THE Scottish Episcopal Church (SEC) has made use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), the Church Times has discovered — regardless that the Primus, the Most Revd Mark Strange, has questioned whether or not they are appropriate, saying: “I don’t think anyone ought to be silenced.”
In an interview on Saturday for the Church Times podcast, Bishop Strange, who has been the Primus since 2017, said: “I’m not aware of non-disclosure agreements getting used, actually not in my time, after I would have been aware of that.
“Non-disclosure agreements I don’t think are at all times helpful, [but] I’ve never explored it greatly. . . I’d need a discussion about whether that will be appropriate, because for me, I don’t think anyone ought to be silenced.”
After the interview, a spokesperson for the SEC got in contact to say: “Non-disclosure agreements have, every so often, been entered into previously within the Church. HR processes are handled at the suitable level throughout the Church, and subsequently the Primus wouldn’t normally be involved.”
Documents seen by the Church Times suggest that a confidentiality agreement was reached with a senior church officer who left the SEC in 2019.
The Church Times has seen an email from the Synod’s Secretary General, John Stuart, to members of the Church’s standing committee, which incorporates Bishop Strange, outlining the agreement with the staff member, writing that it “will probably be subject to strict confidentiality on each side”.
The email details a £30,000 “compensation payment”, with a further sum to cover legal costs.
A supporter of the church officer resigned from one other SEC committee in protest on the person’s treatment. In a letter to the Primus on the time, they wrote that a number of the bishops and provincial staff within the SEC “appear to have lost their moral compass”.
The letter continued: “It is commonly stated within the press that NDAs are used to cover inappropriate behaviour by employers. I strongly suspect that that is the position with SEC.”
The Church Times approached the previous church officer for comment, but they declined to reply.
Separately, a former senior cleric within the Scottish Episcopal Church told the Church Times this week that they’d signed an NDA, and knew of at the least two others who had done the identical. They spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that there was a “culture of reprisal within the SEC”.
Of Bishop Strange, they said: “I actually have reason to think he should know at the least one NDA was signed.”
The use of NDAs to stop former employees from disclosing details about their employment and its termination have been a subject of debate within the Church of England. In 2021, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that he was “totally against NDAs. . . NDAs are unacceptable”, after it was reported that they’d been utilized in the C of E (News, 23 April 2021).
The Church Times has previously investigated using NDAs within the C of E, chatting with two priests who had signed confidentiality agreements (News, 3 September 2021).
Listen to the interview with Bishop Strange here.
