The General Synod has voted to transfer most of the Church of England’s national safeguarding staff to a new independent body while keeping diocesan and cathedral safeguarding officers as church employees.
With the C of E engulfed in a catalogue of abuse scandals, members meeting on February 11 at Church House, Westminster, debated two models as “the direction of travel” for future safeguarding in the Church. These were set out in a paper by its lead bishop on safeguarding, Joanne Grenfell, Bishop of Stepney.
According to the option called model three, all diocesan and cathedral safeguarding practitioners would remain in their current structures with no change to their employment arrangements. Most of the people in the National Safeguarding Team (NST) currently employed by the Archbishops’ Council would transfer to an external national body.
But according to model four, diocesan and cathedral safeguarding practitioners, along with most of the NST staff, would “transfer to a new delivery body which is external to the Church while remaining embedded in dioceses – working from diocesan offices, attending diocesan meetings, able to provide advice locally”.
In support of model four, Bishop Grenfell said: “Where model four differs from model three is in bringing together the staff from 85 charities – the cathedrals in the Cathedrals’ Measure, the dioceses in the Church of England and the Archbishops’ Council into one external employer. Why? The aims of this model, which is the one I support, are to bring sufficient consistency, timeliness and evenness of resourcing to our operational safeguarding.”
The Second Church Estates Commissioner, Marsha De Cordova MP, who fields questions in the House of Commons about the C of E, also supported model four.
She told Synod in her first address to members after taking up her role: “When I was appointed Second Church Estates Commissioner last October, I could not have foreseen the storm that was about to engulf the Church.
“No one can deny these past few months have been challenging. It has been an unprecedented time. Since the publication of the Makin Review that exposed the devastating abuses inflicted by John Smyth, MPs, including myself, have rightly expressed concern. We have received correspondence from constituents, distressed clergy, victims and survivors.
“Therefore, Synod, I am clear that this must be a watershed moment for the Church to change its culture and approach to safeguarding, as these failures can never happen again. It is essential that this assembly shows both Parliament and the public that the Church is fully committed to change.”
She said model four would bring about independence in safeguarding operations, complaints processes, scrutiny function and audits.
“Bringing those responsible for safeguarding from across the Church under one body will bring about that much-needed consistency in its approach but also a consistency in how it responds and how it deals with safeguarding matters,” she said.
Ahead of their meeting, members had received a letter signed by 106 safeguarding practitioners in C of E dioceses and cathedrals expressing “serious concerns” about model four.
“There is no doubt that transferring staff from 85 current employers to one yet-to-be-created employer will be destabilising, expensive, and likely to take far longer than expected,” the letter read.
“The disruption to recruitment and retention of staff, to existing relationships, and to morale would be considerable.
“Moreover, new structures bring new problems: a large national organisation is at least as likely to multiply layers of management as it is to improve frontline service delivery.”
Moving an amendment to adopt model three, the Bishop of Blackburn, Philip North, called model four “eye-wateringly complex”. It would “take years to implement, assuming it is implementable”.
“No organisation has done anything on this scale before and during those years not enough will change when the Church and the nation are demanding change now,” he said.
Bishop North’s amendment passed in the House of Bishops with 23 votes for, 14 against and one abstention; in the House of Clergy with 114 for, 65 against, and two abstentions; in the House of Laity with 106 for, 86 against, and three abstentions.
An amendment by Sam Margrave, a lay member for Coventry Diocese, to “lament and repent of the failure of the Church to be welcoming to victims and survivors and the harm they have experienced and continue to experience in the life of the Church” passed in a vote of the whole Synod with 315 for, 24 against, and 23 abstentions.
Responding to the debate, Bishop Grenfell said: “Model three is a considerable change in itself and I do believe that it will help us to move on. However, there are questions that will not go away … issues of consistency, evenness of resourcing, and most of all of trust and confidence.”
The final motion as amended passed with 392 votes for, nine against and six abstentions. Synod endorsed model three “as the way forward in the short term” and called for “further work as to the legal and practical requirements necessary to implement model four”.
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
