by Gilo
Some reflections by Gilo, co-editor of Letters to a Broken Church, which will be sent to both Archbishops for the members of Archbishops Council and also to the Church Commissioners.
Both the Interim Support Scheme (up and running) and the eventual Redress Scheme were agreed unanimously by Archbishops’ Council in Sept 2020. But it seems now that the Redress Scheme might not begin for at least another year. The delay is not as might be imagined entirely the work of Secretary General William Nye and his lawyers in the demesne of the Secretariat. It’s also, from what one can gather, the Church Commissioners closely guarding their assets and saying the funds are not for this purpose.
It is somewhat ironic that the two Archbishops both nominally sit as trustees of the Church Commissioners alongside four other bishops, two of whom are on the National Safeguarding Steering Group. But at least this gives survivors and our allies some room for moral leverage. Archbishop Welby is unlikely to welcome being held hostage by his machinery – on the one hand presented as supporting the call for the Redress Scheme and restorative justice, whilst at the same time having to contend with the powerful engine of the machine blocking it. That’s not a good look.
At the current moment the Interim Support Scheme (ISS) is funded by Archbishops Council. I believe there are currently about 35 survivors being supported. The current monthly expenditure is likely to be in region of £60k plus additional capital expenditure. And there are perhaps over 10 current applications in process. Maybe closer to twenty. It’s hard to know when the Scheme might reach its first 100 applicants. Perhaps within the next four to six months. And the Scheme is likely to grow exponentially. It’s not clear how dioceses are making the information and access readily available to those in need. I hope none are blocking access to this vital service. Credit to the lead bishop, Jonathan Gibbs, for driving these schemes into existence. Constrained by structure and culture that desperately needs reform – he seems nevertheless determined to see restorative justice begin to take shape.
But the Interim Scheme is not the Redress Scheme. It’s important to maintain a clear distinction. It can be seen as the beginning of restorative justice as its focus is on rescuing people from further economic damage. But there is a way to go before the Redress Scheme begins. It should be seen as the sticking plaster, holding people towards the time when the Redress Scheme is ready. Civil claims will continue throughout all of this period. It’s important that they do. The Church’s insurer Ecclesiastical, who have played many unethical games, should not be let off the hook due to the Interim Support Scheme, and anyway the compensation paid by Ecclesiastical (derisory as it often is) should not prevent survivors from seeking support from the ISS where necessary.
I imagine the ISS Panel must find themselves treading an awkward line between the needs of survivors… and the all-seeing Nye and his lawyers. This cannot be easy. They can only make recommendations. We can only hope that few of those recommendations are being turned down. I believe the Panel and its secretary Tim Bonnett are doing the best they can to make sure people receive the support necessary at this stage. And I know the scheme has so far already saved lives. I suspect the Panel is having to push against the increasing limitations Mr Nye would seek to impose. It is disturbing that so much power lies within the hands of one figure who frankly needs to repent the reputational management circus he and Church House carried out in their handling of the Elliott Review. But that is for another day.
When the Interim Scheme started Church House lawyers sought to impose draconian and ugly Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) upon survivors involved in the scheme. But when a group of us told the Archbishops about this direct – they acted fast to get them removed. Archbishop Welby was visibly angry – angry enough to get it actioned it within 48 hrs. We learnt several important things from this. The Archbishop hasn’t much of a clue what the operations of Church House legal department consist of, and how out of touch they might be with the Church’s thinking. But when the right hand knows what the left hand is up to – action can in fact be surprisingly rapid. When the Archbishops are motivated and working together – they can make stuff happen with astonishing urgency. Apologies were duly sent to those who had received these NDAs, and they were hurriedly removed presumably to a backdrop of red faces in Church House
At the current moment Archbishops Council is probably needing to budget £1m this year for the ISS. Easily within the capacity of their purse. It’s probable that they have set aside £5m for the scheme over the next few years. But the main holdings are under the keys of the Church Commissioners who have control over £9billion plus. They made a return of £500m this past year alone.
The Church are needing to find in the region of £1billion for the eventual Redress Scheme and if the Church Commissioners are dragging their heels, then it will not be surprising if daylight visits them and their blocking. The institutional hypocrisy is likely to be exposed. Both Archbishops and 4 other bishops sit on the CC trustees. Not a great look if they are publicly calling for the Redress Scheme while a corner of their own structure that has all the power and control is blocking it. It would look even odder if any of these bishops had major unaddressed scandals in their dioceses, that they and their diocesan structures had done everything to push away.
The Church is likely to play out its ‘game of parts’ and pretend that pieces of the institution are separate from one another. It’s been doing this throughout decades of scandal – acting as forty+ autonomous structures when it suits, and then at other times, presenting itself as one identifiable body, the Church of England. However it plays it out, eventually the embarrassment catches up and does more damage.
So someone had better warn the Archbishops that this embarrassment could be better avoided. They closed down the NDAs on the ISS when we told them about this ugliness. So presumably they can action this and kick the Commissioners into touch, admittedly with some difficulty. But nevertheless it can be done. Especially now that we finally have two Archbishops who seem genuinely to like each other, work together well, and are keen that the new paradigm of culture change and restorative justice finally happens.
If there is a big internal passing the buck quarrel going on between the Commissioners and Archbishops Council – they might need to be honest and own this problem transparently. And allow any ensuing embarrassment to unblock the blockage. Embarrassment is usually the one thing this rickety structure responds to, and it would be far healthier at this stage if it were self-administered embarrassment.
Perhaps what may be required to help this move along might be a workshop with members of CC and Archbishops Council. A joint meeting of both members with a group of survivors at a two-day conference somewhere. With a commitment to learn direct about cost of impact in real lives. This was something two of us (Phil Johnson and I) led in a diocese in recent weeks – and it would be good to see this pattern recreated elsewhere with more stories, both men and womens’ represented. It is hugely costly work emotionally but it is not until the significant power brokers hear it for themselves and in the presence of notable allies within the structure, will they get it.
And if the two highest bodies of the Church refuse – then ask for reasons for the reluctance to be on the record so the Church can see that these bodies might be more intent on playing for PR than authentic commitment to real change and genuine justice.
Now the chances of such a workshop happening may seem as likely as Secretary General Nye turning up for work in a sombrero and calling for the introduction of continental shifts in Church House. But he knows they are badly on the back foot. They all know it. The structure is desperate to claw back moral ground. Their expensive reputation launderers and crisis managers (chiefly ‘Loofah’ Pendragon in London) have failed to scrub clean the stain of much corruption as well as multiple ongoing failures. The Church of England’s scar tissue will not begin to heal until a theological and cultural shift towards genuine and full ownership and repentance takes shape. This involves amongst many other things, a letting go of the harmful detergent offered by the likes of Pendragon which has often done more damage. The only workable medicine for the Church’s many self-inflicted wounds is the medicine of transparency – a willingness to be more transparent than transparent. Some senior figures have already made the clear shift into this new paradigm. Others have not.
There is a gulf between what bishops officially say the Church is doing, and the backroom machinations of its power brokers and managers. It is this gulf that the lead bishops and Archbishops will need to bridge. And the best way forward might be to speak openly and transparently about the delay, who or what is causing it, and how they intend to shift this. As Martin Sewell writes on the latest Archbishop Cranmer blog:
“Question-and-Answer sessions at General Synod are frequently treated as a cat-and-mouse game by Church House, with the avoidance of giving a straight answer to an inconvenient question the preferred default option.”
I was very interested to read this as I had not heard of either the interim support scheme or the redress scheme.
Very interested as after a year of trying to get action and eventually deciding there was nothing else to be done but bring a cdm following months of obfuscation and disinformation from everyone involved in my case. I finally won the cdm ( one of the 2% of lay people who win cdms brought against clergy, according to Fiona Gardner’s excellent book).
I needed action to protect others from a repeat of what happened to me.
The only thing I asked for myself, repeatedly, in writing, was for proper professional counselling to be provided for me as the hate incident perpetrated by the vicar caused me much distress. This request was turned down by the bishop investigating my case, who tried every trick in the book to get me to drop my case.
This bishop is on the national safeguarding team, and talks publicly about listening to victims and offering support to victims.
This is absolutely not my experience of raising serious concerns with him via a cdm.
I asked 5 times in writing before I was given the whistleblowing policy. I figured out to contact the nspcc myself, as there was no info given at the time.. The diocesan website has since been updated to give their number.
The cdm result was published in February of this year so this is a very recent case.
After I could get no action from the rector, and no support, and realised there were literally no effective mechanisms for raising a complaint at lower levels and getting any action, as well as the cdm I reported what happened to me to the police where its recorded as a hate incident, and to the nspcc. The nspcc took my complaint seriously and passed it on to the past case review which is ongoing.
I suspect it was my determination to get action and reporting to public bodies that led to any action at all via the church of England’s own mechanisms. I shone a light on what was going on via reporting to the police and the NSPCC.
The problem for me is that I don’t feel my case was dealt with at all appropriately by the bishop, that it’s clear to me that safeguarding good practice and ANY procedures for dealing with serious complaints are not at all embedded in this diocese – yet this bishop sits on the national safeguarding team in the c of e.
There isn’t anywhere left for me to whistleblow to because the c of e is a law unto itself, one that is far more interested in protecting institutional reputation over and above insisting on truth, good embedded safeguarding practise and listening to victims.
If you raise a problem, however serious and evidenced, you immediately become the problem.
This is deeply unsafe.
So sorry you you received neither justice or compassion. Sadly, I am not surprised to hear your Bishop is on the national safeguarding team. My personal belief, and it is an assumption, is that those who are willing to cover up may well find a place within national safeguarding. How else could you explain your Bishop, and that the safeguarding consultant who wrote in my case that there was no way that persons posing a risk could be deprived of their voluntary church roles, and that it must be understood that they may forget any restrictions ( meaning I no longer had the right to complain when they breached restrictions) is now the advisor to the lead Bishop for safeguarding. After all, a good way to cover up safeguarding failures would actually be to imbed those willing to do so in national safeguarding. And who will provide the promised “independent” scrutiny we are awaiting? Your guess is as good as mine.I fear we have both unintentionally been on a course to learn how best to ensure safeguarding failures never see the light of day. Despite your persistence, which I admire, there is indeed nowhere to whistle blow except in blogs such as this and the public media because, as you say, there will be obfuscation and disinformation. I do hope you will be properly heard within the structures of the past cases review but do beware . My case has been ” independently ” signed off by the consultant who tweaked the restrictions to say it was permissible for persons with restrictions, even with a written agreement, to “forget” them. I am extremely sorry you did not receive the very small redress you asked for and which should have been offered as standard. Is there any chance of nhs counselling? I had very good trauma counselling provided by the nhs. Many complainants feel they need counselling not just for their original abuse but also for the appalling way church personnel treat them. It is bad enough that complainants did not receive counselling in the past, one would hope that with a redress scheme in place and with the cdm decision upholding your complaints, you would be automatically offered a course of counselling. If you did not receive it who will? The appalling truth is that despite what is said at a national level, the church has shown itself to be untrustworthy. I now personally always assume that national pronouncements are mostly window dressing and not to be relied upon, no more than safeguarding personnel who show a distinct lack of interest in the safety of vulnerable parishioners. At least on sites e church as this you won’t be deemed to be the problem but part of the solution. God bless.
As a diocesan survivor I completely agree with these two comments and think that the well written article by Gilo painfully highlights the enormous gulf that is now apparent between National and Diocesan response.
It is easy for the national church to come up with shiny new initiatives and policies and present them to the public as ‘this is what we are now doing to atone for the sins of our past’, but the fact that these initiatives need never be translated into diocesan structure, if the Diocesan Bishop doesn’t want them, is never addressed. Gilo comments that the Archbishop was angry about the NDA’s but both Archbishops and Jonathan Gibb know about the NDA on my diocesan LLR and their response is, we will pray for you.’ That is because they have no authority over any diocese. Jonathan Gibb is a suffragen Bishop so he has no authority over his diocesan Bishop, Nick Baines and wouldn’t want to rock the boat by challenging other Bishops as he presumably wants to make Diocesan Bishop one day.
The person overseeing the redress scheme Simon Stanley represents the church in parliament so how many buddies has he got in the House of Lords?
The advert below should have been disseminated by every diocese to survivors so if you haven’t heard about it challenge them. It could well be tucked away in some newsletter noone looks at but equally the dioceses don’t have to share it because the NST have no authority to require it. However the church cannot then call itself an equal opportunities employer if not everyone has had an equal opportunity to have the information.
National Redress Scheme Victim and Survivor Working Group Victim or Survivor Representative – Pathways | Pathways (churchofengland.org)
The abuse suffered by diocesan survivors is increasingly hidden and increasingly serious as the National church pulls away from dioceses to present its shiny, wholesome face to the world and diocesan survivors are increasingly treated by leading national clergy as the troublesome scum that swirl around in their peripheral vision.
Hear, Hear.
I know about the vacancy from my survivor network, but was not notified of it either by the diocese handling my complaint, or by the NST who are also dealing with it.
Re the Lead Bishop, I suggested to the Archbishop of York last September that he ought to have no responsibilities other than Lead Bishop for Safeguarding, and be of diocesan status. My reasoning is that with so many survivors and victims, and complex church structures evolving, it’s a full-time job; and a suffragan is too easily ignored or dominated by more senior bishops. I doubt if Abp Cottrell is able to make this happen by himself, but it needs to be done.
Yep, I’ve never heard of this, either.
Great only know from a survivor network. Heard nothing from the Diocese despite recent contact.
Gilo has done a huge amount of work in helping the Church to set up the ISS and plan for the Redress Scheme. We all owe him a debt of gratitude – including the National Church.
Thank you. But others have done more work than I have on the Redress. I think I can legitimately lay claim to the groundwork that led to the Interim Scheme.
Point of correction – the Simon Stanley who works for Church in Parliament is not the same Simon Stanley, manager of the Redress Scheme. There are two Simon Stanleys on the payroll. It’s an easy mistake, and I made it too at first, until the parliamentary Stanley pointed out to me that he had nothing at all to do with any redress scheme. The Redress Stanley has not previously worked within the Church as far as I’m aware.
Strong comment from first poster #churchtoo. Sadly what you outline, along with other commenters, is all too common in some dioceses. Soundbites unmatched by reality. If it’s who I think it is – that Bishop has form. It will take a decade for the paradigm shift to run across the Church’s senior diocesan layer. This is a painful truth, but it is one that is inescapable. Much daylight and attendent acute embarrassment will be required in some quarters before we see the broken culture redeemed. I’m often astonished at how some of these senior figures think they can get away with bad behaviour and jagged response – but they seem to get away with it for now. There is still very little accountability and ownership of responsibility.
Thank you Gilo for the warning that it will take time. I remain astonished that although my Bishop will answer to the Makin enquiry, he can still get away with his own misconduct and that of his Diocese in a current case. Even to the extent of being sent solicitors letters warning me of further police action should I write to Diocesan Officers or clergy after I wrote to Trustees of the Board to complain. Not a single response from the Trustees so far. …Perhaps they are receiving solicitors letters too.
Thank you for your work on the ISS – I will look this up now I know about it.
What do you mean by ‘has form’? This isn’t familiar language to me.
‘Has form’ is an expression meaning ‘has done similar in the past’. I think the idiom comes from racing, where a horse’s performance in previous races is studied to judge it’s likely performance in future. The police also use it of criminals and their records.
I didn’t put that superfluous apostrophe in! Autocorrect needs to learn some grammar.
It certainly does! Mine is heading for being disabled!
Hi #churchtoo
“has form” = approx, he’s been there before. Done unto others as he has unto you.
For further info on the ISS message Tim Bonnett direct. He’s the secretary of the Scheme and can advise on what you need to do. It’s advisable to get an advocate who can help sift through economic needs and lay out clearly and fully what the needs are and show evidence. It’s also good to lay out the other aims – in my case for example I am still seeking and expecting full apology and repentance from those who played a dishonest PR circus with the Elliott Review into my case. Those who blanked vital and necessary questions. These apologies are still outstanding. But it’s important to have such things on one’s list of aims given to the Support Panel so they can see the extent of repentance required from senior figures.
Thanks Gilo, that’s really helpful.
The lack of accountability, basic empathy and truthfulness, and total failure to take action at every level has really shocked me.
The racism, homophobia and misogyny also.
I guess the church’s ploy is currently to pass you from pillar to post, failing to listen or take action or for anyone to take responsibility, to disinform and obfuscate, gaslight you and smear your reputation, treat you like you are the one in the wrong for insisting on truth, accountability and safeguarding – until you become exhausted in the hopes that you give up. When you realise how rotten the wood is, from the person who committed the original offense right through to the top it does beg the question whether you can salvage anything from such an institution.
Mary is right in saying that its the total failure to act and offer support by the church that’s often more difficult to deal with than the original issues raised.
I was put on an nhs waiting list for counselling within a week of the hate incident. The health service is overwhelmed anyway, but with the pandemic at one point there were 800 people on the waiting list for counselling last year in the area of the city where i live. I put this in writing to the diocese but was still refused counselling support from them.
You get 8 counselling sessions, and i did have these at the end of last year and beginning of this, my counsellor was great but it is a very time limited support that can be offered which is why i think the diocese should have offered professional counselling support as a minimum, given what happened
Thanks Gilo, that’s really helpful.
The lack of accountability, basic empathy and truthfulness, and total failure to take action at every level has really shocked me.
The racism, homophobia and misogyny also.
I guess the church’s ploy is currently to pass you from pillar to post, failing to listen or take action or for anyone to take responsibility, to disinform and obfuscate, gaslight you and smear your reputation, treat you like you are the one in the wrong for insisting on truth, accountability and safeguarding – until you become exhausted in the hopes that you give up. When you realise how rotten the wood is, from the person who committed the original offense right through to the top it does beg the question whether you can salvage anything from such an institution.
Mary is right in saying that its the total failure to act and offer support by the church that’s often more difficult to deal with than the original issues raised.
I was put on an nhs waiting list for counselling within a week of the hate incident. The health service is overwhelmed anyway, but with the pandemic at one point there were 800 people on the waiting list for counselling last year in the area of the city where i live. I put this in writing to the diocese but was still refused counselling support from them.
You get 8 counselling sessions, and i did have these at the end of last year and beginning of this, my counsellor was great but it is a very time limited support that can be offered which is why i think the diocese should have offered professional counselling support as a minimum, given what happened
to clarify that, I waited 9 months for the 8 sessions of NHS counselling. In the meantime i was refused this support by the diocese
I too waited some months for trauma therapy. As you say the number of sessions may not be enough and I remained traumatised in the meantime. However this was much better than waiting for the Diocese to do nothing. Even my request for pastoral care was turned down in an email by the DSA. The Bishop investigating my cdm arranged pastoral care as soon as he became involved. The respondent made a partial admission.
Thanks for putting me straight about Simon Stanley, Gilo, you saved him from an ear bashing from me.
It really is disgraceful how most dioceses do not seem to be disseminating information as requested by the NST, not only the redress scheme (I have a copy of the letter they sent to all dioceses) and the ISS but also about survivor representation on the ISB.
I have suggested there needs to be a central forum managed by the NST where they can place information directly without survivors having to rely on dioceses because the real reason dioceses don’t disseminate information is because they don’t want, or don’t know how to engage with survivors and want to manage their reputation, which is at complete variance to what is said nationally.
I’m not an Anglican although I have been deeply involved in both an Anglican Chaplaincy and a Diocese. I have learnt much about the internal workings of the CofE over the last few years. Hardly anything that I have heard is to the credit of the Church. Indeed, every week things get worse. Faithful Christians are being let down by evidently unChristian character of those at the administrative centre. How much longer can the CofE survive?
Child sex abuse case at Lambeth, anyone? Maybe they could give advice to CofE survivors.
I don’t do Twitter but thank you Gilo for putting the Church Times article about the Southwark diocese vicar Stephen Kuhrt on your twitter page.
It is so disgraceful that a man who was trying to do the right thing should be treated in this way and yet I have to go to a meeting with the safeguarding people from Southwark next week to explain why I am upset that they have moved my abuser just down the road from me with no disciplinary action being taken against him.
Why am I doing a Lessons Learned Review if they can’t actually learn lessons! Pointless!!
Thanks Trish. Yes, the way the Southwark whistleblower has been treated is disturbing. He made some errors, but he’s really paying for them. Can’t help feeling there was a much better way to respond to him, especially as he’d previously faced a wall of silence in the diocese and the NST. The Church really is in a ragged mess in many dioceses.
Good luck next week. That sounds a bad situation and I hope they take it seriously. There’s a newly appointed DSA in the diocese.
The comments beneath this article make for depressing reading and indicate that little has changed in some dioceses over the past five or six years.
So many of us have found ourselves up against this tactic of ‘fog and blank’ where one is suspended in a vacuum of silencing. There seems no place to go to with complaints. If you try the NST they are unable to deal with dishonesty or bad response or corruption. They dwell in boxes and I suspect collapse in a heap of cognitive dissonance when presented with discomforting realities outside of those boxes. And significantly, they have no narrative wisdom or institutional wisdom so one is dealing with the equivalent of a local authority department, rather than ‘the Church’. If you go to the chair of the NSP, survivors have found they get nowhere. The lights are on, but nobody’s home! The chair is deferential to Bishop culture, and anyway her role is restricted to a couple of days a month.
So where to go? What can you do?
My advice from experience would be to write the flow of events and non-responses and send to the lead bishop and copy to others. (Meg Munn, Zena Marshall, Local DSAs, etc) They may not do much, but at least it gives a clearer picture of the extent of widespread culture change, structural reform, and personal transformation required. If bishops are still blanking and deploying other standard tricks from the past, I think it’s very legitimate to bring this to the attention of lead bishops.
It’s very costly, but like others I’ve only felt able to get anywhere at all by trying to drive a coach and horses through this structure, exposing the dishonesty and corruption as much as possible. We’ll never expose it all. Too many bodies are buried, especially in Church House (pictured at the top of the article). In the process you get branded ‘persistent and vexatious’. So we turned that into badges which we wore at the CoE National Safeguarding Summit to further expose the hypocrisy. There should be a handbook on how to stand up to the power of an institution and floor it using its own clunking weight. It feels like a form of martial art! In some ways I hope Letters to a Broken Church was a sort of handbook.
But it will take more books, more revelations, more stories of the power of silencing to bring about the deep change of culture necessary to transform this Church and its senior layer and its diocesan structures. It’s a decade long process. And has already taken two or three decades.
Gilo, I thoroughly agree, and it is even more depressing when you remember that the survivors posting here are just the tip of the iceberg. But do take heart. If it wasn’t for you and others who have complained before me, I would not be able to pursue my complaint through the various convoluted processes and not be able to point to current regulations. It makes a difference when you can say to national safeguarding and the panel that for instance in my case, my Bishop has not followed guidelines, neither has the DSA,my former vicar and my new Rector. Although it is still unsafe for me to go to my parish church independently after three years of protests and complaints, including threats and legal action taken against myself and my husband in two separate court cases, I feel it has made some difference in the background. As you say it is necessary to write to all these people and make sure everyone is aware. When Bishop Sowerby would not reply to my email pointing out that my past case review was carried out by the same person who wrote the arrangements, I wrote to Zena. When she replied he was independent as he had not worked for The chutch, I pointed out several times his four jobs for the church which included advisor to the safeguarding panel and now safeguarding advisor to the Lead Bishop. I have to say I am still waiting for an independent reviewer, but I will never get one if I don’t complain and continue to complain. The Diocesan solicitors (the same firm of which the Registrar is the senior partner) wrote complaining that my complaint had been going on for three years and was taking up a lot of Diocesan time and resources. To which I smartly replied that the Diocesan Bishop is still not, after three years, following national guidelines. I know from making a sar that the Lead Bishop has been told this is the case and Meg Munn is aware. It is because all the convoluted processes are in place that I have been able to pursue my complaint. Centimetre by centimetre things are moving. We will look back one day and be able to see what has been achieved. Yes it is deeply depressing at times and terribly sad to know the church is currently still enabling abuse to go on because of inaction and disinformation, but progress has been made by you and others. One day people will look back on the struggle and be grateful. I certainly am grateful to you, Graham and others because you have made it easier for me. Thank you Gilo.
I think social media has helped a lot in exposing the church for what it is but also in making survivors feel less alone and more connected to a greater group of people experiencing the same as them.I take comfort from your Twitter page Gilo and this blog, things I never had years ago. Being on the autistic spectrum having those type of connections are really important to me because they don’t feel threatening.
I think each survivor makes a difference whether they know it or not and the church certainly won’t tell them they are making a difference but I think more clergy understand the impact of abuse and are less afraid of engaging with it.
There is reason to be positive in a small way perhaps. Don’t give up Gilo, if you don’t update your Twitter page for a couple of days I worry. I have enough to worry about without that, so keep going, you are doing great!