DIOCESAN apportionment — under which dioceses made financial contributions to cover the prices of centralised services, including clergy retirement housing — officially ended this month.
Its abolition formed a key plank of the financial package set out by the Triennial Funding Working Group (TFWG) last yr, heralded as a way to ease dioceses’ financial woes (News, 27 January 2025). It was produced after a diocesan-finances review that painted a stark picture of the Church’s financial and mission health: 35 dioceses expected to report deficits in 2023, totalling £62 million by 2024. An extra 23 held lower than three months’ money reserves (News, 21 June 2024).
The review warned of complex financial flows that, being a “mystery to many”, contributed to “resentment and confusion”. The Archdeacon of Liverpool, the Ven. Dr Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, observed last yr that Liverpool was in receipt of emergency short-term sustainability funding of £750,000 to £1 million while paying £450,000 in apportionment.
Apportionment was covered by five separate “votes” within the General Synod: training for ministry, the Archbishops’ Council’s operating budget, grants to bodies including the Anglican Communion, mission-agency pension contributions, and clergy retirement housing). The amount had been frozen or capped lately, and, in 2025, the entire was set at £32 million: about half the entire cost of the five items. The sum that individual dioceses were asked to pay was determined by a formula that included local income levels and diocesan and parish investment income. For 2025, the entire ranged from £280,000 from Portsmouth diocese to £2.2 million from London diocese.
From this yr, 4 of the five areas might be covered by distributions from the Church of England’s national endowment fund (managed by the Church Commissioners). A single Ministry Training Fund to cover ordination training costs — including all fees, living allowances, and expenses — is being established and might be largely funded by dioceses. Contributions might be set to reflect clergy numbers, investment assets per capita, and population income. Dioceses will contribute about £24 million a yr in total.
The abolition of apportionment is anticipated to avoid wasting the dioceses about £20 million in total, helping them to cover the £18-million cost of accelerating stipends from April 2026 to meet up with historic inflation.
In addition to this, 28 dioceses will profit from a £10-million increase in Lowest Income Communities Funding, while short-term financial support of £200 million might be distributed to dioceses over nine years to “ease pressures”, totalling £25 million this yr. An extra £11 million might be available to be awarded as additional time-limited support through the Diocesan Investment Programme “to assist dioceses to sustain ministry whilst waiting for his or her longer-term plans to develop missional health and financial sustainability to bear fruit”.
Last yr, the Bishop of Hereford, Dr Richard Jackson, suggested that there was “a certain quantity of smoke and mirrors occurring” when it got here to the package’s offer (News, 13 June 2025). Calculations he had made together with his diocesan secretary suggested that his diocese could be just “£1000 higher off”. The £200-million transitional support was set to taper “really quite savagely”, and he estimated that, “in three to 5 years, we might be worse off than we’re in the mean time.”
At a gathering of the General Synod last yr, the chair of the Archbishops’ Council’s finance committee, Carl Hughes, said that, before the £200-million time-limited support, dioceses as an entire could be £12 million higher off, but that this level varied by diocese, and 7 could be “barely worse off”.
This week, he said: “Whilst we all know that these recent mechanisms is not going to mechanically solve dioceses’ financial challenges, that is a crucial step in simplification of monetary structures and in ensuring more diocesan funds are spent on local ministry. We expect that the entire net profit to dioceses in 2026 might be over £50m, which we hope will each ease financial pressures and support the stipend increase.”
