by Hatty Calbus

In my pieces about the influence of HTB, I looked at its charity, the Revitalise Trust, and the questionability of some of its trustees, then at the safeguarding danger of following the megachurch model. The two issues come together in another member of the leadership body, its Patron Richard Chartres, Bishop of London from 1995 to 2017, who used to attend HTB’s Focus annual summer holiday, with his loud shirts a humorous tradition. For teenagers and vulnerable adults, Chartres’ approach to safeguarding could be much less amusing.
Just before he retired from the biggest diocese in the country in 2017, he complained about the frustrations Church bureaucracy had caused him. https://www.premier.org.uk/News/UK/Bishop-of-London-speaks-of-career-frustrations-ahead-of-retirement This dislike of bureaucracy may partly explain his lack of oversight of Martin Sargeant, whom he appointed as Head of Operations, and who in December 2022 was jailed for five years for defrauding the diocese of £5.2 million over a decade. It was unclear how much of that money had been donated by parishioners. An investigation in 2023 found that Sargeant was seen by other staff to be acting “with the authority of the Bishop.”
Chartres’ dislike of bureaucracy definitely extended to safeguarding procedures for vulnerable adults. For several years the diocesan website included his opinion that the law protecting adults judged to be at risk was “the elaboration of defensive bureaucracy based on a culture of suspicion” and he put “vulnerable adults” in political-correctness-gone-mad quotation marks [I have a printout of the webpage.]. This critique was there at least as late as October 2012. There had been a legal requirement since the 2006 Vulnerable Groups Act to have a policy and procedures for vulnerable adults as well as children. London was the last diocese in the country, Anglican or Catholic, to comply, and by some time, not meeting the requirement till the end of 2012. In 2011, he claimed it was up to individual churches if they wanted to apply the safeguards required by law [in a letter]. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2013/27-september/comment/opinion/the-hidden-scandal-of-adult-abuse
The lack of oversight of Martin Sargeant and dismissal of the need for care to be taken with vulnerable adults came together terribly when a suicide attempt by Fr Alan Griffin was ignored and Sargeant also decided he had used underage rent boys. Fr Griffin converted to Roman Catholicism and these allegations were passed on to the Diocese of Westminster. He killed himself. The coroner, Mary Hassell, reported that the allegations were “supported by no complainant, no witness and no accuser.” She commented on “the breadth of the systemic and individual failings.” https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2021/23-july/news/uk/church-s-safeguarding-blunders-could-cause-more-deaths-coroner-warns A review in 2022 noted,“It is abundantly clear that [Sargeant] was allowed to function with little accountability or supervision during the tenure of the former Bishop.” It also suggested that he “chose to leave his post when the new Bishop came into post, partly because of her insistence on greater accountability.” According to the Church Times, “The report found that there was insufficient understanding of appropriate practice when it came to handling safeguarding allegations.”
The case of church youth worker and ordinand Timothy Storey in 2016 showed Chartres’ attitude to safeguarding children and teenagers was no better. This was a shocking case, all the more so because rather than historical abuse, it involved a recent predator operating for years when strict child safeguarding should have been assumed, but where there was, in Judge Philip Katz’s words, “wholesale failure.”
Storey was convicted in 2014 of grooming hundreds of children on Facebook, sexual assault, inciting children to engage in sexual activity and making indecent images of children, and jailed for three years. In 2016 he was convicted on three counts of rape and jailed for fifteen years. From 2002-2008, he had not only been able to work as a youth pastor at St Michael’s, Belgravia, but trained other youth pastors in child safeguarding and was put forward for ordination. Complaints only seem to have been recorded in 2008 and 2009, despite how prolific his abuse was in the youth group and at church camps.
When two of Storey’s teenage victims reported their rapes to Chartres, Storey was withdrawn from ordination training. No help was given to the victims, though Chartres told one of them who had written to him that he would pray for her “at the end of the week.” https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3160116/Bishop-London-s-apology-joke-says-alleged-rape-victim-Oxford-youth-pastor.html But then Storey had been personally sponsored in his application for ordination by Chartres. Judge Katz said his protestations of innocence reeked of “false religiosity,” yet this false religiosity was apparently invisible to one of the most senior churchmen in the country. And the Diocese of London was actually ‘slated’ (the Church Times’ word) by Katz for lying. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/22-april/news/uk/judge-slates-london-diocese-over-storey-case Katz accused the diocese of a “shameful misrepresentation of the truth” when at the end of the trial, a spokesman claimed they had acted appropriately at all times, and implied the police were at fault for not properly pursuing the matter earlier. Katz said the police had “investigated diligently and sensitively — something the diocese had been incapable of.” https://www.premier.org.uk/News/UK/Judge-s-fury-at-Diocese-of-London-after-rape-sentencing
https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2016/26-february/news/uk/diocese-admits-safeguarding-failure-over-rapist-ordinand The 2020 IICSA report says Storey was permitted to continue working with children, as he expressed remorse. He was assessed to be “basically a good man who could be an effective priest.”
After the trial, the diocese claimed safeguarding had been much better since 2010, yet, to repeat, Chartres’ criticism of safeguarding procedures was still on the website late in 2012 and there was no policy and procedure for vulnerable adults till the end of 2012, so the law was still being broken. And St Michael’s continued to have nothing on its website about safeguarding: no policy, no contact details. When I questioned this, the woman I spoke to there was “shocked and horrified” and was going to pass it straight on. Eighteen months later there was still nothing. It took a couple more years.
None of this puts Justin Welby in a good light either. Large question marks have been placed by John Smyth’s victims and Channel 4 over how much he knew about his abuse, but there should be none over what he knew about Chartres, as Storey’s trials were reported in the press. Yet Welby said nothing. When he told the IICSA inquiry in 2018 that clergy were given training that made it “quite clear” that if a safeguarding issue were not reported it was a disciplinary matter, he omitted to say how recently this had failed to happen in London. Three months after Storey’s second sentencing, Chartres was on the stage at HTB’s 2016 summer holiday being extravagantly feted. Welby, there on the stage with him, described him as “quite simply one of the best, if not the best, bishop that we’ve had in the Church of England since the Reformation.” https://m.youtube.com/watch?sns=em&v=pA9j17re5CE (2 mins 42). This is supposed to square with a Church of England spokesperson’s statement after Smyth’s death in 2018 that “Safeguarding has always been an absolute priority of [Welby’s] ministry.” And then his reported choice to succeed Chartres, fitting his businessification of the Church, was Paula Vennells, whose leadership of the Post Office, similarly to Chartres with Martin Sargeant, featured suicides.
Rather than resigning in disgrace, Richard Chartres retired in 2017 accepting outpourings of praise and the grandeur of a peerage, becoming the Right Reverend and Right Honourable the Lord Chartres GCVO – Baron Chartres, of Wilton in the County of Wiltshire. And none of the above was deemed serious enough to disqualify him from being appointed Patron of Revitalise, the charity to a significant degree determining the Church’s direction. To give him such a prominent role shows a continuing disregard for victims. For all the periodic bouts of handwringing and pious statements, how is anyone to believe that those with most power in the Church of England really care if lives are destroyed by abuse?