THE Consistory Court of the diocese of Worcester has ordered that three petitioners, who had been granted a school permitting certain structural remedial work to be undertaken at St Mary’s, Doverdale, and the diocese itself ought to be penalised in costs for deliberately failing to comply with a condition in the school.
St Mary’s is a Grade II listed church dating back to the 14th century. In December 2016, the quinquennial inspection identified movement within the church’s south-west wall, and the inspector really useful that the wall ought to be stabilised.
In 2018, further structural movement was noticed. The wall gave the impression to be leaning outwards at the highest along the roof line. Structural engineers were consulted, and, in 2020, bore holes were dug (without faculty permission) to research the situation underground. A technical specification was drawn up, and a contractor was retained to perform the work.
In May 2022, the petitioners, who were the then Rector, the Revd Stephen Winter, Robert Coppini, a churchwarden, and Geoffrey Crow, the secretary of the PCC, sought a school for the work to be undertaken.
On 16 August 2022, the Deputy Diocesan Chancellor, the Worshipful John Summers, granted a school for the scheduled works to be carried out, but imposed a condition stating that “before any works begin an archaeological watching temporary shall be commissioned to the satisfaction of the Diocesan Advisory Committee Archaeology Advisor”.
The remedial work on the church was carried out without compliance with that condition. No archaeological watching temporary had been commissioned.
Mr Crow indicated that the PCC was becoming “increasingly alarmed on the worsening state of the west wall”. He apologised for the failure to comply with the condition, but said that he “genuinely believed that he was acting in the perfect interests of the constructing and those that used it”. He accepted that, with hindsight, “more time must have been taken to pursue the diocese for details of archaeologists on its panel to comply with the school,” but he had not felt that he “had the luxurious of that point”.
The Deputy Chancellor emphasised that orders of the Consistory Court, just like the orders of any court of law, have to be complied with, unless that they had been put aside or varied by the court or on appeal. A failure to comply could have serious consequences for those involved. They might be referred to the High Court, which could impose punishments corresponding to fines or imprisonment, as if those were a contempt of the High Court.
Although much of the school system was conducted with informality, the Deputy Chancellor said, orders of the court mandated steps designed to guard “the peculiar cultural treasure . . . of places of worship within the Church of England.”
The Consistory Court had been entrusted with the regulation of what was often known as the “ecclesiastical exemption”. That afforded particular benefits to places of worship by exempting listed ecclesiastical buildings from the usual system of secular listed-buildings consent.
If the consistory courts were to fail to take breaches of their orders seriously, the Deputy Chancellor said, “there [was] a risk that the ecclesiastical exemption may be removed, provided that its existence was predicated on there being an equally rigorous system to control the alteration of affected buildings as exists for secular buildings.”
Clergy were subject to the disciplinary system of the Church of England, and there was no reason that that may not encompass ignoring the orders of a Consistory Court, the Deputy Chancellor said.
The failure to comply with the condition was now irremediable, because it was inconceivable to know if the excavations were of archaeological interest.
The Deputy Chancellor concluded that the non-compliance had deliberate, and never an “oversight”, as Mr Crow had said. The petitioners were ordered to pay 50 per cent of the prices of the judgment, and the diocese of Worcester the opposite 50 per cent.
