In an earlier blog I spoke about the loss of memory that can befall an organisation where there is a rapid turnover of staff. Traditions and important memories of the past could be wiped out for all practical purposes if the new people were coming into post knew nothing of what used to go on. The ability to be ‘in the know’ about the past used to be a position of considerable power. Today, however, the internet makes it far less easy to bury old information. The power of knowing much of what was said or written is given to anyone who has determination to seek it out. Reviews, lessons learned reports and old committee meeting minutes can be scrutinised by anyone with the determination and the time.
We have, on this blog, recently given a great deal of space to a discussion of Church Core Groups. Some may be weary of this topic. Nevertheless, this blog is primarily about the way power is exercised in the Church. These Core Groups are vivid expressions of this Church power. The coercion and pressure that may be felt by those who are the target of such a group is considerable. Also, a Core Group can, when mismanaged or bungled, do extensive damage to the reputation of the Church at large. Current interest in Church Core Groups has been caused by the wide publicity given to the one investigating Dean Percy at Christ Church. Quite a lot has already been said about the conduct of this Group, but I need to revisit it once again since it interacts with another once widely reported Core Group, the one dealing with the case of Bishop George Bell. This was convened six years ago in 2014, but its findings and procedures were critiqued extensively in an independent Review by Lord Alex Carlile.
This Carlile Review was published in December 2017 and made several recommendations for the future conduct of such Groups. On Friday 17th July we read that there appears to have been an effort, according to the Church Times, belatedly to apply one of the stipulations of Carlile’s recommendations. This was to outlaw conflicts of interest in such a Group. On this occasion the NST has addressed one glaring example of such a conflict in the Percy Core Group and decreed a change in the composition of the members. Two of the Group members, who are publicly identified as complainants against the Dean, have ‘been removed’. With them present, it must have been impossible for the Group to act in an unbiased fashion. It was as though two members of the prosecution team were also serving on the jury.
Many of those serving the current Oxford Core Group are probably unaware of what was said by Carlile, but there are those still working for the Church at a senior level, who cannot be ignorant of what was in the 2017 Review. Alongside his extensive criticisms of the Bell Core Group, Carlile had a clear vision for such groups in the future and the way they should be managed. The criticisms made by his Review were harsh. The Review stated that the Church of England had established a ‘Core Group which failed to follow a process which was fair and equitable to both sides’. The muddles and confusions that marked the Bell Core Group process had led to a serious situation. It raised (and raises) questions about the competence of the Church of England’s structures and their capacity for integrity and fair dealing. The current Percy Core Group threatens to be another serious disaster for the Church even with the recent changes. Would a more detailed appreciation of Carlile’s suggestions have helped to avoid another crisis and even an utter discrediting of the entire Core Group process?
Looking at the 74 pages of the Carlile Review, we find that, at its heart, there is a story of a woman given the name of ‘Carol’. She claimed to have been sexually abused, when she was a child in the early 50s, by the internationally known Bishop of Chichester, George Bell. This had been disclosed to a subsequent Bishop, Eric Kemp in 1995. Nothing came of the complaint and in 2012, Carol, by now a pensioner, wrote again to Lambeth Palace about the matter. She no doubt believed that her story might receive more attention after the Jimmy Savile scandal broke. After a series of consultations, a Core Group to look at the complaint was convened in 2014. This would review Carol’s claim and make some recommendations about possible compensation.
Carlile’s critical Review was especially exercised by the fact that the Group appeared very ready to assume Carol’s testimony as factual. There seemed no appetite for subjecting it to any proper scrutiny or query. Even accepting the fact that Carol may have been sexually abused by someone, there were other possible interpretations, such as mistaken identity of the abuser or memory lapses. This led to the main criticism of the process by Carlile that even handedness had been absent in what was a quasi-legal process. Carlile repeated this point several times in the review in different ways. In his words: ‘I have concluded that the Church of England failed to institute or follow a procedure which respected the rights of both sides.’ In effect the Group treated the reputation of Bishop Bell as of no real importance. Although Bell died 62 years ago, there are remaining relatives and many others who remember him.
In a small way I have a personal interest in Bishop Bell. The last six months of his life were spent in Canterbury and I, as a twelve-year-old have some personal memories of him. There will also still be others who were teenagers in the Diocese of Chichester and were confirmed by him. His good name does matter to many people. The issue of Bell’s possible guilt is discussed in the Review, but it was not in Carlile’s brief to decide on the matter. But we can read into the text a certain sympathy for Bell’s cause when Carlile speaks of a ‘rush to judgement’ on the part of the Core Group members. He also discussed the way that, once the belief in Carol and her claim that her abuser was Bishop Bell became fixed in the minds of the Core Group members, no attempt was made to seek out corroborative evidence to back up or challenge Carol’s recollections. Bell had a living biographer, Andrew Chandler and there was also alive in his 90s a former chaplain of Bell’s who had been resident in Bell’s Palace at the relevant time. No attempt to speak to either man was made. Carlile was himself able to speak to the 92-year-old chaplain, Canon Carey, about his recollections of the period as well as the buildings where the abuses were supposed to have taken place.
The Carlile review of 2017 is, in summary, a telling critique of the Church of England and a guide telling us how not to run a Core Group. Carlile described the Bell Group as a ‘confused and unstructured process’. Clearly there was a lot of work needing to be done if the Church was planning to continue to serve the cause of justice and historical transparency, using this process.
At one point in the report, Carlile uses a small word which I find significant. The word is ‘oversteered’. Perhaps that was what had distorted the whole 2014/5 Bell Core Group process. In a vehicle, a small oversteer can cause a fatal crash. In the case of Bell’s Core Group, oversteer in the process of interpreting evidence caused irreparable harm to the reputation of a past hero of the Church. Why did such oversteer happen? We need to recall that 2015 while the group was doing its work, the newspapers were full of the Bishop Ball affair. Is it too fanciful to suggest that image advisers employed by the Church were anxious to write a narrative about the Church, showing it to be considerate for the interests of an elderly lady who had been abused and was seeking justice?
Can we detect in any way that the Core Group was being ‘managed’ to satisfy the needs of the Church communications department and its desire for good PR? Were the Archbishop and Bishop of Chichester making statements suggested to them by their highly remunerated reputation managers? If Carlile’s critical Review is pointing us in this direction, then it follows that similar pressures will also be at work in the 2020 Percy Group. Are Core Groups, in other words, subject to being managed to suit the purposes of the reputation launderers working for the Church? In the comments I made about Bishop Jonathan’s responses to questions at the recent Synod, I suggested that the management of safeguarding issues was being handed over to a team of lawyers. Such lawyers would be the ones seeking to defend the Church and protect its good name. Now, after reading the Carlile report again, I am left wondering whether it is in fact the power of reputation managers and communication departments that we see operating behind the scenes and making the decisions for our Church. If that is the case, then our Church will not be taking too seriously the cause of transparency, justice and truth. These and other Christian values like honesty and right dealing may only ever be paraded in public when they can serve the purposes of good PR!
This rereading of the Carlile report and the way that it revealed rampant ‘unconscious bias’, to quote from Martin Sewell’s question at last Synod, allows us to point once again to our ongoing concerns over the Percy Core Group. Conflicts of interest still abound there. Quite apart from the inappropriate placing of two complainants in the Group, there are the collusions we have pointed to before between firms of lawyers, reputation managers and those at Christ Church who have manipulated the Church and the NST to operate in their interests. If the incompetence of the Bell Core Group was a scandal, the sheer apparent malevolence at work in this present Percy Group is one which is driving out all pretensions to ethical behaviour and Christian values. We seem to be witnessing evil and corruption on a grand scale. Will the Church at the national level be able to rescue this situation and allow it to come through this appalling crisis?
Many thanks indeed for this, Stephen.
You mention the influence of PR managers. I suspect that we have the finance, legal, insurance and PR divisions or contractors within the Commissioners and other Church bodies working in an unholy symbiosis (I shall call them FLIPR – or Flipper! – for short). They are all focused on damage limitation and, together, they will be a formidable lobby whom few will dare contradict. It would take a moral figure of great authority to overbear such a lobby, and I suspect that, as most bishops these days are not so much figures of moral authority as administrators who do a bit of morality on the side, I doubt they would have the energy or inclination to oppose any recommendations emanating from FLIPR.
With respect to Carol, my misgiving is that the Church was dealing with alleged abuse stretching back more than 40 years in 1995 and nearly 70 years now. The risk of an unsafe ‘trial of the facts’ was therefore relatively high, allowing for the effluxion of time or the tendency for childhood memories to be distorted. Some SC readers might recall the fate of the War Crimes Bill in 1990-91. It was sponsored by Immanuel Jacobovits, and had the blessing of the then government. However, it was defeated in the Lords and had to be rammed through using the Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, to the consternation of Conservative right-wingers. In the Lords debates (see here, for example: https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/1990-06-04/debates/2d73a89c-ad1f-4005-996b-ef51d38561ba/WarCrimesBill) a recurrent theme of many of the speakers, including many distinguished lawyers like Hartley Shawcross – chief prosecutor at Nuremberg – was that prosecutions after a lapse of 45 years must be futile or unsafe. There has been only one successful prosecution, Anthony Sawoniuk (ex-SS). The Nazis made the fatal error of ensuring that their crimes were documented meticulously, so they were damned by their own efficiency. How much more difficult will it have been to determine safely that the person upon whose lap Carol was abused was or was not Bell.
Core groups may have a useful function if they are comprised of professionals. However, it seems that they are routinely representative of those whose concern for the victim is debauched by wider anxieties for the Church’s reputation, and it would appear that they can be a sounding-board for the interests of one party at the inevitable expense of another. Nor are they immune to the wider context in which they are conducted. The period 2012-17 was marked by an outcry over abuse in the wake of Savile (though based on legitimate claims to a good extent, it was also arguably a specimen of the crowd psychology first analysed by Charles Mackay in 1841). The Bell core group cannot have been immune to that.
What we need are core groups which are totally apart from the Church, which are staffed by credible professionals, who take dispassionate soundings from all parties.
Major effort, Stephen. Well done!
Core groups are ancillary to the House of Bishops’ Safeguarding Guidance 2017 (in reality the guidelines amount to regulations). They are intended to be an investigatory process in response to reports of safeguarding issues. They are not part of the CDM procedure although a failure to have due regard to them can lead to a CDM.
As pointed out on an earlier thread, the introduction to the 2017 Guidelines includes a statement that the Ecclesiastical Insurance Group has indicated that indemnity is conditional upon the Guidelines being followed.
Martin Sewell has pointed out (letter to The Church Times 15th July 2020) that the 2017 Guidelines have not been fully updated to incorporate Lord Carlile’s recommendations.
The following, quoted from Lord Carlile’s conclusions, may be useful in providing a picture of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s perception of how the case was handled:
“265. The Archbishop was kept updated intermittently about the case. Primarily, he said, Chichester was dealing with it. The number of allegations of sexual abuse within that diocese was ‘overwhelming’ – disproportionate to other areas. Covering things up was completely unacceptable. It had plagued the Church for years, is immoral, and had caused a loss [sic] of trouble. Consequently, there was an appalling mess that might be costly. Once the Bishop Bell decision was made, he felt passionately that the Church should be transparent. The press release had been drafted by the national director of communications, with the Chichester and national members of the Core Group able to comment on the drafting. Thus all were responsible and accountable for the impression left.”
Rowland: Re the role/jurisdiction of core groups, William Nye (Secretary General to the Archbishops’ Council) recently wrote this to me by way of explanation of their role:
“As you know, under HoB guidance core groups are essentially strategy groups; they don’t exercise powers. They are entitled under House of Bishops guidance to commission an investigation where a safeguarding concern or allegation comes to light in connection with a Church officer (much in the same way as in a different context employers often undertake internal grievance and disciplinary investigations before any decision is taken in order to ensure a fair process). They are an advisory body and make a recommendation.”
This begs the questions,(i) who filters the information said to constitute ‘a safeguarding concern or allegation’ and decides that it is not vexatious and is sufficiently prima facie cogent to warrant an investigation, and (ii) who then decides the composition of the core group, having regard to the Carlile guidance.
I thought that the answer to both (i) and (ii) was the National Safeguarding Team, but I don’t currently have ready access to the House of Bishops’ Guidelines to check details, and would be very happy to be corrected.
Lord Carlile in his recommendations at paragraph 21 said this:
“The Core Group should have, in addition to someone advocating for the complainant, someone assigned to it to represent the interests of the accused person” (etc.)
‘Someone’ suggests one person each as advocate.
I think the distinction in the case of the people removed from the Percy Core Group is that they were far too close to the action to be properly “advocating for the complainant”. Essentially at least one of them was the complainant.
The ‘National Safeguarding Team’ currently comprises 22 people: see https://www.churchofengland.org/safeguarding/promoting-safer-church/how-we-work-and-governance.
The issue, highlighted by the Percy case, is which individual is to carry out the triaging role – or, indeed, whether at present any such preliminary scrutiny of an allegation or information takes place. The Bishop of Huddersfield, Jonathan Gibbs, acknowledged that this was area requiring consideration when answering a supplementary question during the ‘virtual’ meeting of General Synod on 11 July 2020.
I agree with you that Alex Carlile’s recommendation, properly construed, is that there should be someone on the core group who is there specifically as advocate for the accused person / person under investigation. At present, this does not seem to be how Lord Carlile’s Review is being interpreted by the NST on the basis that his report was dealing specifically with how the Church should deal with allegations made against a deceased person.
I have tracked down the Bishops’ Guidelines – officially “Practice Guidance: Responding to, assessing and managing safeguarding concerns or allegations against church officers”, 2017. (There are 102 pages.)
In ‘ordinary’ cases (if there is such a thing) the core group is convened by the DSA (Guidance “First Response” p.25) but I recall reading that in this case the diocese was bypassed.
The reference to the DSA is qualified by these footnotes:
“30 If the concern arises in a church body other than a Diocese this will normally be via the Safeguarding lead in the church body that the concern or allegation arises. This could be via a Parish Safeguarding Officer, Cathedral Safeguarding Adviser, the safeguarding designated person in a religious community or the nominated safeguarding lead in a TEI.
“31 The only exception to this would be a situation, in relation to other church bodies who have a professional safeguarding adviser, where agreement has been reached about who is placed to lead on the Churches response. For instance where a cathedral has a paid professional safeguarding adviser or the nominated safeguarding lead in a TEI and the concern or allegation is against a church officer who is not ordained, licensed, authorised, commissioned or holding permission to officiate or have another diocesan or Parish role. In these situations the DSA should be kept informed of progress and outcome.”
I have to leave to others how any of this might apply in the unique and complex set-up of Christ Church. In reality, we know so few of the facts.
Here are extracts from Mandate Now’s review of HoB car crash policy (Core Groups / DSA’s and Insurance).
http://mandatenow.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CofE-Safeguarding-policy-analysis-270218.pdf
See :
Para 3 page 124
Para 3.1 page 126
Para 3.3 page 130
Footnote 44 page 132
Para 4.1.2 page 145. (Conflict between Abusee, DSA, and insurers)
The review is worth reading in full. No other review of such scope and detailed analysis has been carried out previously or since. The review was cited in evidence at IICSA by Richard Scorer.
In the introduction here
http://mandatenow.org.uk/church-of-england-safeguarding-is-dysfunctional-and-can-have-no-reliance-placed-upon-it-a-review-by-mandate-now/
MN states its view on these core groups:
“The role of ‘Core Groups’ appears to be an exercise in ‘mission creep’. Their interference in an incident is a real possibility for the reasons we state in our review. There is an absence of expertise and independence in the establishment of these ‘scratch teams’.”
Gilo,
Thank you so much for providing the link to the Mandate Now review. It especially interesting to see the delta between the Church’s position and MN’s understanding (which I take to be far more accurate) of what is necessary. As such, it makes for fascinating, if dispiriting, reading.
It is striking how much of the Church’s policy is written – as MN have noted – in the passive voice, and how much waffle/padding it includes.
Indeed, the cumulative impact of MN’s criticisms is such that I cannot help but think that the Church put out a policy in order to be seen to have a policy, and that its length (which MN notes is excessive and unnecessary) was in inverse proportion to the strength of its real commitment. So, it was put out partly, at least, for show and window dressing (and presumably to help EI in the event of claims), allowing the Church a considerable amount of wriggle room so that it could retain control over its own affairs and discipline.
In other words, it was about preserving the power and discretion of ecclesiastical authorities.
Thank you again.
I have quoted on the linked Thinking Anglicans thread about this the exact wording dealing with conflict of interest from the Bishops’ Guidance (pages 39 and 40). For the sake of brevity here, all that needs to be said is that the rule simply wasn’t followed.
Thanks Froghole for your astute comments as always.
MN picked up on the ‘omnipresence of EIG’. It would seem some of the policy was clearly formed with their benefit in mind.
Worth hearing Richard Scorer speak at IICSA on this review a year later – for his assessment of how much change to the policy had ensued as result:
https://audioboom.com/posts/7304479-iicsa-anglicanhearing-inquirycsa-richard-scorer-opening-statement-1-7-19-represents-numerou
I gather the Roman Catholic policy set was even more of an incomprehensible thicket … but have not seen it. Apparently it comprised about 70 pdf.s and would require the equivalent of numerous Ordnance Survey maps for any possible chance of navigation! It may have been cleaned up since then.
On the understanding that I don’t really know much about the process of how NST core groups start is there no room for mediation before this process? Mediation used to be and still is in some cases no better than core groups with little independence but to be fair to Melissa Caslake in my case she did not object to completely external mediators, selected from Yellow Pages and knowing nothing of church policy. My learning review attempts to look at that process as a way forward. Mediators who are highly skilled and have no particular interest in either side can work miracles and though obviously the Bell case would not have been suitable for this it sounds like others would. There is no way back from a core group, trust and relationships will be forever damaged whereas mediation seeks to maintain dialogue and heal, surely that is what the vision of the church should be.
Tell you what guys, this is getting more depressing by the minute. I suppose the fact that we’re all fighting is positive.