THE chair of the Business Committee, Robert Hammond (Chelmsford), moved the first motion, to take note of Committee’s report, at the General Synod in York on Friday afternoon. He spoke of the difficulties that the Committee faced in making time for all the issues that people wanted to debate.
“It’s your absolute right to ask questions, move motions, present petitions, and so on; and I do understand how important these issues are,” he said. “But our time is not elastic.”
Mr Hammond said that comparing the Synod to a parliament for the Church of England was not necessarily helpful, as the Synod was not designed to be adversarial. An experimental “deep dive” session on governance was planned for Saturday evening, he said, but he insisted that “parallels to a parliamentary Select Committee are unhelpful”.
He also reported that the layout of the chamber had been altered to make it more accessible.
Emma Gregory (Bath & Wells) thanked the Business Committee for running evening sessions: this was a more efficient use of time than fringe meetings or “relaxing in the bar”.
“Synod, we’re in a mess,” Jayne Ozanne (Oxford) said. She suggested that levels of trust had never been so low, and that members were concerned about LLF, safeguarding, governance, and mission. The record number of questions submitted before the meeting illustrated this.
The Synod was being “managed”, she said. It was viewed as “an inconvenient body that gets in the way”. The many presentations at this group of meetings illustrated this, too, she said.
Ms Ozanne asked the Committee to find time for an emergency debate to enable members to “air their grievances”. Such a debate would require the permission of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, which illustrated “our governance peculiarities. . . We find ourselves having to ask the very people who lead the institutions that we have concerns about for permission to have time to debate those concerns.”
Dr Helen King (Oxford) echoed Ms Ozanne’s points: there was an “agenda beneath the agenda”. Questions about transparency, accountability, and trust needed to be “addressed directly”.
The Revd Robert Thompson (London), speaking on Zoom, echoed the previous two speakers. “I think we’re in a complete governance mess at the moment,” he said, and members felt “marginalised”. His private member’s motion asking for an urgent review of safeguarding issues at Soul Survivor had garnered the support of almost one quarter of Synod members within one month being launched — and yet it had not been included on the agenda.
Mr Thompson also referred to the fallout over the Archbishops’ Council’s decision to sack two of the three members of the Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB). Council members and the lead bishop for safeguarding, Dr Joanne Grenfell, had said that the decision was made inevitable by a breakdown of relations. The members of the ISB had originally been due to present an update on their work, but the timing of their dismissal meant that a presentation would instead by made by the secretary-general of the Council, Sir William Nye. If the problem really was a breakdown of relations, Mr Thompson asked — and he noted that Mr Reeves and Ms Sanghera had disputed this description — then why was the Synod hearing from only one of the parties?
He also asked why the debate on the loyal address in February had not made space for a wider range of views about the monarchy.
Luke Appleton (Exeter) suggested that the Synod should not be debating such contentious issues on a Sunday, and asked the Committee to “respect the sanctity of the Lord’s Day” by moving the safeguarding slot.
Prudence Dailey (Oxford) said that the need to suspend Standing Orders to hear presentations suggested that this was not the way in which the Synod should operate, and members might consider voting against.
Finally, Sarah Finch (London) suggested that data on “revitalising the parish for mission”, a subject on which the Synod would receive a presentation on Monday afternoon (News, 30 June), could be made available.
Responding to the debate, Mr Hammond said that the Standing Orders no longer needed to be suspended for that Synod to hear presentations, and that Mr Thompson’s motion had not been selected for debate because it had not received the necessary 100 signatures by April, when the Business Committee had met to set the agenda.
To those calling for an “emergency debate”, Mr Hammond suggested that there were “lots of opportunities to ask questions and debate various aspects of the elements we’re talking about”.
After the take-note motion on report was carried, Sam Margrave (Coventry) introduced a petition calling on the Government to extend the Freedom of Information Act to the Church of England. He argued that total transparency was the only way in which the Church could restore trust broken over safeguarding and other scandals.