IN A House of Commons debate on Monday evening, MPs criticised the General Synod’s decision last month to not outsource all safeguarding functions immediately to an independent body (News, 11 February).
The Labour MP for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, Luke Myer, said that survivors had told him that, despite “apologies, reports, and reviews . . . they’re unheard, ignored, and left to fight alone for basic justice”.
The Church’s safeguarding structures, he said, “should be independent, transparent, and accountable”, and that “trust within the Church will only be restored when every survivor who steps forward is met with compassion, justice, and meaningful motion.”
The debate was called by Mr Myer, who sits on the Ecclesiastical Committee, and his opening remarks were followed by a speech from the Second Church Estates Commissioner, Marsha De Cordova MP.
In February’s Synod debate, she had spoken in favour of outsourcing all the Church’s safeguarding work to a recent body, and had said that the consequence of the talk “puts back the progress we’d like” (News, 14 February).
On Monday, she reiterated her disappointment, and called for the changes that the Synod had agreed to implement — including the establishment of an independent scrutiny body and the transfer of the National Safeguarding Team to an independent body — to be taken up “with urgency and at pace”.
Other speakers in the talk included the Labour MP for Glenrothes and Mid Fife, Richard Baker, who said that Church of England could learn from the experience of the Scottish Episcopal Church’s reforms of safeguarding; and the Labour MP for Banbury, Sean Woodcock, who said that a safeguarding audit of the diocese of Oxford had concluded that it was doing this work well. Standards ought to be high across the board, Mr Woodcock, said. “It mustn’t be a postcode lottery.”
The Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, Jess Phillips MP, responded to the talk on behalf of the Government.
“The stories of victims that now we have heard today are harrowing,” she said, “not only within the facts of their abuse”, but in the best way that complaints had been met with “ignorance”.
The Church, she said, was not alone in having faced issues with safeguarding, and one in every of the opposite institutions with a history of such failings was Parliament itself.
The Government couldn’t tell the Church what to do, she said, but “lessons learned” needed to be translated into motion. “We owe a debt to the victims who come forward about any institutional abuse. We owe them greater than lamenting and repenting. We owe them change.”
Mr Myer had earlier argued that change was not happening fast enough. He recounted among the reports that had been produced on church safeguarding prior to now decade, including Professor Alexis Jay’s advice last 12 months that the Church transfer all safeguarding to an external body (News, 21 February 2024).
The Synod’s failure to vote for such an approach, but to prefer more time to explore the legal and logistical barriers to outsourcing diocesan safeguarding teams while concurrently making a recent, independent scrutiny body, was, Mr Myer said, “deeply disappointing”.
The decision, he said, “didn’t follow the advice from Professor Jay and plenty of other specialists and professionals, or the preference of many survivors”.
Two separate surveys have suggested that about three-quarters of the victims and survivors questioned supported Professor Jay’s recommendations; but her advice was not supported by all safeguarding professionals.
Jim Gamble, the top of the INEQE Safeguarding Group, which is auditing all Church of England dioceses and cathedrals, was amongst those to disagree with Professor Jay. In a report published the day before the Synod’s debate, he wrote: “When it involves delivering effective safeguarding practice — practice that genuinely works and makes a difference — it’s most effectively delivered from inside, not imposed from without” (News, 14 February).
