In the last couple of days an important decision from the Solicitors Regulation Authority concerning the CofE has appeared in the public domain. It is not a story recounting outrageous immorality on the part of a church leader, though the report does have a link with the late Bishop Peter Ball and his crimes. It recounts the unprofessional behaviour of a single individual who used to work as Registrar or chief legal officer for the Anglican Diocese of Gloucester. The officer concerned, Christopher Peak, has now seen his registration as a solicitor removed by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. This story has some importance in the wider relationships between the Church and the legal institutions of this country. Every member of the Church is, in a slight way, affected by the special legally enforceable rules that operate in the work of the national Church. There are certainly hundreds of professionals who are employed to oversee legal matters in the dioceses and at a national level. It is to be hoped that these qualified professionals will always give good service for the substantial sums of money that they earn to manage this aspect of church life.
At the heart of this legal story is not a decision or a court case. It is the account of a total absence, over a twenty-year period, of any challenge or legal questioning over a legal saga. The context of the case is the arrest and subsequent Caution of the then Bishop of Gloucester, Peter Ball for offences against young men. This part of the story is well-known. Having voluntarily agreed to vacate his see in 1992, Ball went on to an active retirement ministry for some twenty years. Eventually the case was re-examined, and Ball served a fifteen-month sentence in prison for his offences. The part of the story that is less well known is the fact that the Gloucester Diocesan Registrar, Christopher Peak, acted as a personal solicitor to Ball when the case first came into public view in 1992. In short, Peak agreed to negotiate with the police and the legal authorities in the task of mitigating the crimes of Ball. In this he seems to have enjoyed a measure of success, as Ball, despite his Caution, went on to enjoy many more years of retirement ministry. Somehow, Peak failed to recognise that it was totally inappropriate for him, as a chief diocesan legal officer, to act at the same time on behalf of his bishop under criminal investigation. In non-legal jargon, can it ever be right to represent the interests of the diocese and an accused bishop simultaneously? Is this not a case of a lawyer tolerating a clear conflict of interest?
The twenty-year gap that I have referred to above represents the period (1992- 2012) where Peak, the chief legal officer of a diocese, having legal responsibilities for promoting the welfare of that body, had chosen to identify with one party in a criminal case. One does not criticise Peak for taking on the role of a defence solicitor, thus presenting the best possible case for an accused party. Peak was entitled to defend Ball, but he was not entitled to have the role of representing the interests of the diocese as its Registrar at the same time. This conflict of interest should have been obvious to Peak as its head legal official. It should also have been obvious to others working in a legal capacity around him. For twenty years this situation of obvious conflict of interest was tolerated without any awareness of dissonance. Because Peak would not have been able to represent the diocese ‘without fear or favour’ in a legal case involving the former bishop and his diocese, he was compromising his ability to protect the diocese. No doubt, there were those within the church legal system nationally, who might have spotted something wrong with the situation. Somehow we suspect that the power of vested interests were wanting to keep a firm lid on any examination of what had gone wrong. In the end, it was not church lawyers that blew the whistle of what had been going on; it was the work of some lawyers following the case from the National Secular Society. It was they who, thirty years after the event, obtained this current ruling from the Solicitors Regulatory Authority. This deemed Peak’s behaviour as worthy of official censure and sanction.
Why is this story important? It is important for at least two reasons. The first is that legal offences by those working for the church, when they occur, have been, historically speaking, rarely challenged. The conflict of interest involved in having the Diocesan Registrar acting as a personal solicitor for the bishop should have been fairly obvious to anyone working in a legal capacity in Gloucester at the time. One suspects that deference to Peak by lawyers and church dignitaries alike supressed any such challenge. As Registrar and probably the most highly paid servant of the diocese, it was probably not difficult to overawe any potential opposition to his legal activity as personal solicitor in defending Ball. Initially, at any rate, the diocesan clergy unanimously supported Ball and it was only later that the possibility of guilt gradually dawned on them. The second factor is linked to the high financial rewards payable to lawyers who work for the Church. Just as Peak used his skill and power to successfully manage things legally for Ball, so we have witnessed the raw power of well-paid lawyers working openly to intimidate their victims in the case of the Christ Church/Percy case. We have discussed in earlier blogs the way that conflicts of interest were clearly apparent in that long-running saga. At Gloucester, the power of a Registrar acting as a defence lawyer must have been considerable. We know from the Charity Commission statement that the fees charged by the church lawyers working for Christ Church and Diocese of Oxford were massive and one suspects that considerable sums of charitable money were also spent defending Ball. We should always be able to expect the highest standards of ethical behaviour from lawyers working for the church. Somehow the events of recent years when specialist church lawyers have been involved have meant that our confidence in the church’s legal system is not as secure as we would like it to be.
The Peak affair is something that could easily be buried under the ecclesiastical legal carpet. It is however, I believe, saying something challenging to a future generation of church lawyers. After failures and evidence of legal malfeasance over recent years, the wider Church will always be watching your behaviour with greater scrutiny. In return for the millions we spend, and have spent, on legal services, we expect one thing above all. We expect the very highest standards of morality and ethics. These are already laid down by the legal profession itself as it seeks to serve the public in a variety of contexts. Breaches of trust, conflicts of interest, protecting reputations and institutional bullying should never be found coming among church legal officers. Also, protecting such behaviour, when practised by church dignitaries, is not part of your job. We need the service of good lawyers to help the Church of England in its work, but we need to be able to assume that you fully share our highest ethical values, even if not necessarily our beliefs. These values indeed already belong to your ethical and professional training. They include respect for all, justice, equality under the law and high levels of personal integrity. Recent failures by church lawyers in preserving such values have put many of us in a state of high alert. We want to see that the church legal system is being used to promote the cause of justice and goodness and not a means to bolster reputation management and indulge in unjust power games which damage so many.
Without the church legal system promoting justice and goodness there will never be accountability and clergy discipline even at the highest level will remain elusive.
You are so right Stephen. My own experience echoes what you say.
“Who is responsible for the failure of this task?” Aficionados of BBC’s Apprentice will be familiar with the impending doom for the losing team’s worst performer. Lord Sugar decides and the culprit is “fired”. It’s a painful process.
Who is in charge of a failing Church of England? Even in a most basic parish church there are finances, property to maintain, legal matters, and that is before the everyday theological activities and disciplines are undertaken. The knowledge required is magnified as you extend up the diocesan hierarchy to a vast kingdom, with actuaries and bankers all included in the mix.
No one person can be “omnicompetent” despite appearances, as we have already seen in a recent case in our capital.
I ask who is in charge, because we need to know who needs to take responsibility for the “omnishambles”we appear to be seeing. In the inclusion of multiple professions into the management mix, key management roles appear to have been delegated without proper supervision or controls, to the point of abrogation. Plausible deniability seems to be the guiding principle here: “It wasn’t me, guv”.
I’d I expect to see senior clergy taking the rap for the malfeasances, as well as appropriate disciplinary measures from the advisors’ regulators. Unless of course the advisors are actually running the whole thing.
It’s time to come clean about who is in control.
This link will take you to the ‘job description’ of a diocesan registrar. It will require some patience to read it all, but possibly even a glance might convey what the C of E expects of this legal officer:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1991/1757/schedule/1/made
It seems to me that there are potentially inbuilt risks of conflicts of interest with so many functions and so many different potential ‘clients’. Until now I had no idea that the role was so wide-ranging.
Mr Peak has accepted that he was wrong and has accepted the penalty. The irony of this case is that he thought that in his dual role as legal adviser to the bishop and to the diocese he was protecting the reputation of the diocese by ‘protecting’ the bishop.
We are told on ‘Thinking Anglicans’ that there are other similar cases waiting in the pipeline.
Other lawyers, such as Martin Sewell, were careful to identify and then avoid the potential conflicts of interest in their own work, on a daily basis.
Doubtless we could have a lengthy discussion on all the legal niceties, but it’s time to work out who is in charge and deal with these problems at root. There’s a danger of getting hopelessly lost in all the details, and nothing actually changing.
If his job description was somehow enshrined in legislation, this is further support for early disestablishment of the Church of England, from the State.
The descriptions are the C of E’s. The fact that all C of E Measures have to be approved by Parliament and become UK legislation with statutory force arguably makes them stronger. Disestablishment is a red herring, and a misunderstanding in this context, I suggest. I merely quoted these as an indication of the duties required of a registrar which, as I said, prove to be far wider than I had imagined. Useful background information, and not intended to be any kind of arguing point about Mr Peak’s case.
To anyone outside the rock pool of diocesan bureaucracies, the conflict of interest would have been evident. However, would it necessarily have been evident to Mr Peak at that time?
The office of registrar is an ancient one which grew, like the office of chancellor, out of the bishop’s household or familia. The bishop had, in ‘Lord’ Hale’s words, rights as iudex ordinarius’ in his own diocese which, over time, would be delegated to an official in his chancery (i.e., secretariat). The consistory courts therefore developed as emanations of the bishops’ judicial authority. The registrar was an official of that court and, as such, was also part of the familia. Outrageous conflicts were avoided between bishops and their own courts by appeal to higher (i.e., provincial courts), since for a bishop to challenge his chancellor was to challenge himself (as Edward Stillingfleet noted in his 1695 ‘Discourse on Bonds of Resignation’).
As time has passed, and as the business of the consistory courts has largely evaporated, the registrar came to function more and more as a legal adviser to the bishop, and whilst the bishop is a corporation sole, the bureaucracy which has developed around him/her since the 1920s is an emanation of his/her legal authority (although since 1925 DBFs have been constituted as limited companies). There is therefore an inherent confusion between the bishop and the diocesan bureaucracy: or, to put it another way, there is a symbiotic and indistinct relationship between the two. This is fertile ground for conflicts of interest, and for the registrar to function as a lightning rod for such risks.
Messrs Lamming and Sewell (and Mr Porteous Wood of the NSS) have kindly noted the risks associated with this in recent posts on TA. Attention has specifically been drawn, once more, to Winckworth Sherwood as a ‘universal spider’, at the centre of a web of potential conflicts. I am sure that firm manages its conflict checks as well as it can, but the basic problem is that Church business generates limited income for a very small number of specialists: economies of scale are necessary to make the work profitable, and that means its concentration in one or two firms, increasing the risk of conflicts.
I, for one, am getting tired of all this nonsense. Diocesan bureaucracies and the residual legal powers of the bishops are so much extraneous (and expensive) bilge ripe for the flushing. They are not only a deadweight overhead weighing on parish share and accelerating the decline of the parish, but they add very limited value relative to their cost and often impose additional demands on hard-pressed incumbents and PCCs. Centralisation in the Commissioners is long overdue, and feeble appeals to local interests are almost invariably self-serving.
‘I, for one, am getting tired of all this nonsense.’ I couldn’t agree more Froghole.
Bloated bureaucracies have a nasty habit of enduring unfortunately, and it must be crippling to have to operate under this costly and inefficient regime.
Wondering about ways of extricating themselves from this heavy weight, I was reminded of a local HTB-seeded Church which is entirely outside the C of E (and its quota system). From a standing start their income is now over £2m.
Other denominations continue to “compete” for those wishing to attend and give to church too. There are no barriers to entry.
If it doesn’t insist on raising its own game, the established Church is in terminal decline.
In an admittedly limited context, Paragraph 2-(1) (c) of Schedule 2 referred to above provides that:
“ if a legal dispute arises between parties who are both church officers, [the Registrar] may decline to advise either party but is at liberty to advise both parties with a view to helping them to resolve their dispute if, in the registrar’s judgement, it is desirable to do so.”
Albeit, with the limitation mentioned, this does appear to me to sanction the Registrar’s advising disputing parties (even if, ultimately, they both represent ‘the church’), whilst fully accepting that this has does not have any bearing on the facts of Mr Peak’s case.
Stephen’s powerful analysis reminds us that “forewarned is forearmed”. Aside from Gloucester and Oxford, what are the other 40 diocesan legal counsels doing? From what we can gather several other cases are being scrutinised by those outside.
What an appalling witness this is to them. We’re supposed to be better behaved people, as Christians, exemplars of Christ’s goodness on earth, rather than being examined by the secular agents and being found wanting. We really have lost our way as a National Church.
Those with any conscience left, and the stomach for it, may start a more detailed analysis of these charities’ costs. Bear in mind that when excessive, the costs are attempted to be concealed in other expense headings. Auditors, Report Writers and other examiners should be aware of this.
I see the news items about reparations for slavery. What a pity the CofE hasn’t seen fit to set aside moneys to recompense the victims of bullying, which is far more recent, and indeed ongoing.
EnglishAthena and John are rightly drawing attention to bullying. Individual episodes are gathered here and coalesce together with, for example, the Winchester bullying proceedings, to illustrate a picture of systemic embedded bullying in the Church.
Grand gestures to provide reparations haven’t yielded much actual money for victims or descendants so far as we can gather. Is society fooled by the ‘virtue signalling’? I don’t expect so.
It is ongoing. I can testify to that. Your comment is incisive and profound. It demonstrates the virtue signalling of a sadly un virtuous church. Great comment. Thanks.
Thanks. I’m glad it was helpful. I can’t take much credit for genius, though! I’m afraid it’s quite personal. I received a written apology, but even my decent, humane bishop doesn’t “get” reparation.