A CLASH of views on whether the Church of England should fully outsourcing safeguarding has been playing out online, in the build-up to this week’s General Synod debate on which model of safeguarding to adopt.
A webinar hosted by the Church Times on Wednesday evening saw a split develop between participants, with some supporting “Model 4” — in which diocesan safeguarding staff would be transferred to an independent national body — while others warned of hidden dangers in the plan.
And, in a briefing for Synod members on Tuesday, in which she endorsed Model 4, Professor Alexis Jay confirmed that her brief, in preparing last year’s Future of Church Safeguarding report (News, 21 February 2024), was explicitly to chart a route to “outsourced” safeguarding.
In the Church Times webinar, a safeguarding lawyer, David Greenwood, said that he was “not a supporter” of Model 3, because it leaves frontline safeguarding staff in the employment of individual dioceses.
This, he said, would leave a “temptation” for “conflicts of interest and protection of the reputation of the diocese and individuals to override safeguarding decisions”.
A paper by the lead bishop for safeguarding, the Bishop of Stepney, Dr Joanne Grenfell, outlined the risk of such conflicts of interest, but said that “staff working in safeguarding teams, and those who support them, report no evidence of current pressure from within the Church to compromise safeguarding priorities and no conflict of interest” (News, 31 January).
This point was picked up by another of the speakers, the chief executive of the INEQE Safeguarding Group, Jim Gamble.
He commended the independence of the teams that his organisation had audited. “They don’t, in the evidence I’ve seen, park their safeguarding philosophy at the first pew that they got to and become indoctrinated in what the Church wants,” he said.
INEQE has published safeguarding audits of nine dioceses, finding improvements in safeguarding structure and culture, though in every case warning of the danger that diocesan teams could find themselves overrun, and recommending investment to increase safeguarding capacity (News, 7 February).
Mr Gamble opened his remarks by saying that he had seen evidence of an “improving situation” in church safeguarding.
“I’d like to begin from where we are, not where we were,” he said, referring to significant improvements in diocesan teams since around 2017.
Outsourcing operational safeguarding was not, he argued, the answer to the Church’s problems, and could lead to problems down the line, if confidence was lost in the new body.
Mr Greenwood later responded to this concern, saying that it was “hard to see a situation in which a professional body like that would drop the ball so badly that it wouldn’t be able to retrieve the situation”, but, if it happened, another provider could be brought in.
Legal advice received by the diocese of Gloucester which raised concerns about where liability would lie in an independent body in charge of church safeguarding (News, 3 February) did not present an insuperable barrier, Mr Greenwood suggested.
Mr Gable, however, said that it was vital for accountability for safeguarding to remain with the Church, so that it was able to effect change if safeguarding services were not up to standard.
“I don’t think that the unintended consequences in this regard have been properly considered,” Mr Gamble said. While he had started the audit process expecting to find church safeguarding “off kilter”, he had concluded that it was “heading in the right direction” with its existing diocesan model, with evidence of “growing consistency”.
It was a view with which the diocesan safeguarding adviser for the diocese of Chichester, Colin Perkins, agreed.
“You have to do safeguarding with the church; you cannot do safeguarding to the church,” he said. He suggested that full independence was a “myth”, because, at a parish level, the safeguarding contact point would always be someone who was a member of the church.
However, the co-founder of Survivors Voices, Jane Chevous, said that she had surveyed fellow survivors about the options facing the Church, and that over 75 per cent favoured Model 4.
Only complete independence of operational safeguarding, including investigation of cases, “would restore our confidence in the Church”, she said.
She raised concerns about how a new independent scrutiny body would be established, calling for it to be designed by an organisation itself independent of the Church.
Ms Chevous said some survivors were concerned about the danger of “good working relationships” at the local level being lost, but that, in general, the sense was that improvements were not fast enough and that only a “beefed up” version of Model 4 would “get the survivor vote”.
Mr Perkins was one of the 106 safeguarding professionals in the Church who signed a letter on Wednesday, arguing that Model 4 could “increase the risk of harm to children and vulnerable adults” owing to the disruption of the outsourcing process and the creation of extra bureaucracy (News, 5 February).
Addressing Mr Greenwood’s concern that conflicts of interest might prevent diocesan safeguarding staff from doing their job, Mr Perkins said: “If it was true that we were being fettered in our ability to protect children and vulnerable adults, no voice would be louder than ours in support of Model 4.”
The option of fully outsourced operational safeguarding had never been tried by an institution such as the Church, he said: “That model doesn’t exist, and there’s a reason for that.”
Mr Greenwood suggested, however, that the only way to restore public confidence was for the Church to adopt Model 4. “This loss of confidence creates the reason why . . . it has to be seen to be doing something,” he said, and accused Mr Gamble and Mr Perkins of being “invested in the status quo”.
It was a comment to which Mr Gamble took exception. As an auditor, he had no “vested interest” in the Church, he said. “My background is safeguarding and scrutiny, and my position comes from evidence: I want what’s best for children and young people and the vulnerable adults who rely on their church communities.”
ON TUESDAY, Professor Jay, the author of the report that sketched out the path to independent safeguarding, told members of the General Synod that she supported Model 4, “with some reservations”.
She advanced the lack of consistency on safeguarding across dioceses as a principal reason for recommending this course of action.
She confirmed that she had been specifically asked by Archbishop Welby to “devise a plan for how church safeguarding could be ‘outsourced’ — and I use that word in quotation marks, as that’s the word he used”.
The project she undertook was, therefore, she said, not “a review, nor an enquiry, nor a consultation exercise”.
The fact that Professor Jay had not been asked to evaluate whether independent safeguarding was the best course was highlighted in Wednesday’s letter from safeguarding professionals.
“Professor Jay had been asked to provide a roadmap, but the destination — ‘independent’ delivery of safeguarding — was chosen by the archbishop,” they wrote.
Professor Jay’s intervention on Tuesday came in an online briefing for Synod members, given by her and the secretary to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), John O’Brien. Press were not invited, but the Church Times has seen clips from the meeting.
Asked about the legal opinion received by the diocese of Gloucester, Professor Jay said: “We always knew that this was a very complex legal scenario, in any of the options and certainly for [Model 4], but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.”
Mr O’Brien suggested that the legal advice was commissioned in an attempt to prevent the adoption of Model 4. “If you want to find a way to derail this, that is the sort of advice you commission,” he said.
He said that an option for getting around the issue might be to put a trustee of the charity onto the board of the new organisation.
Listen to the panelists’ opening remarks at churchtimes.co.uk/podcast