THE Church Commissioners have announced further details of the spending of £5 million on disability projects over the following three years, after disagreements last summer over the long run of racial-justice funding within the Church of England.
An allocation of £12.4 million for social and racial justice within the 2026-28 triennium was really useful to the Commissioners and the Archbishops’ Council by the Triennium Funding Working Group last 12 months.
The awarded £5 million is a component of “its commitment to the participation of Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people within the lifetime of the Church”. Funding will support “leadership training, children and youth work, further training for members of the diocesan disability advisers network, and learning disabilities research”.
Further funding will go towards “small and enormous grants to make churches more accessible within the Southern Province of the Church of England”, in addition to targeted support to the working groups for neurodiversity, children and young people, learning disabilities, and Deaf ministry, to “advance and promote the participation and inclusion of parishioners, churchgoers and clergy with a big selection of disabilities and differences”.
The Bishop of Bedford and Acting Bishop of St Albans, the Rt Revd Richard Atkinson, who chairs the Committee for the Ministry of and amongst Deaf and Disabled People, said: “Working with, and listening to my disabled, neurodivergent and Deaf colleagues, I’m increasingly aware of the theological, cultural, and practical barriers to participation and flourishing. There is progress, but there may be so rather more to do to rework attitudes towards disability within the Church.”
The Archbishops’ Council agreed in December that £7 million can be spent on racial-justice programmes between 2026 and 2029. An additional £200,000 was also to be carried forward from 2023-25 to be spent on racial justice. In response, the Racial Justice Board expressed “deep concern and disquiet” in regards to the Archbishops’ Council’s decision to scale back the funding for racial-justice work from £20 million in 2023-25 to £7 million for 2026-29 (News, 12 December 2025).
In a letter to the Church Times, the board members, who include the co-lead bishops for racial justice, the Bishop of Croydon, Dr Rosemarie Mallett, and the Bishop of Kirkstall, the Rt Revd Arun Arora, described the choice as “lamentable”.
Last June, Dr Mallett and Bishop Arora described the choice to chop social- and racial-justice funding from £26.7 million to £12 million as “bewildering” (News, 13 June 2025). In the General Synod, in York, the next month, the spending plans were defended on the grounds that the £20-million racial-justice funding had been intended as a one-off, not an ongoing commitment (News, 25 July 2025).
The decision was criticised by Daniel Matovu, of Oxford diocese, who suggested that the leadership of the Church “cares little, at the least for racial and disability justice”.
“It looks as if racial and disability justice have been asked to share the leftovers at the underside of the basket,” he said. “We don’t want your words of pity, your lament, your commitments. We are bored with your approval of recommendations and motions without adequate resources to take effective motion” (News, 1 August 2025).
