A DEBATE concerning the mechanics of accelerating the clergy pension — currently set at an “indefensible, ungodly, and unchristian” level — must not delay agreement on the moral plan of action, a Southwark priest who has helped to organise concerned clergy said on Wednesday.
“This is a justice issue,” the Vicar of the Ascension, Balham Hill, the Revd Marcus Gibbs, said. “We take the choice to do the appropriate thing — and that requires leadership — after which we work out find out how to do it. . . We need to begin with the moral imperative.”
Mr Gibbs, who’s the Area Dean of Tooting, has gathered greater than 700 signatories to a letter to the Church Times this week calling for “urgent and decisive motion on clergy pensions”. In the past three weeks, greater than 1800 people have joined a Clergy Pension Action group on Facebook.
Among the signatories is the Revd Dr Ian Paul, an NSM at St Nicholas’s, Nottingham, and a member of the Archbishops’ Council, who, in February last yr, brought a Private Member’s Motion to the General Synod which called on the Archbishops’ Council, the Pensions Board, and the Church Commissioners to enable the restoration of the clergy pension to its pre-2011 profit level (News, 16 February 2024). This would come with reversing the reduction of the pension from two-thirds of the National Minimum Stipend (NMS) to half.
During the talk, he accepted an amendment from the chair of the Archbishops’ Council’s Finance Committee, Carl Hughes, which called on the three bodies to “work along with dioceses to explore ways by which the extent of clergy pensions and stipends may be improved in a sustainable manner” (News, 1 March 2024).
At last month’s meeting of the Synod, Mr Hughes presented a package from the Diocesan Finances Review for the consideration of the Triennium Funding Working Group that features a rise within the NMS to catch up inflation since 2011, which may even uplift the starting pension rate (News, 31 January).
This week’s letter from clergy describes this response as “merely a drop within the ocean” and argues that restoration to pre-2011 levels is a “minimum” requirement. “If a stipend is taken into account the minimum obligatory to live in lively ministry, why is it deemed acceptable for clergy to receive a fraction of that quantity in retirement without housing provision?”
In his own letter this week, Mr Hughes expresses sympathy for clergy concerns and says that there could also be “further opportunities to enhance pensions”. But he warns against “adding to the financial pressures on dioceses and parishes”.
The position of the clergy signatories — echoing that of Dr Paul — is that it’s the Commissioners — who now preside over assets of £10.4 billion — who should meet the fee of accelerating the pension. The Church’s pension scheme is in surplus for the primary time. The 2007 General Synod motion that lowered the profit rate included a clause requesting the Archbishops’ Council, “within the event that the pensions climate improves sufficiently, to bring forward recommendations to the Synod, after consultation with the Pensions Board and the Church Commissioners, with a view to restoring pension level”.
It has been calculated that diocesan boards of finance could have gained £2.6 billion in the event that they had invested the sums they’ve contributed to clergy pensions since responsibility was transferred to them from the Commissioners in 1998 (News, 31 January).
The response from the Diocesan Finances Review, presented by Mr Hughes, was not an adequate response to Dr Paul’s motion, which had commanded “a lot support” within the Synod, Mr Gibbs said this week. The amended motion had contained too many “weasel words”, and the clergy pension demanded a separate response moderately than being “packaged along with all the opposite objectives”.
The Church was guilty of hypocrisy, he suggested: “Here we’re preaching justice and morality and integrity, and calling out within the House of Lords individuals who will not be doing things appropriately, and we will not be even taking care of our own people.” He spoke of a retired friend in his eighties, still serving in his parish church, who had needed to resort to using a foodbank. The pension level militated against the drive to grow vocations from working-class backgrounds, he said (News, 6 October 2023).
Emphasising that he was speaking in a private capability, he described being sent right into a “tailspin” on learning, on turning 50, that, if he retired at 68, after 30 years of ministry, he could be entitled to £9400 a yr. “I initially thought there had been a mistake.” He had felt “really alone,” he said, and “quite ashamed” to speak about his concerns. “You feel as in case you will not be trusting God enough.”
He has calculated that a priest who starts ministry at 26 and retires at 68 will retire on £13,370. The Synod’s secretary-general, William Nye, has argued that clergy may even be entitled to the state pension, and that that combined sum will, in lots of instances, exceed the NMS.
Read more on this week’s Leader and Letters
