MINUTES taken at meetings of the House of Bishops will now be published routinely, but the general public or press will still not be admitted, the House has announced.
A committee led by the Archbishop of York had been examining how the working of the House may very well be made more transparent, following sustained criticism from members of the opposite two Houses of the General Synod during last 12 months’s Living in Love and Faith debates.
Multiple members of the Houses of Clergy and Laity accused the bishops of hiding legal advice regarding the Prayers of Love and Faith, and of obscuring disagreements and debates within the House over the gay-blessings policy.
The report produced by the bishops’ transparency group concedes that there was “substantial and reasonable criticism of the best way during which the House of Bishops operates”.
Unlike within the Houses of Clergy and Laity, papers produced for the bishops, and the choices they take, are rarely published, or only briefly summary form.
“The result has been a lack of trust within the House of Bishops and its workings from other Houses of Synod and from the broader Church,” the report states. “It is perceived that bishops are insufficiently accountable to the broader Church of England.”
In an effort to beat this mistrust, full minutes of every meeting of the House of Bishops will now be published, including records of all motions introduced, items discussed, and votes taken.
The minutes won’t include a transcript, nevertheless, and can record only a summary without attribution of what bishops said during discussions. The individual voting records of every bishop can even not be minuted (partly as votes are typically taken by a show of hands).
They can even be published only after having first been approved by a subsequent meeting of the House, meaning that, in most instances, the minutes won’t be publicly available for several months.
Some Synod members had called for the general public and press to be allowed into meetings of the House of Bishops, something mandated within the House’s own Standing Orders.
Since the early Nineteen Eighties, nevertheless, all meetings of the House have begun with a primary item calling for the House to enter private committee, thereby excluding the press and public. Meetings of the House aren’t any longer routinely publicised prematurely.
The transparency group said that it had considered the choices of admitting the general public because the Standing Orders envisaged, broadcasting the House’s deliberations live online, or admitting only the press, but eventually really useful retaining the present tradition of privacy.
While there was a broader culture of mistrust within the Church of England’s leadership which needed to be overcome, “additionally it is true that achieving trust and good governance requires a component of confidentiality”, the report argues.
If there was “unrestricted admission of the general public” to the House’s meetings, transparency would actually be undermined, the bishops argue.
Instead of being “consultative and conversational” in informal debate, members would pay attention to public scrutiny, and lapse into speaking not to one another but to audiences beyond the room, in “increasingly performative” ways.
The right balance between openness to construct trust, and privacy for honest debate, can be struck by publishing minutes, but abandoning the Standing Order which mandated public access to meetings, which was ignored.
While the House wouldn’t commit to publishing every document or paper produced for his or her meetings, they might, any longer, adopt a policy of “maximum transparency”, and restrict publication just for items with a transparent need for confidentiality.
On the difficulty of legal advice, the transparency report recommends that “the default expectation needs to be that advice from the Legal Office and other skilled advisers is published by the House.”
It also suggests that confidential papers currently stored within the Lambeth Palace Library archives be opened to the general public after 20 years in storage, slightly than the 30-year rule currently in operation.
Finally, suffragan bishops who’re acting as diocesans during a emptiness needs to be allowed to not only attend and speak at meetings of the House but additionally vote for the primary time, the report recommends. This change, nevertheless, would require amendments to the canons, and thus take several years to implement through the synodical procedures.
