Due to step back from his lead role on 31 December, Senior Police Chaplain Andy Paget has served for more than 28 years as a force chaplain with Avon & Somerset Police and over 23 years as Lead Chaplain. He began in the summer of 1996 on Bristol’s Central Police District where he was affectionately nicknamed ‘CID’ (Chaplain In Disguise), due to his not wearing a clerical collar during his visits .
Andy leads a team of fourteen volunteer chaplains, serving the six and a half thousand members of Avon and Somerset’s police family. With Ecumenical Prebendary Adrian Prior-Sankey, he also coordinates the A&S victim-focused multi-faith response to major emergencies. He served for over ten years on the National Exec of what was then The National Association of Chaplains to the Police (now Police Chaplaincy UK) as South West Regional Coordinator and was a member of the national training team.
Although much of the work of Andy and his team of volunteer chaplains takes place under the radar, in the confidential space of one-to-one contact with individuals or their families, its value has been affirmed through a series of awards. The team won the Police Support Volunteer Team of the Year Award in 2023 and again, this year, won both the local and regional PSV awards. Andy has been the recipient of a Bristol Multi-Faith Forum Love Your Neighbour Award “for promoting community cohesion & inclusiveness” and, in 2023, was given the Constabulary’s Outstanding Lifetime Service Award. In October, Somerset’s High Sheriff Rob Beckley presented him with an award for his service to the community.
Part of Andy’s legacy will be that, at a time when the Constabulary have to make savings of tens of millions, they have created a full-time salaried post for his successor, Revd Steve Walters, who will be moving from the West Midlands to the West Country to take up the lead role on 2 January. With Steve’s blessing, Andy will continue as a volunteer chaplain with the National Police Air Service, with some of Avon and Somerset’s frontline specialist units and with his local police team in Kingswood.
Andy writes, “I’m enormously grateful to the Diocese of Bath and Wells and, in particular, to the Bishops, Mike Haslam, Charlie Peer, Archdeaconof Bath and Allie White for the encouragement they’ve given me and for their prayerful and practical support of police chaplaincy and the Avon and Somerset Major Emergency Plan. I value your prayers as I make the transition to a more localised and specific role. I know that Steve, too, will appreciate your support.”