SLOW but regular progress towards safeguarding reform was endorsed on the General Synod on Monday morning. Efforts to maneuver immediately towards independent scrutiny were cut off.
A motion brought by the Bishop of Stepney, Dr Joanne Grenfell, who leads on safeguarding for the Church of England, was carried comfortably.
It praised an update from the Response Group which has been exploring options following two reviews earlier this yr by Professors Sarah Wilkinson (the disbanding of the Independent Safeguarding Board) and Alexis Jay (the long run of safeguarding).
Professor Jay really helpful creating two latest independent bodies: Organisation A, which might do operational safeguarding, and Organisation B which might offer scrutiny of this work. Both can be legally separate from the church hierarchy (News, 21 February).
In February, many Synod members had argued for a right away acceptance of those recommendations; but, in the long run, Synod had endorsed a plan for Dr Grenfell and her team to run a consultative process to contemplate different models of safeguarding reform (News, 24 February).
The results of this process were presented in a paper produced for this group of sessions. It outlined some “indicative models” and had tried to seek out areas of consensus, and to make sure the final final result was not considered “unworkable” by any group within the Church.
The independent co-chair of the Response Group, the experienced businesswoman and NGO leader Lesley-Anne Ryder, said that she had been been “struck by how complex the systems and processes” of the Church are. “Seriously — I cannot easily discover whose job it’s to take governance decisions here,” she told members, to an uneasy ripple of laughter within the chamber.
Her focus was on making safeguarding simpler to navigate, especially for victims in crisis who were attempting to get help, and for strange parishes without huge resources.
But it was critical to choose what functions latest safeguarding organisations should hold first, and only then what form they need to take. “No change shouldn’t be an option,” she warned members.
There was a second motion on the order paper from Clive Billenness (Europe), which called for immediate movement towards organising Organisation B, which, unlike Organisation A, had found broad support across the Church. But the chair ruled that it contradicted Dr Grenfell’s motion, and so would fall if the primary motion was passed.
Mr Billenness urged members to, reluctantly, vote down Dr Grenfell’s motion — despite his agreeing with most of it — as a way to facilitate more rapid reform.
In the talk, several members praised the caution and careful approach of the Response Group, warning that excessive haste would result in more mistakes that needed to be unpicked painfully in the long run.
The Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Revd Philip North, said that he had previously supported full operational independence for safeguarding, but had modified his mind after conversations with safeguarding professionals within the dioceses.
Professor Jay’s conclusions were “deeply flawed” and would make the Church less secure, no more, he argued. Outsourcing safeguarding would allow bishops like him to pass the buck for failures elsewhere. Instead, the “sacred responsibility” for keeping children and vulnerable adults secure have to be kept inside the Church, although exercised independently.
The Bishop of Newcastle, Dr Helen-Ann Hartley, said that she had been dismayed in February’s debates on the procrastination over the Jay and Wilkinson recommendations (News, 26 February). But subsequent consultation with victims and survivors, and people on the Response Group, had softened her stance, and he or she now believed Dr Grenfell’s motion was one of the best ways forward.
A lay member from the diocese of Sheffield, Michaela Suckling, shared her experience as a nurse working in children’s services. Her local authority’s services were in crisis, in order that they had been outsourced to an arms-length body. But later they were brought back in house, because it turned out operational independence had not helped.
Another recurring theme had been frustration from individual safeguarding figures with the chaos of the national scene interfering with their work. This was encapsulated by the Archdeacon of Leeds, the Ven. Paul Ayers, who bemoaned how the “attackers and defenders” slugging out safeguarding on the national level were “imposing their drama” on the remainder of the Church.
Locally, safeguarding was not a “automotive crash” but increasingly well-delivered and improving on a regular basis, he argued.
Not everyone was on board with Dr Grenfell’s careful approach, nonetheless. A couple of members joined Mr Billenness in calling for more urgent implementation of, on the very least, Organisation B.
Alison Coulter, from Winchester diocese, wanted more reassurance that Ms Ryder and the Response Group were taking their lead from survivors, not the House of Bishops, and encouraged more attention to power dynamics, which she said were silencing vulnerable people.
The Archbishop of York said that, while he had sympathy with Mr Billenness, he would ultimately be voting for Dr Grenfell’s motion, since the Church had made mistakes before by moving too quickly. He also said, nonetheless, that there was still an extended menu of options before them, and that operational independence could still be achieved with safeguarding professionals remaining “embedded” within the dioceses.
The motion was eventually passed comfortably by a show of hands, meaning that Mr Billenness’s rival proposal lapsed, and was not debated.
A final plan for easy methods to reform safeguarding structures is on account of be brought back for approval on the February 2025 sessions.
AT THE weekend, survivors who had been waiting for reviews of their cases when the ISB was disbanded last yr complained that their situation had been misrepresented by the chair of the House of Laity, and Archbishops’ Council member, Dr Jamie Harrison.
In a written response to an issue about whether any reviews had been began under Kevin Crompton, who’s the interim commissioner of reviews, Dr Harrison said: “Survivors have requested that their engagement is kept confidential, and [Mr Crompton] is due to this fact unable to supply confirmation of the status of individual case reviews.”
This, the group of survivors often called the ISB 11 said in an announcement, was “false, misleading, and harmful to those affected”. They have previously told the Church Times that no reviews had been commissioned, blaming delays within the agreement of knowledge sharing arrangements, and a variety of independent reviewers which they’d felt were inadequate.
In a paper included among the many Synod papers, Mr Crompton writes that, on account of confidentiality, he was “not capable of provide confirmation of the variety of case reviews that may be commissioned right now”.
In the subsequent sentence, nonetheless, he says: “At the time of writing no case reviews have been commissioned despite there being agreed Terms of Reference in place and potential independent reviewers identified.”
A Church of England spokesperson said: “There was absolutely no intention to mispresent the situation, and Dr Harrison would have pointed to the further information in Kevin Crompton’s report had a supplementary query been asked. We do apologise if that was the perception.”
