but no apology

Several speakers emphasised that public hearings are the norm in other professions. That is correct. I have been arguing this for years. But for much of the Measure’s passage, Synod had been told the opposite.

The earlier assertion that private hearings were commonplace elsewhere has not been formally corrected or apologised for.

Transparency cannot be selectively rediscovered when Parliament insists upon it.

A rare correction — and a contrast

The Archbishop of Canterbury corrected an earlier misstatement during final approval. That immediate correction is to be welcomed. It reflects healthy parliamentary culture.

Such corrections should be routine. They should not require a speaker to be the subject of a formal complaint before realising a correction and apology is needed — as was the case with the Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell last year.

The fact that a routine correction is worth noting says a lot about how the Synod is treated by senior officers of the Church.

Inevitable — but unfinished

The Measure now returns to Parliament with clause 31(3) amended.

But draft Rules remain unpublished. Informal discussions have substituted for visible evidence. Framework legislation continues to be advanced without operational transparency.

The Church has moved because Parliament required it to move.

That is necessity, not constitutional renewal.

TL;DR: Open hearings, closed details

Yesterday’s General Synod vote on the Clergy Conduct Measure was inevitable. Once Parliament’s Ecclesiastical Committee concluded that the draft Measure was “not expedient”, the Church had little choice but to amend it. The key change — reversing the presumption of private hearings — addresses Parliament’s principal concern.

But that does not resolve the deeper constitutional problem.

The Ecclesiastical Committee’s objections went beyond open hearings. It questioned the absence of draft Rules and the lack of visibility over how the system will operate in practice. Under the Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919, Parliament must assess a Measure’s “nature and legal effect” and its “expediency”. That requires understanding how it will function in reality — not just reading its skeletal framework.

The Clergy Conduct Measure establishes offices and stages, but leaves critical operational detail to Rules that have not been published. Those Rules will determine how complaints are made, how investigations run, how safeguarding actors participate, what reports must contain, and how hearings function. If those safeguards and procedures are largely contained in unpublished Rules, Parliament cannot meaningfully assess what it is approving.

This is not theoretical. Under the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003, significant elements of the discipline system developed through Rules, Code of Practice and Statutory Guidance rather than primary legislation — including confidentiality norms, publication policies, vulnerability assessments and informal complaint processes. These were not debated in Parliament.

The Clergy Conduct Measure will be implemented by the same institutional actors using the same processes.

Parliament is therefore being asked to approve a framework whose real content will emerge later.

The Church moved because Parliament insisted. But draft Rules remain unpublished, informal discussions have replaced transparent scrutiny, and the core constitutional concern remains: legislation without operational visibility undermines meaningful accountability.

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If you don’t want to read the full 2,450 words, go to the 300-word TL;DR summary

Why do the powers that be in the General Synod continue to mislead members about private or secret tribunal hearings being the norm?

That question sits at the heart of today’s Synod business on the Clergy Conduct Measure. Once again, members are being asked to take decisions on the basis of a claim that simply does not withstand scrutiny: that secrecy is standard practice in other disciplinary and professional tribunal systems, and that the Church of England is merely following an accepted model.

It is not.

It also matters to understand why this issue has resurfaced in today’s Synod agenda. The Legislative Committee is now asking Synod to reverse the presumption of private hearings and make public hearings the norm — but not because the Church’s leadership has suddenly accepted that it got this wrong. It is doing so because Parliament has forced its hand. The Ecclesiastical Committee has made clear that it will not allow the Clergy Conduct Measure to proceed to the House of Commons and House of Lords as expedient unless this change is made. In other words, Synod is being asked to fix a defect that Parliament has identified, not one that the Church was willing to acknowledge on its own initiative.

Crucially, the Ecclesiastical Committee did not stop there. In its scrutiny of the Measure, it also called for the Draft Rules to be provided to it — recognising, correctly, that the Rules will contain the real substance of the system: how complaints are handled, how hearings operate, what information is disclosed, and where secrecy is imposed in practice. The committee was plainly concerned that Parliament was being asked to approve a skeleton Measure while being denied sight of the operational detail that would determine how justice is actually done.

The Church’s response to that request has been to insist that Rules cannot be drawn up until after a Measure has been passed — language used repeatedly in evidence to the Ecclesiastical Committee. That position is wrong. It is contradicted by recent legislative practice within the Church itself. When Parliament considered the Abuse (Redress) Measure, the Legislative Committee did present Draft Rules to the Ecclesiastical Committee, precisely to allow informed scrutiny of how the scheme would operate in practice. The claim that this is impossible or improper is therefore not a matter of principle; it is a matter of convenience.

Repeating a false premise to Synod

In the report to today’s meeting, the Legislative Committee again relies on a partial transcript of Synod proceedings in which members were told that private hearings are the norm in other systems, including professional regulators such as the General Medical Council. That claim has been doing heavy lifting throughout the synodical process. It was used to neutralise concern, to truncate debate, and ultimately to justify making secrecy the default position in primary legislation.

But it is false. The constitutional principle of open justice means that tribunals exercising public functions sit in public unless there is a clear and specific justification for departure. Professional regulators do not reverse that presumption. They allow privacy by exception, not as a starting point.

This was not a matter of interpretation or opinion. Parliament was told exactly that when it examined the draft Measure.

Parliament was not persuaded

When the draft Clergy Conduct Measure came before the Ecclesiastical Committee, members from both Houses repeatedly challenged the presumption of secrecy.

One peer cut straight to the point, questioning why a Church tribunal exercising statutory authority should depart from ordinary standards of open justice at all. Another asked why victims, complainants, and the wider public should be expected to trust a system that begins from privacy rather than transparency.

Most strikingly, Danny Kruger MP, drawing explicitly on a written briefing I had provided to committee members, challenged the comparison with professional regulators. He quoted from that briefing to make the point that the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service lists hearings publicly as a matter of course, and that hearings are open unless specific reporting restrictions are imposed.

The committee’s scepticism was unmistakable. Members pressed Church representatives on why secrecy had been elevated into the Measure itself, rather than left to judicial discretion on a case-by-case basis. The underlying message was clear: Parliament did not accept that secrecy was either normal or necessary.

That scepticism ultimately found expression in the committee’s conclusion that the Measure was not expedient, precisely because it made private hearings the default.

“A very robust debate”? No, there wasn’t.

In oral evidence to the Ecclesiastical Committee, the Archbishops’ Council’s lawyer, Edward Dobson, attempted to reassure MPs and peers that Synod had consciously and robustly chosen this path. He told the committee:

“There was, during the course of the debate at General Synod, an amendment that sought to reverse that presumption… There was a very robust debate and the Synod decided to stay with this presumption.”

That statement mattered. It was designed to convey to Parliament that Synod had been fully informed, that arguments had been tested, and that secrecy was a deliberate, settled choice.

It was also untrue.

The amendment in question was never substantively debated. It fell because fewer than 25 members stood to allow debate to continue — after Synod had been told, incorrectly, that secrecy was commonplace elsewhere. A procedural lapse is not a debate, still less a “very robust” one.

Being called out — and doubling down

After the evidence session, I wrote to Mr Dobson asking him to correct the record. I set out why his description was inaccurate and reminded him that Synod members had been misled about other tribunal systems.

His response did not correct the record. Instead, it attempted to redefine events. He argued that an exchange limited to two speakers was sufficient to justify the description “robust”, and that the amendment lapsing: “in effect amounted to a decision by the Synod to retain the clause as drafted.”

That is simply wrong. Standing Orders explicitly distinguish between a debate on the merits and a failure to secure enough members to permit debate. One cannot be retrospectively converted into the other.

More tellingly, Mr Dobson’s response entirely avoided the central issue. He did not explain why Synod had been told that secrecy was normal elsewhere. Nor did he address the fact that the same false claim appeared in the written report of the Revision Committee.

When pressed again on that point, the silence remained

How many times does this need saying?

This was not the first warning, nor the second.

In July 2021, even before the Measure had been drafted, I prepared a formal briefing to Synod members on behalf of the Jill Saward Organisation, setting out why secrecy in clergy discipline had no sound legal basis, why open justice mattered, and how comparable tribunal systems operated transparently.

I have also repeatedly called out the false assertion in other posts here on churchabuse.uk, including:

• 25 July 2024 – “Archbishops’ Council lies about GMC in battle for secret clergy discipline tribunals”, documenting in detail how Synod had been misled about professional regulators.
  
  
• 15 August 2024 – “Archbishops’ Council ignored chances to fix safeguarding risk assessment loophole”, showing how opacity was being preserved by design.
  
  
• 15 January 2025 – “The General Synod and safeguarding – a look ahead to February’s group of sessions”, again correcting the false comparison with the GMC and explaining how professional tribunals actually operate.
  

Each time, the same claim resurfaced. Each time, it was wrong.

So why does it continue?

Which brings us back to the question that refuses to go away.

Why do the powers that be insist on giving Synod a misleading impression on this most fundamental point — about openness, justice, and trust — even after Parliament itself has exposed the claim as unsustainable?

And what does it say about the culture behind this Measure that, when falsehoods are identified and evidenced, the response is not correction, but entrenchment?

This matters because the issue is not simply one clause in one Measure. It is about whether Synod is being treated as a deliberative body capable of weighing evidence honestly, or as something to be managed through selective information and procedural sleight of hand. When members are told that secrecy is normal elsewhere, debate is truncated. When Parliament then exposes that claim as false, the response is not candour, but a reluctant concession forced by external scrutiny.

It also matters because secrecy does not protect justice; it protects systems. Victims and survivors do not gain confidence from processes that operate behind closed doors by default. Nor do clergy accused of misconduct benefit from a system in which outcomes are hidden, precedents are obscured, and public confidence is eroded. Open justice exists precisely to prevent error, arbitrariness, and institutional self-protection.

Synod is now being asked to correct a flaw that should never have been there in the first place — and only because Parliament has refused to wave it through. That should give members pause. If this much resistance has been shown to transparency at the level of primary legislation, what confidence can there be about how the system will operate once the detail is pushed into Rules, guidance, and practice directions beyond Synod’s effective reach?

So the question remains — and it deserves an answer. Why do the powers that be persist in giving Synod a misleading impression on so fundamental a point, even after being called out by Parliament? And until that culture changes, how can anyone have confidence that the Church’s disciplinary system is being designed in the interests of justice rather than institutional convenience?

TL;DR — Why Synod is still being misled about secret hearings

The General Synod is once again being asked to take decisions on the Clergy Conduct Measure on the basis of a claim that does not stand up: that private or secret tribunal hearings are the norm in comparable disciplinary systems. They are not.

This claim has been used repeatedly to justify making secrecy the default position in the Measure. Synod members were told that professional regulators — including the General Medical Council — routinely sit in private. That is false. Open justice is the constitutional norm. Other tribunals operate with public hearings as the default, allowing privacy only by exception.

The issue has resurfaced now because Parliament has intervened. The Ecclesiastical Committee has refused to allow the Measure to proceed to the House of Commons and House of Lords as expedient unless the presumption of secrecy is reversed. The Legislative Committee is therefore asking Synod to change course — not because the Church has acknowledged error, but because Parliament has required it.

The committee also demanded sight of the Draft Rules under the Measure, recognising that these will contain the real substance of the system. The Church’s response was to insist that Rules cannot be drafted before a Measure is passed. That claim is wrong. When Parliament considered the Abuse (Redress) Measure, Draft Rules were provided precisely to enable informed scrutiny.

During the Ecclesiastical Committee’s evidence session, members repeatedly challenged the secrecy default. Danny Kruger MP quoted directly from a briefing showing that professional tribunals are open by default. Parliament was not persuaded by assurances that secrecy was normal or necessary.

Despite this, the Archbishops’ Council’s lawyer told the committee that Synod had reached its position after a “very robust debate”. That claim is inaccurate. The amendment in question was never substantively debated; it lapsed after Synod had been misled about other tribunal systems.

Even when challenged directly, the response was not correction but defensiveness and entrenchment.

The question remains: why do the powers that be persist in misleading Synod on so fundamental a point — and what does that say about the culture behind this Measure?

The post Even after Parliament called it out, Synod members are still being misled about secret hearings appeared first on Church Abuse.

I have already written about the substance of the two safeguarding-related questions put to the Presidents of the Archbishops’ Council at General Synod. What now needs addressing is something more troubling: the decision by the Chair of the Question Time session to interrupt and halt an answer that was plainly becoming uncomfortable. I have prepared a transcript of the two questions, which you can download here.

The moment of interruption deserves scrutiny in its own right, because it goes to the heart of accountability, transparency, and how far — or how little — the Church’s national leadership is prepared to permit open examination of its relationship with the Charity Commission.

The ruling — and the reason given

The supplementary question from Sue Lucas was straightforward. She asked whether the expectations the Charity Commission places on trustees — in this case in relation to safeguarding — apply in the same way to Parochial Church Councils as they do to diocesan boards of finance and the Archbishops’ Council.

Canon Alison Coulter began to answer. She said, correctly, that her understanding was that these expectations apply to all trustees, and that the Charity Commission is clear about this in its published guidance. She then added that conversations were ongoing.

At that point, the Chair intervened and ruled the question out of order, stating that it was “a question seeking legal advice”.

The ruling is final. That is not in dispute. But the reason given matters, because it reveals much about the institutional instincts now at play.

Was this really “seeking legal advice”?

On any ordinary understanding, the answer is no.

The question did not ask for a legal opinion on the interpretation of statute. It did not ask how a court would rule, or whether a particular body would be legally liable in a given scenario. It asked whether the Archbishops’ Council understands the Charity Commission’s expectations to apply equally across Church charities.

That is a governance and accountability question, not a request for legal advice. Synod routinely asks — and is routinely answered — questions about legal duties, regulatory frameworks, trustee responsibilities, and compliance obligations. If merely touching on law were enough to render a question out of order, a large proportion of Synod’s safeguarding scrutiny over the past decade would never have been permitted.

Nor does the Standing Orders language support such an expansive prohibition. The relevant clause prevents questions that ask for “an expression of opinion on a question of law”. Sue Lucas’s question did not do that. It asked about institutional understanding and regulatory expectations. Those are not the same thing.

Indeed, Canon Coulter’s partial answer demonstrated precisely how the question could be answered without straying into legal opinion at all.

A ruling that stopped an answer, not a question

What is striking is that the interruption did not come immediately. It came after the answer had begun, and at precisely the point where it was moving beyond safe generalities and towards the reality of the Archbishops’ Council’s engagement with the regulator.

That strongly suggests that the practical effect — if not the formal framing — of the ruling was to stop the answer, not to exclude the question. The ruling functioned as a protective interruption, not an application of a defined Standing Order rule.

I cannot know what prompted the intervention. But anyone familiar with Synod procedure will recognise the pattern: Chairs almost never deploy Standing Orders mid-answer without prompting. In practice, such interventions are usually made on advice from the legal assessor sitting beside the Chair.

In this case, that assessor is a barrister employed by the Archbishops’ Council, Edward Dobson. The Chair himself, Stephen Hofmeyr, is a senior and highly experienced KC, selected by the archbishops as part of the panel of Synod Chairs. That context matters. It does not prove anything improper, but it does raise legitimate questions about institutional reflexes when scrutiny sharpens.

Why this answer, at this moment?

It is worth asking why this particular line of questioning might have been seen as risky.

The Archbishops’ Council is currently under a Regulatory Action Plan imposed by the Charity Commission. One of the Commission’s concerns — expressed not only in relation to the Council, but also in findings concerning dioceses — is that the Church has failed to apply ordinary safeguarding expectations where adults are not assessed as “vulnerable”.

That concern rests squarely on the Commission’s understanding of normal trustee duties. Duties that apply to all charities, religious or otherwise.

Yet in response to Mrs Allotey’s written question, the Archbishops’ Council said that it had written to the Charity Commission seeking a discussion on what changes may be needed. That language is revealing. If expectations are clear and accepted, there is nothing to “seek a discussion” about. You comply.

The obvious inference — and I stress that it is an inference — is that the Council is exploring whether ecclesiastical law, or the Church’s peculiar structures, might justify a different application of charity law duties. In other words, whether Church of England charities can or should be treated differently from other charities when it comes to safeguarding obligations.

That is a weak argument. Charity law does not evaporate at the church door. Trustees are trustees. But it is precisely the sort of argument that becomes awkward if stated plainly in open Synod.

The inconsistency that should worry Synod

This brings us to the earlier exchange with Dr Brendan Biggs.

Asked about the Regulatory Action Plan, Canon Coulter sought to minimise its significance, saying there was “nothing in it that wouldn’t be surprising to Synod” and that it was “all work that you know about”.

That cannot be right.

The Charity Commission does not issue Regulatory Action Plans to ask charities to carry on doing what they are already doing. Such plans are, by definition, corrective. They identify failures, gaps, or deficiencies and require concrete remedial action.

If Synod already “knew about” the work, why had it not been done? If it had been done, why was a Regulatory Action Plan necessary?

Canon Coulter also told Dr Biggs that the Archbishops’ Council “continue[s] to meet and work regularly with the Charity Commission”. Yet, in answer to Mrs Allotey, the Council said it had written seeking a discussion about concerns raised in November 2025 — three months earlier.

That is not what “meeting and working regularly” looks like. It looks like delay.

Why this matters

The interruption of Sue Lucas’s supplementary question matters because it shut down precisely the line of inquiry Synod most needs to pursue: whether the Archbishops’ Council is fully accepting the Charity Commission’s view of trustee duties, or whether it is attempting — quietly and behind closed doors — to negotiate exceptions.

Synod is entitled to know that. Survivors are entitled to know that. The public is entitled to know that.

I am not alleging conspiracy. I am not accusing individuals of bad faith. But patterns of behaviour matter, and so do instincts. When scrutiny tightens, does the institution lean into transparency — or does it reach for procedural shields?

On this occasion, the shield was labelled “seeking legal advice”. It does not withstand serious examination. The Chair’s ruling stands. But the questions it suppressed do not go away.

The post When scrutiny gets silenced: what are they trying to hide? appeared first on Church Abuse.

Last February’s General Synod showed, in stark and unprecedented terms, how fragile confidence in the Church of England’s senior leadership has become. At the start of the Group of Sessions, Sam Margrave attempted to prevent the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, from delivering a Presidential Address.

This was not a fit of personal animus. Stephen Cottrell was — and remains — at the centre of multiple safeguarding, leadership, and governance failures. Many people, me among them, have called for his resignation. But “Teflon Stephen” refuses to go.

The Standing Orders provide a number of procedures for General Synod members to stop an item of business. The most common is a procedural motion to “move to next business”. That motion would almost certainly have been challenged by the Synod’s legal adviser if used against a Presidential Address. While not explicitly ruled out by the current Standing Orders, the limits on when it may be used implicitly mean that it could not be deployed in that context.

So Sam Margrave wisely chose another route: the suspension of Standing Order 119 — the Standing Order that makes provision for Presidential Addresses. Suspend that Standing Order, and there is no Presidential Address.

The attempt failed. By a counted vote of the whole Synod, 73 members voted in favour of stopping the address, 239 voted against, with 43 abstentions. The Archbishop therefore spoke. But the numbers matter.

A vote of 73 Synod members willing to take the extraordinary step of seeking to block a Presidential Address, together with a further 43 unwilling to support it, represents a significant and entirely unprecedented expression of no confidence in an Archbishop by the Church’s General Synod — just under a quarter of the Synod indicating opposition or withholding support. That should have been a warning light. Instead, the Church’s leadership brushed it off and carried on regardless.

It is against that background that the Standing Orders Committee’s proposed amendment to Standing Order 33 must be judged. The change would make explicit what was previously implicit: that a motion for “Next Business” may not be moved on a Presidential Address or the questions that follow it.

In substance, it locks in protection for archbishops at the very moment Synod has demonstrated a willingness to challenge them. At a time when trust in the Church of England — and in Stephen Cottrell personally — is at a low ebb, that looks less like tidying up procedure and more like circling the wagons.

The way this is being done compounds the problem. The Business Committee has determined that the amendment will be deemed approved unless five members spot it, object, and force a debate. That is no small ask when Synod members are already required to plough through more than 900 pages of GS and GS Misc papers — nearly 350,000 words — before even reaching the notice papers, where this proposal is buried.

Expecting members to catch and contest a constitutional tightening of their own powers under those conditions is not transparency; it is procedural stealth.

The handling of last year’s motion only sharpens the concern. The Chair of that session, the Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, chose not to allow debate on the procedural motion. She was entitled to do so under the Standing Orders — but she then proceeded to offer her own extended intervention, invoking Scripture and prayer, and downplaying questions of consequence by appealing to biblical examples of flawed leaders.

I have nothing personal against Bishop Rose — she was the first person I interviewed when I was 14 and volunteering on a church-event newsletter — but the way she handled Sam Margrave’s motion was wrong.

Many members experienced her intervention not as neutral chairing, but as a spiritually-abusive weighted rebuttal of a procedural challenge, delivered by someone who had just ruled that no debate should take place.

At such a moment, the instinct of Church leadership should be to open itself further to scrutiny, not to narrow the space in which it can be exercised. Other Synod members enjoy no comparable “safety blanket”. They can be interrupted, curtailed, or procedurally challenged. Archbishops, it seems, must not be. If Standing Orders are to be amended, they should move in the opposite direction: towards reducing disparities of power, not entrenching them. Accountability cannot be something the Church merely preaches. It must also be something its leaders are willing to face — in the chamber, in public, and without procedural insulation.

The post Preaching accountability while closing the shutters appeared first on Church Abuse.

If you don’t want to read the full 2,450 words, go to the 300-word TL;DR summary

The General Synod meets this week (starting tomorrow) for the first of three scheduled Groups of Sessions this year. It is the penultimate Group of Sessions this quinquennium, with the Synod being prorogued after the July meetings in York.

The November meeting marks the formal start of the next quinquennium: think of the State Opening of Parliament without the pomp, held every five years rather than annually. The King, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, is expected to deliver a message to mark the formal opening of the new Synod with its newly elected or re-elected members.

The last opening of the Synod took place in November 2021. The current Duke of Edinburgh — then the Earl of Wessex — Prince Edward, stood in for the late Queen Elizabeth II and delivered the message she had written. It was the first time in the Synod’s 51-year history that Queen Elizabeth II missed the opening of a quinquennium. She had been advised to rest by doctors following a brief hospital stay the previous month.

When this quinquennium began, it did so with one of the biggest — if not the biggest — turnovers in membership. Many members, including me, had to get used to Synod processes, procedures and tactics. I say “tactics” because I soon discovered the lengths to which the Archbishops’ Council goes to curtail difficult debate, especially on safeguarding. Combined with a Business Committee that often appears to act as though it were the Archbishops’ Council’s business committee rather than the General Synod’s, the effect has been to blunt Synod members’ attempts to secure safeguarding reform that most people can see is needed.

Parliament says no

I believe that the Church of England is now at the centre of a governance crisis. Parliament’s Ecclesiastical Committee has ruled the draft National Church Governance Measure not expedient, rejecting the case for a new body that would concentrate more power and provide less accountability than the existing arrangements under the Archbishops’ Council.

We don’t know what MPs and peers made of the draft Measure, because the Ecclesiastical Committee cannot publish its report unless the Synod’s Legislative Committee signifies that it should be presented. Although the Legislative Committee has reported that the Measure was rejected, it has not, as yet, published the underlying report or set out the reasons.

Alongside this, the Charity Commission is finally taking a harder line on the Church of England’s safeguarding failings. Over the past year it has:

• written to Synod members who are also charity trustees, reminding them of their safeguarding duties as trustees;

• written to diocesan bishops — who are Synod members and charity trustees — reminding them of similar duties and asking whether structural impediments prevent them from fulfilling those duties;

• warned the Archbishops’ Council that it must “rapidly accelerate” safeguarding reforms and meet an 18-month expectation, faster than the Council’s stated plans, including in its report to this week’s Synod;

• issued official regulatory warnings to two Diocesan Boards of Finance — Chelmsford and Liverpool — because their trustees (the bishop’s council) failed in their safeguarding governance and trustee duties in relation to allegations concerning the former Bishop of Liverpool, John Perumbalath.

For many years, the Archbishops’ Council has, in my view, relied on obfuscation and — more seriously — dishonest statements. Victims and survivors of church-related abuse have said this for decades. In recent years more campaigners and advocates have added their voices, and they have repeatedly been dismissed.

Now Parliament and the Charity Commission — the statutory regulator — have recognised what is happening and are signalling that poor practice must end.

How do the Archbishops’ Council respond? It defaults to type and continues to obfuscate.

They may get away with this approach with victims, survivors, campaigners and advocates. It won’t work against Parliament and the regulator.

Am I being too hard on the Archbishops’ Council?

A regular feature of General Synod is Question Time. Every Synod member may table up to two questions to several national Church bodies, including the Archbishops’ Council. Written answers are circulated shortly before the Group of Sessions begins, and each substantive question may attract up to two supplementary questions on the floor.

Let us look at two questions, and the written answers, for this Group of Sessions.

Janette Allotey, a lay member from the Diocese of Chester, asked the Presidents of the Archbishops’ Council — the Archbishops of Canterbury and York —this question:

“‘The Commission’s guidance is clear that trustees must take reasonable steps to protect from harm all people who come into contact with their charity.’ In the Regulatory Action Plan of November 2025 issued to the Archbishops’ Council following publication of the Makin Report, the Charity Commission expressed concern that the Church did not treat allegations of abuse from an adult not assessed to be vulnerable as a safeguarding issue. What steps, if any, are being taken to address this criticism?”

“Identifying the issues”

The written response came not from either archbishop but from a lay member of the Archbishops’ Council, Canon Alison Coulter. She wrote: “This is a matter that was also raised in the Charity Commission for England and Wales’s findings in relation to the Dioceses of Chelmsford and Liverpool. Staff of the Council are working to identify the questions, issues and requirements this raises and have written to the Charity Commission seeking a discussion on what changes may be needed. I will keep the Synod informed of progress and any changes required. However, Synod should note carefully the expectations that the Charity Commission has of trustees, of which they have helpfully reminded us.”

So: a Regulatory Action Plan in November, two Official Warnings to Chelmsford and Liverpool, and the Archbishops’ Council’s position is that it has written to the Charity Commission to seek “a discussion” while staff work to “identify the questions, issues and requirements” raised.

This response is extraordinary. The Charity Commission’s “questions, issues, and requirements” are not recent inventions. They reflect the legal duties that apply to every charity trustee.

Those duties are set out in the Charities Act 2011, which largely consolidates earlier charity legislation. The core obligations of trustees did not begin in 2011; they have been part of charity law for many years.

The Archbishops’ Council should already know what the Charity Commission expects of trustees, because those expectations arise from the law.

Perhaps, one might say, the Council is composed of well- meaning people acting in good faith who lack the specialist knowledge to navigate trusteeship. Maybe that is why it has written to the Charity Commission to seek a meeting.

A well-lawyered institution

That explanation does not withstand scrutiny. In July 2022, during my time as a Synod member, I asked how many lawyers the National Church Institutions (NCIs) employed, what they cost, and how many external lawyers they instructed for specific work.

The Secretary General, William Nye, replied that the number of legally qualified staff, and their immediate support staff, rose from 10 in 2017 at a salary cost of £935,078 to 13 in 2021 at a salary cost of £1,483,801.

On external lawyers, Mr Nye said that “the information requested is not readily available and could not be obtained without disproportionate cost.”

A brief aside on that claim. The Archbishops’ Council is a large charity. In 2021, the last year covered by Mr Nye’s figures, the council’s income was £128.09 million and its expenditure was £128.74 million. In 2024, published figures show income of £235.64 million and expenditure of £229.41 million.

An organisation of that scale does not run its finances on handwritten ledgers. It uses an accounting system with structured ledgers and cost centres that should allow external legal spend to be identified without disproportionate cost. On an ordinary reading, that is a basic requirement of financial control.

When Mr Nye said that the information “is not readily available” and could not be obtained without disproportionate cost, one of two things was true. Either the Archbishops’ Council was capable of producing the figure and chose not to disclose it (in which case Mr Nye lied), or it could not readily identify its external legal spend, in which case the trustees were not exercising proper oversight.

That aside illustrates the gap between the Archbishops’ Council’s claims to transparency and what it is prepared to disclose when pressed.

The larger point is that the Council cannot plausibly plead ignorance of trustees’ legal duties or of what the Charity Commission expects. It employs a substantial in-house legal function, and it spends well over £1 million a year on the salaries of legally qualified staff and their support.

Why, then, does the Archbishops’ Council present itself as needing to “identify” the Charity Commission’s “questions, issues and requirements”? Why does it need a meeting to establish what charity trustees are obliged to do?

The Regulatory Action Plan was issued in November last year. The Official Warnings to Chelmsford and Liverpool Diocesan Boards of Finance were issued last month.

These are unusual — and serious — interventions by the regulator, and I doubt they will be the last. Any organisation confronted with this level of scrutiny would normally treat it as a priority: trustees and senior officers would meet, identify the failures, and implement corrective action.

The Charity Commission’s intervention is not a “Lessons Learned Review” commissioned internally and filed away. It is a formal regulatory signal that practice must change. Incidentally, the Church of England no longer uses the “Lessons Learned Reviews” terminology. It now calls them “Safeguarding Practice Reviews” — an implicit acknowledgement, perhaps, that lessons have too often not been learned.

Janette Allotey’s question asked, directly, what steps were being taken to address the Commission’s November criticism. The written answer, as at February, was that staff were still “identifying” issues and seeking a discussion with the regulator. To me, that reads as an admission that the Archbishops’ Council do not have a firm grip on what charity trustees are required to do.

A letter seeking a meeting three months later raises obvious questions. Where is the urgency? Where is the action? Where is the change on the ground?

Another question for this week’s Group of Sessions is equally revealing.

Dr Brendan Biggs, a lay member from the Diocese of Bristol, also directed his question to the Presidents of the Archbishops’ Council. As with Janette Allottey’s question, the written reply came from Canon Alison Coulter.

Dr Biggs referred to the letter that the Charity Commission’s chief executive, David Holdsworth, sent to diocesan bishops in January 2025. It asked whether, after decisions taken by the General Synod in February 2025, there remained any “structural, procedural or constitutional arrangements under ecclesiastical law” that conflicted with, or prevented, bishops and their co-trustees from fulfilling their safeguarding duties as charity trustees (“legal impediments”). Dr Biggs asked whether bishops’ responses had collated centrally, and whether there was a plan to address any legal impediments identified.

Canon Coulter’s response illustrates, again, what I regard as a failure of the Archbishops’ Council — and of Diocesan Boards of Finance — to discharge basic trustee responsibilities.

She wrote: “Some dioceses have shared their responses with the staff of the Archbishops’ Council, but we have not produced a central digest.”

After referring to the Charity Commission’s November 2025 intervention, she added: “We continue to work with the Charity Commission on the Regulatory Action Plan and the Archbishops’ Council is determined to improve practice to fulfil our requirements. We very much hope that dioceses will work in partnership with us.”

That answer sits uneasily with her answer to Janette Allotey. In response to Ms Allottey, Canon Coulter said the Council had written to the Charity Commission to seek a discussion to understand what changes might be needed. Here she says the Council continues “to work with the Charity Commission on the Regulatory Action Plan”.

Which is it?

More seriously, the answer discloses a lack of proactive action. The Charity Commission’s January and February 2025 letters were public. Rather than treat them as a prompt for urgent, coordinated work, the Archbishops’ Council appears to have waited for the regulator to act and is now presenting itself as seeking clarity on what trustees are required to do.

What the Charity Commission expects is neither novel nor obscure. It expects trustees to fulfil their legal duties as trustees.

Instead of waiting, the Archbishops’ Council should have convened the bishops and asked them what “structural, procedural or constitutional arrangements under ecclesiastical law” prevented them from fulfilling safeguarding duties as charity trustees.

There is an obvious mechanism for doing that. The House of Bishops meets regularly, and this issue could, and should, have been on its agenda throughout the past year.

The General Synod has limited powers to initiate legislation. In practice, that is the preserve of the Archbishops’ Council. If “structural, procedural or constitutional arrangements under ecclesiastical law” must change to enable trustees of Church of England charities — including Diocesan Boards of Finance — to fulfil safeguarding duties, the Archbishops’ Council is the body that must bring forward the necessary legislation.

Independent charities — selectively

The Archbishops’ Council has often said that Diocesan Boards of Finance are independent charities and that it cannot require them to take particular action. The line that dioceses and DBFs are separate, independent charities has become a limiting principle: the Council does not, on that account, instruct, compel, or enforce outcomes, but relies on persuasion, encouragement, or legislative change.

Yet the Council invokes this principle selectively. In the second Past Cases Review (PCR2), dioceses were instructed on which files to review, the qualifications required of the reviewers, the actions expected of diocesan safeguarding teams, the timescale, the content of diocesan summary reports, and the manner of publication.

When asked to produce a report collating the recommendations made by reviewers across dioceses, the answer was that the Archbishops’ Council could not do this because the data belonged to those independent charities (the bishops’ councils).

This “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach is not legally defensible. Call it what you will — institutional blindness, deliberate ignorance, turning a blind eye, plausible deniability, or failure of oversight — the practical effect is the same: avoidance of responsibility and avoidance of scrutiny.

By failing to ask the questions that trustees ought to know must be asked, and by failing to require the information needed to discharge their duties, the Archbishops’ Council displays the same pattern that public inquiries have criticised elsewhere. In the criminal courts, directors who operate in this way may face exposure to corporate manslaughter investigations, health and safety prosecutions, and professional sanctions.

It is no longer good enough for the Archbishops’ Council to sit back and wait, suggesting that delay reflects a need for “clarity” from the Charity Commission. It must act — not because I demand it, and not only because the Charity Commission demands it, but because charity law requires trustees to act.

TL;DR — Synod questions expose a governance blind spot

Two questions at this week’s General Synod expose a deeper problem at the heart of the Church of England’s governance: how members of the Archbishops’ Council understand — or evade — their responsibilities as charity trustees.

In November, the Charity Commission issued a Regulatory Action Plan to the Archbishops’ Council following the Makin Report. It criticised the Church for failing to treat allegations of abuse from adults not assessed as vulnerable as safeguarding matters. Since then, the Commission has issued Official Warnings to two Diocesan Boards of Finance and written directly to bishops and Synod members reminding them of their legal duties as trustees.

Against that backdrop, Janette Allotey asked a simple question: what steps are being taken to address the Commission’s criticism?

The written answer was striking. The Archbishops’ Council said staff were still “identifying the questions, issues and requirements” raised by the regulator and had written to the Charity Commission to seek a discussion about what changes might be needed.

But the Charity Commission’s expectations are not new or unclear. They are rooted in long-established charity law. Trustees are required to act in the best interests of their charities and to protect people from harm. Those duties do not begin with correspondence from the regulator.

A second question reinforced the same picture. Asked whether bishops’ responses to the Commission’s letter about possible “legal impediments” had been collated centrally, the answer was no.

Together, these replies reveal a pattern of delay and deflection. Despite employing a substantial in-house legal team and spending well over £1 million a year on legally qualified staff, the Archbishops’ Council presents itself as needing “clarity” on what trustees are required to do.

That stance might once have gone unchallenged. With Parliament and the Charity Commission now watching closely, it no longer will.

The post When the regulator comes knocking, the Archbishops’ Council puts on the blinkers appeared first on Church Abuse.

I have just published a new detailed briefing, critically examining the Archbishops’ Council’s latest proposals for independent safeguarding in the Church of England.

The briefing document, written for Synod members, MPs, trustees, and all those concerned with safeguarding reform, sets out why the latest proposals, to be debated by the General Synod later this month, fall far short of what is needed.

The briefing explains that, despite years of promises and external scrutiny, the Church’s new safeguarding plans do not deliver genuine independence. Instead, they propose a slow, staged approach that keeps real control within existing Church structures for years to come. The analysis highlights how this approach fails to meet the expectations of victims and survivors, the requirements set out by the Charity Commission, and the calls for urgent action from General Synod and Parliament.

Key sections of the briefing cover the collapse of the Independent Safeguarding Board, the findings of the Jay Review, and the recent intervention by the Charity Commission. It argues that the Church’s current direction represents a retreat from previous commitments and risks further eroding trust among survivors and the wider public.

The document also challenges the claim that all IICSA recommendations have been delivered, pointing out that true independence in safeguarding remains undelivered.

The briefing concludes with a call for Synod and Parliament to reject the current proposals and instead demand a credible, accelerated route to statutory independent safeguarding, with robust interim measures in place.

It also offers a suggested amendment for Synod members to use, ensuring that reform is not delayed any further.

For anyone interested in the future of safeguarding in the Church of England, this briefing provides a clear, evidence-based summary of why urgent, decisive action is needed now.

You can download it here [PDF].

The post Delay and control: the problems with the Archbishops’ Council’s safeguarding plans appeared first on Church Abuse.