Bishop Michael reports back on the General Synod safeguarding development

Image: Church of England/Geoff Crawford

At its February session, General Synod engaged in extensive debate about the future of safeguarding. Bishop Michael has reported back on the debate:
This week at General Synod, considerable steps were taken towards much greater independence of the Church’s safeguarding. The decision made by Synod was agreed by large majorities in each of the Synod’s houses of bishops, clergy and laity and will allow us to build on the work of parish safeguarding officers, diocesan safeguarding teams, clergy, churchwardens and others. Synod agreed:

1. To establish an independent body to provide scrutiny of the Church of England’s safeguarding activities. 
2. The scrutiny body will be governed by an independent board overseen by an independent chair. Its staff will not be employed by the Church of England but will be employees of a separate organisation.

The role of the independent scrutiny body will be to:

• commission or deliver safeguarding inspections of dioceses, cathedrals, and possibly parish churches and other Church bodies. 
• undertake a scheduled programme of thematic reviews and monitor the implementation of safeguarding policies. 
• hold Church bodies accountable to meeting agreed minimum standards. It will have new powers to require compliance which will be integrated into Church laws and procedures. 
• be a final and independent point of escalation for complaints about safeguarding processes.

The establishment of such an independent scrutiny body was agreed by all. 
There was much more debate about whether staff of safeguarding teams employed by dioceses and cathedrals should also be employed by a separate organisation (this has been called operational independence). There was strong support for this. It also became clear, however, that making this happen in practice would require overcoming an enormous amount of complexity in terms of charity law, as well as the practical challenges of transferring staff from 85 separate bodies (the dioceses and cathedrals) into one. As a result, synod ultimately came to the view that to vote immediately for such operational independence stood a very high risk of massively overpromising and the risk of significantly underdelivering.

This led Synod to:

• agree to move with all possible speed towards the establishment of the independent scrutiny body.
• agree that much more work was needed to better understand the legal and practical requirements necessary to implement independent operational delivery of safeguarding within dioceses and cathedrals.

While I recognise and understand the concern and disappointment expressed by survivors about the decision not to move forward with full independence immediately, I feel the outcome agreed upon was necessary to ensure that such a move to independence is done with due diligence and care, without impacting on the current good safeguarding practices we have in place, as recognised this week by INEQE, the independent auditors who have been evaluating the work of Church of England dioceses. Bath and Wells Diocese is due to be audited by INEQE in April. We are looking forward to being challenged by all that the auditors will bring us and to making our churches safer as a result.

Bishop Michael

If you missed the debate at General Synod on Tuesday you can catch up online

All the information about this week’s General Synod motions are available on the Church of England website. There are also links to recordings of all the sessions.