Third in a series of guest articles detailing the unhappy situation in the Church of England with regard to its failures in the management of Safeguarding.

By Martyn Percy

Part 3 Lies and Damned Lies

Trust and confidence in the Archbishops’ Council and National Safeguarding Team is broken beyond repair. The statements made on safeguarding and issued by both Archbishops, senior staff and Lead Bishops seem designed only mislead both church and public. Yet ordinary members of the church seem to be powerless in the face of the lack of accountability and competence over the ways in which safeguarding policy and practice is being operated.

Recently, the Archbishop of York was found to have deliberately lied to General Synod over progress on reviews and the closure of the ISB. Victims of abuse are now writing to their MPs and calling out the deceptions, incompetence and cover-ups. In a short series of five extracts of letters sent to Members of Parliament, the case for root and branch reform is set out.

These short extracts detail the deceptions fed to General Synod, the wider Church of England and general public. On the scales of justice, we find that statements from either of the Archbishops cannot be trusted and have little weight. Furthermore, little, if anything, that the Archbishops’ Council says to General Synod about safeguarding is likely to be true.  The scales of justice can no longer be balanced, and victims are now calling upon Parliament to intervene as a matter of urgency.

In five brief extracts taken from letters to MPs, the issues now being put to Parliament are carefully set out, and the call for independent statutory regulation of church safeguarding is made. Victims of abuse and injustice have no confidence in the Church of England’s leadership being able or willing to address the abuses it continues to perpetrate. Only external legal independent intervention can right these wrongs, and finally put a complete stop to all of the continuing injustices that the Church of England’s safeguarding policies and practices perpetuate.

We write in relation to an issue that has comparable seriousness to that of the plight of the sub-postmasters and the Post Office scandal. In 5^th July 2024, members of the General Synod gathered at the University of York. The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, spoke to give his presidential address, which are on the record. But before doing so, he made the following statement, publicly to Synod, off the record: 

“Just before giving the address, Synod, I’d like to make a small correction to the record. Since the last meeting of the General Synod, and following publication of the Wilkinson Report, it has come to my attention that when I spoke in the ISB debate at the July Synod in 2023, I mistakenly said that the decision of the Archbishops’ Council to terminate the contracts of the two remaining members of the ISB was unanimous.

In fact the Wilkinson Report states, of those voting 11 voted in favour, four voted against, four chose not to vote. I’m sure we will all remember, those of us who were here, it was a heated and difficult session. I spoke incorrectly and since it has been pointed out to me I wanted to apologise and put the record straight.”

This is what he said in July 2023, answering a question from Synod member Robert Thomson, from the Diocese of London:

“I think I just want again to reiterate something that I said earlier: the decision that was taken, painful though it was, was taken because we believe, in the medium term, it will be the best way of providing what the Church needs in terms of scrutinising and overseeing the safeguarding of the whole Church in its ministry to everyone. But this was a collective decision, and it was a unanimous decision. As I think has come out, there may have been some disagreements around timings, because this was a sensitive issue, but they were not disagreements about the decision itself.”

It is easy to misspeak when you are speaking off the cuff in answer to a question you were not expecting. But the questions followed a scripted, prepared and rehearsed presentation by some members of the Archbishops’ Council, including Stephen Cottrell.

This is what he said in his introductory remarks and presentation in July 2023, and well before the session could be described as “heated and difficult”:

“I will make a few final comments at the end of this short presentation before we open up for questions. But the other thing I want to emphasis is that we do take collective responsibility for this as the Archbishops’ Council. Yes, yes, we wish we weren’t here, but we have proceeded all along in the knowledge that we are working with people of good will and in the belief that we all want the same thing. But we acknowledge that we have failed to get there. And the decisions we took in getting here were unanimous.”

Questions about the disbanding of the ISB were first formally raised at the Synod during “question time” on Friday 7^th July 2023. In a supplementary question to the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, Sam Margrave from Coventry asked:

“Your response says that it was the decision of the Archbishops’ Council and not the two Archbishops personally. As a statement of fact, how did the Presidents vote on this issue at Archbishops’ Council?”

Why was the Archbishops’ Council so determined to portray the decision as unanimous? That has not been explained. The claims began in a June 2023 paper from the Archbishops’ Council’s Secretary General, William Nye, to members of the General Synod. The paper, GS Misc 1341, was penned to provide background to the decision ahead of the “heated and difficult” session the following month. In it, he writes: “It is the considered judgment of the council, as a whole, that it is necessary to reset the process in order to get to the destination.”

Since disbanding the ISB, the Archbishops’ Council has spent more than one million pounds of charitable funds to defend its actions, including commissioning two reports from lawyer Sarah Wilkinson into the “creation, work and termination” of the ISB”; and by Professor Alexis Jay, the former Chair of IICSA – the statutory Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse – which found appalling behaviour by Church of England officialdom, into how an independent safeguarding structure for the Church of England should be established and how it should operate.

Sarah Wilkinson’s report sets out the vote in Archbishops’ Council on the decision to disband the ISB. Rather than being unanimous, 11 members of the Council voted to scrap the ISB; four voted against; and another four abstained. So why the continuing insistence by the Archbishops’ Council and its staff that the decision was unanimous? In his apology, Stephen Cottrell sought to explain his “speaking incorrectly” on the heated and difficult nature of the session in which he spoke. This, however, does not stand the test of scrutiny, and must be regarded as deliberate deceit.

First, he made the comments twice: (a) in his pre-prepared and scripted opening comments; and (b) in answer to a question.  Second, it echoed the comments from William Nye that the decision was that of the Archbishops’ Council “as a whole”. Third, following Justin Welby’s comments that both archbishops wanted to wait before a decision to disband the ISB, the Archbishops’ Council’s communications staff proactively briefed the media to say that the decision was unanimous. This was untrue, and all members of the Archbishops’ Council knew that to be the case. None spoke up.

In setting out why he was “correcting the record”, he said that it had come to his attention that he had misspoken, “following the last meeting of the General Synod and following the publication of the Wilkinson Report.” The Wilkinson Report was published in December 2023. Since then, there was a meeting of the General Synod in February 2024. So why has it taken until now, a year later, for Stephen Cottrell to realise that he had misled the Synod?