by Anonymous
An occasional series looking at how ordinary words and terms have been redefined in the Church of England (CofE). Others in the series to look out will feature mutual flourishing, vulnerable adult, pastoral care, equality, collegiality, mission, appropriate, growth and accountability. And of course, the term ‘safeguarding’. This week, we take a look at ‘independent’.
Readers of this blog may have a fond recollection of the launch of The Independent newspaper in 1986. It was memorable for many reasons. This was the first broadsheet newspaper to be launched in the UK for 112 years. The founders of the newspaper – dissatisfied with the ding-dong battles between Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch slugging it out in circulation figures, scoops and advertising revenue – sought to establish a newspaper free of mogul-ownership.
One of the more striking features of the newspaper was its marketing, with Paul Arden and Tim Mellors leading the team at Saatchi & Saatchi responsible for creating the advertising campaign. Who can forget the giant billboard posters: “It is. Are you?”. Just four words, and then the title of the newspaper. As zeitgeist captions go, hard to beat.
Yet the Archbishops’ Council have rubber-stamped the appointment of Meg Munn as the new chair of the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB). Munn takes up post this month. This comes at a delicate moment in the gestation of the ISB. The two board members, Jasvinder Sanghera MBE and Steve Reeves CBE, have recently issued a number of statements and reports stressing the need for the ISB to become an authentically independent body. You’d think that request for independence would be granted? Think again.
The Archbishops’ Council has responded by imposing Ms. Munn as the new Chair. She already sits on or chairs other CofE safeguarding panels. She is not independent. Moreover, more than fifty survivors have written to the ISB to protest. They do not have confidence or trust in Ms. Munn. The likely incontinence between the NST, NNSP, NSSG and ISB is now a certainty. There is no proper data-related ISA (Information Sharing Agreement) in place. Anything communicated to Ms. Munn in one forum cannot avoid leakage into another.
The Archbishops’ Council don’t care a jot about any of this, because when you dominate an institution and its culture, words mean what you say they mean. Take a word like ‘independent’. It means ‘free from outside control; not depending on another’s authority’ (e.g., “the study is totally independent of central government”). But this is not the definition applied by the Archbishops and most bishops. In their case, ‘independent’ means “it wasn’t me that did or decided this: it was s/he, her/him, they/them…but they came to the same conclusion as me, and honestly I did not influence their decision…and they are not me, so they are independent”. In other words, ‘independent’, in episcopal hands, means a separate person agreeing with a decision the bishop has already made.
In case you doubt this Orwellian, Kafkaesque and Lewis Carroll Dictionary World, you may need to remind yourself that the CofE has no written conflict of interest policy. That is partly because “thoughts and prayers for you at this difficult time”, “we have offered pastoral care” and “it was a difficult decision, but I can’t comment further or give my reasons” are what are usually substituted for truth and justice in the CofE. Time and time again.
The last thing your average bishop wants is any independent scrutiny, external accountability or regulation. God forbid! The CofE is a large unregulated body, and in a literal sense, a law unto itself. Employment law, gender, discrimination, pay and conditions – all testify to a culture that works with its own standards (which would be unlawful outside the CofE) Having its own system of ecclesiastical law means it can (almost) get away with murder.
Well, certainly a few suicides – which in any secular body or organisation would prompt a public inquiry, much soul-searching and several sackings – but barely causes a ripple in the CofE. So, after the tragic gas-lighting of Fr. Alan Griffin and which led to his suicide, the senior diocesan officials carry on regardless, safe in the knowledge that any ‘lessons learned review’ will have terms of reference set by the accused, and be conducted by those whose main concern is to protect the reputation and optics of those who might be criticised. This is a serious pathology within an institution, this is an advanced case of Truth Decay.
Of course, it is true that a term like ‘independent’ can be used in a rather pliable way. My local coffee shop is ‘independent’, by which it means it is not a branch of Costa, Starbucks and the like. But my local independent coffee shop has three branches. Next door to the independent coffee shop is the independent bakery – it has seven outlets. OK, it is not exactly Greggs, I grant you. But if the bakery had 40-plus outlets, is this now an ‘independent chain’? The term ‘independent’ is a commercially-positioned identity. It connotes local, and not being owned by some faceless foreign conglomerate. It may even mean it makes its own pastries rather than buying them in bulk. Fair enough.
But when the CofE uses the term ‘independent’ in safeguarding, what does it mean? Is it “free from outside control and not depending on another’s authority”, or the more commercially local definition? No. Plainly, it is a PR term, and absolutely nothing remotely proximate to genuine independence.
Thus, the Diocesan Safeguarding Advisor (DSA) in your diocese will sometimes be referred to as independent. But they are paid by the Diocese, accountable to the Diocesan Board of Finance, work in Diocesan HQ, and ultimately be accountable to your bishop. (So, good luck with your complaint to the DSA about your bishop’s recent handling of X or Y…how is that investigation progressing? Seems a bit slow…and s/he’s not “stepped back from ministry” as required of all other clergy, pending outcomes…hmm, strange that, strange…).
Last year I wrote to both Archbishops to complain about the fact that the (then) Chair of the ISB, Maggie Atkinson, was not acting independently, and instead seemed to be conducting her work in a manner that was partial and protectionist of existing power interests, including church lawyers, senior officials and PR agents. The Archbishops waived away these objections in their first sentence: “we obviously have a different definition of what ‘independent’ means”.
They went on to explain that the way they used the term had to be qualified, and to factor in that as the Archbishops’ Council were paying for the ISB, yes, of course, to some extent they were inevitably controlling it, and had authority over it. But the ISB was still ‘independent’, they maintained – in a way that one might argue the Isle of White is unattached to England. Or I am independent from my partner.
Or the Basingstoke branch of Costa is from the ones in Basildon, Bicester and Barnet. I mean, those Costa branches are not physically joined together, are they? They have different staff, variable turnovers of income, dissimilar customer profiles – so in a sense they are independent of each other, aren’t they?
Put like this, then pretty well everything in the CofE is independent of everything else in the CofE, and that is also sort of true, isn’t it? Parishes are independent of each other. Clergy too. Dioceses, when it comes to questions of maternity leave, housing allowances, moving expenses, employment…well, yes, they’re all independent of their neighbouring dioceses. You see, having your own definition of words really can work awfully well in certain kinds of cultures and kleptocracies (i.e., 1984, Handmaid’s Tale, etc).
So, when the Lead Bishop for Safeguarding asserted at General Synod that the ISB was ‘independent’ he was not lying. He was just using the word in a rather unconventional way that is different to the rest of the population.
When IICSA demanded independent oversight of safeguarding in the CofE, it was of course left to the Secretary General of the Archbishops’ Council, Mr. William Nye, to properly interpret and translate the term ‘independent’ into a concept that those inside the CofE could work with. Because if ‘independent’ was used and deployed in the conventional sense in the CofE, then bishops would lose power and authority in safeguarding, and be open to challenge. IICSA surely didn’t mean that to happen, did they?
So here are three clusters of questions to ponder the next time you hear your bishop, DSA or some senior official in the CofE say there has been an “independent investigation” into some safeguarding matter or other. Just ask yourself the obvious questions, and put yourself in the position of being on the receiving end of the implementation. Ask yourself if you are comfortable with the standard of truth and justice operating. Or, feel rather betrayed?
The Set-up:
Who made the complaint? What do you know about the accusation? Were there other charges, victims or complaints? Who set the terms of reference for the investigation? Who paid for these to be set? Did you have any input into this set up, either as a victim, witness or as accused? Is there anyone involved at this stage who has a conflict of interest? How would you even know, or challenge this?
The Execution:
Is the legal firm advising on the investigation process the same one that the Diocese and the Bishop have? Do you have any legal representation, or even legal rights? Is the investigator regulated or accountable, and if so, how and to whom? What evidence is going to be considered? How was the scope of investigation communicated to you?
The Outcome:
When a decision is made, what rights do you have as a victim or as the accused? If you discover that there have been false witnesses, or that evidence has been redacted, supressed or co-ordinated, can you do anything? Is your Bishop in this acting as your pastor, prosecutor, judge, jury, employer – all of these, or maybe none of them? Can you trust this system in which there appears to be no accountability?
In conclusion, it is these sorts of questions the independently-minded Jasvinder Sanghera and Steve Reeves were beginning to grapple with. Whatever the shortcomings of the nascent ISB – largely attributable to the abysmal resourcing and obstruction from its parent body the Archbishops’ Council – Sanghera and Reeves at least understand independence, and also what a problem conflicts of interest are for the destruction of trust and confidence.
This explains the imposition of Ms. Munn as the new chair. She is in post to remind the rest of the CofE that ‘independent’ is a meaningless term in a church run by autocratic and unaccountable leadership. If Ms. Munn had any decency, integrity and probity, she’d refuse to take on the role. Those who have imposed her are banking on her toughing it out. That, at a stroke, renders the concept of independence void, and simply leads to a total incontinence with the data and lives of victims, survivors and complainants already abused through CofE safeguarding.
As a postscript, we note that The Independent was eventually bought by Tony O’Reilly’s Independent News and Media Group, before being sold to the Russian oligarch Alexander Lebedev in 2010. Lebedev, like Putin, is a former KGB officer. Lebedev also owns a newspaper with Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2017, Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel bought a large stake in The Independent.
In theory, The Independent could run a critical story on Lebedev, Gorbachev or Abuljadayel. But it doesn’t seem likely, does it? You might then ask yourself if it is not a little impertinent, and indeed slightly misleading, to be the owner of a newspaper called The Independent?
We are back deep into CofE safeguarding terrain here. ‘Independent’ is a commercial and marketing-PR term as much as it is a legal one. The Archbishops’ Council hope you will believe they are using the term as a legal or regulatory word. In truth, they are selling you a huge con: it is only their marketing-PR term.
As I say, once you realise that the DSA works for your bishop, it isn’t going to be easy to raise your concerns about episcopal safeguarding conduct. The ISB might have been a useful avenue that opened up an alternative route. Ms. Munn’s appointment puts a huge roadblock firmly in the way. The advertising campaign for The Independent once teased “it is, are you?”. The CofE, with Munn’s appointment, shows that it has its own secret advertising campaign well underway. But there are no teases here. “Independent Safeguarding? Certainly not! Why in God’s name would we?”.
Wasn’t it Lewis Carol’s Humpty Dumpty who said, ” A word means what I mean it to mean”?
Indeed, EA, but then Alice goes on to say to Humpty:
“The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all’.”
In other words, the bishops intend to remain ‘master’, and ‘independence’ can go hang.
Many thanks for this excellent piece. The authorities have evidently taken note of the declaration made by Ms Sanghera and Mr Reeves in connection with the Percy case, and have made the following announcement: https://www.churchofengland.org/media-and-news/press-releases/independent-safeguarding-board-statement-archbishops.
In other words, they are going to double down on what they believe ‘independence’ means, which is at significant variance with the definition applied by most sentient human beings. Query whether this statement was intended to dress down Ms Sanghera and Mr Reeves, albeit obliquely, for having perhaps ‘stepped out of line’.
The ISB Terms of Reference, most recently confirmed in March this year, are at https://independent-safeguarding.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/ISB-Terms-of-Reference-March-2023.pdf
Among other things, they state
The Church has put the ISB in place to do work it cannot then frustrate.
This turned out to be false. The Archbishops’ Council frustrated the ISB inquiry into the Percy affair; in its Annual Report https://independent-safeguarding.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Independent-Safeguarding-Board-Annual-Progress-Report-2022-23.pdf the ISB stated “The ISB were later informed that the Archbishops’ Council decided at their January 2023 meeting that the review should now be led by another person.”
Phase 1 ISB has three members. All are independent of all Church bodies.
This has turned out to be false. As is well known, Meg Munn is chair of the NSP, a Church body, and a position which gives her a clear conflict of interest. It is simply not possible to maintain that she is “independent of all Church bodies”.
The Archbishops’ Council ratifies Board appointments. Each is appointed following this process:
• Public advertisement of vacancies.
• The use of expert recruiters to ensure a wide field.
• Formal written application through curriculum vitae and a statement of support
• Formal interview by a panel including independent safeguarding expert(s), a
representative of a Diocesan Safeguarding team, and at least one survivor.
This has turned out to be false. There is no proviso for “interim” appointments to be made in any different process. The appointment was made by AC in direct contravention of the ToR and of the wishes of the ISB members.
There are two disturbing forms of dishonesty in modern politics, and I’m not sure which is the more destructive. Both are superbly analysed by George Orwell.
The first is deliberate dishonesty as an exercise of power. The tyrant makes the victim acquiesce in, or even repeat, statements that both know to be untrue. The victim’s sense of self is diminished and thereby rendered more subservient and more likely to acquiesce again.
The second is uncoupling statement from any sense of reality. A form of words is deployed merely as a tool to achieve a given end in a given situation without reference to its truth as related to any objective situation. Once utterance has become decoupled from reality, discussion becomes impossible.
They happen in that sequence. First intercession, providence, a normal sort of eschatology, the spiritual gifts in connection with virtues, a view of meanings in Holy Scriptures, got discredited by malpractice, then they got “seen to be” irrelevant. Any genuine charismatics who complained of manufactured sensation and induced mannerisms precisely because we saw the world needs the real and entire Jesus and Holy Spirit thing, are now “satisfactorily shown” (by ecclesiologists) to be the dismissive ones.
Ensure that wrongs are addressed wrongly, because unlimited damage causing places limits on damage limitation.
Good one Michael.
Just picked up the ‘CofE has no written Conflict of Interest policy’. There now is one – at least for Core Groups – in the safeguarding e-manual: https://www.churchofengland.org/safeguarding/safeguarding-e-manual/section-1-purpose Some individual dioceses have written conflict of interest policies.
However, like most other CofE policies its existence hasn’t been very well communicated. I only know it’s there because I happened to stumble across it recently while looking for something else.
I have it on very good authority that this conflict of interest provision was only instituted following the uproar over Martyn Percy’s core group. The chair had neglected to ask members to declare possible conflicts of interest — and two members of the core group were complainants in the case.
Prior to this new policy, I’d had it on equally good authority that there was no conflict of interest policy in CofE safeguarding at all.
The Church cites ‘conflict of interest’ when it suits them, whether or not there is any basis for this claim.
As a fairy newly elected churchwarden I have been invited to safeguarding training. ‘Core Groups’ seem to be quite important. I thought I should try to understand what they are.
My understanding is that they are an ‘independent’ judge and jury, appointed by the diocese. Except that the ‘judge’ appears to have no training in how to do the job, and the jury members are, as you would expect straight off the street. However, the church being a small and enclosed body it would be impossible to set up a jury with no connections with those it is investigating.
Also, I believe that the ‘group’ is not set up to establish ‘the facts’ or ‘guilt’ and yet is expected to make recommendations for dealing with the ‘accused’.
Have I completely misunderstood, or is it as Kafkaesque as this?
Yup! Hi, Roger. Welcome. And do enjoy your new rôle.
Yes, it’s that Kafkaesque.
And that’s not all. A core group was eventually set up to look into my complaint, decades after I’d first made it. I was asked, for the umpteenth time, to re-supply all the details (survivors will know how wearing it is to keep having to relate the same traumatic stuff over and over again). I didn’t hear any more for months, so eventually I enquired what progress had been made. Only then was I told they hadn’t proceeded, because my alleged assailant didn’t have PTO. But they’d known that at the outset, and had explicitly said they were going to conduct a core group anyway!
From the Church Times, yesterday 24 May: “Independent Safeguarding Board serves dispute resolution notice to Archbishops’ Council — Board members say Council has frustrated their work and threatened their independence”
I have no idea what a ‘Dispute Resolution Notice’ is, but I wish them luck. It’s a brave move. They at least seem to understand what independence and integrity are.
I’ve no idea what it is either. As you point out the ISB members are showing the leadership in safeguarding which is sorely lacking in our Arcbishops and Bishops. I thank them for taking a stand and listening to their consciences. As many current survivors are aware, the Church still places repuational management first, and survivors are still treated as trouble makers, with threats and various delaying tactics used against them. It seems that the ISB have been getting the same run around as survivors. It will now not be credible for our leaders, however high their position, to claim that matters are mostly well on the safeguarding front, when the deliberate obstructiveness of the Church is being called out by the very safeguarding board set up by the Church. I think this is a watershed moment. I just fear that expensive lawyers will once again do battle with the only people with integrity who actually care about the safety of vulnerable worshippers. As to your previous post Janet, if you wanted to invent a system which retraumatises and wears down survivors, look no further than the Church of England.
This will shed light and assist about the action taken by the two remaining original members of the ISB:
https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/isb-writes-formal-dispute-resolution-notice/
Thanks, Rowland. I get what the complaint is about; I don’t understand what kind of procedure it is or what is its legal status.
The formal notice has yet to be published. The link includes a statement issued by the ISB members who have indicated that they will issue updates.
Dispute resolution can involve negotiation, mediation and, in the last resort, litigation. Ideally, the object is to right the wrong without that last resort.
Dispute resolution procedures are usually specified by contract. I understand that the ISB members are legally contractors for the AC.
Yes, I understand that they are contractors, but obviously don’t have access to any relevant contract or other appointment documents. There are these ISB Operating Principles and Standing Orders:
https://independent-safeguarding.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Standing-Orders.pdf
Paragraph 6.2 seems to be a contradiction of the Church’s stance that the ISB was incapable of being sued by Martyn Percy, and indeed a court order was sought and obtained that Martyn Percy should pay the costs of his attempt to do so. The order for costs has since been waived, but in the face of the ISB’s own document there is, at best, a serious inconsistency between that and what happened.
It was, I believe, intended that the ISB should at some stage become a legally separate body and presumably that wording reflects that future aspiration rather than current reality. Of course publishing an incorrect set of Standing Orders is at best a blunder.
The fact that the ISB’s SOs, in a document said to have been approved by the ISB on 23 August 2022 (see para 10.1), states in para 6.2: “While any legal proceedings initiated by a third party are most likely to be brought against the Board as a whole…” cannot determine the legal status of the Board.
One of the arguments of counsel for the ISB (instructed by Plexus Law LLP) at the hearing before the District Judge on 28 October 2022 was that the ISB was not a legal entity capable of being sued: “The fact is here not only have proceedings been brought using the wrong procedure, they were brought against somebody that does not have legal capacity, and cannot be sued” (transcript, page 10), an argument repeated in paragraph 13 of the skeleton argument settled by different counsel for the putative appeal: “As an unincorporated association, ISB cannot be sued”. Martyn Percy’s principal argument for his appeal against the costs order was to ask how an order for costs could then be made in favour of a body that could not be sued – an interesting legal question that, now, will not be answered following the decision of Jasvinder Sanghera and Steve Reeves (as the only two ISB members at the time) to agree not to enforce the costs order. [The appeal, due to be heard on 13 April 2023, had been adjourned to a date to be fixed after the judge, His Honour Judge Stephen Murch, recused himself on the basis of a possible perceived bias having informed the parties that he had had dinner the evening before the hearing with the chief legal officer of the C of E.]
As ‘Unreliable Narrator’ says (below), it was intended that the ISB should become a separate body—what has been described as ‘phase two’—but the whole project now seems to be up in the air following the gauntlet thrown down to the Archbishops’ Council by the Dispute Notice served by Jasvinder and Steve on 24 May.
One of the reasons the whole ISB fiasco is that the Church’s approach to safeguarding is essentially disconnected from reality. If we read Meg Munn’s most recent blog on “Survivor Engagement” at https://chairnsp.org/2023/05/22/survivor-engagement/ it’s hard to believe that she is on the same planet as the other two members of the ISB. The approach adopted hitherto appears to be based on writing things on pieces of paper and hoping that this will somehow cause them to happen. This is, at best, magical thinking, and at worst, displacement activity.