TRANSFERRING the Church of England’s diocesan and national safeguarding staff to an independent body would take at least three years, a paper recommending the proposal says.
In the paper, published on Thursday, the lead bishop for safeguarding, the Bishop of Stepney, Dr Joanne Grenfell, outlines the options to be laid before the General Synod in February.
Radical change was necessary, she told the Church Times, so that “people can have trust and confidence in how safeguarding is done.”
Two models are being put forward for consideration. In the first, the National Safeguarding Team (NST) would be transferred to a new, independent body; in the second, the new body would also include diocesan and cathedral safeguarding teams, removing them from their current local employment status.
In both models, a further independent body is proposed to scrutinise the Church’s safeguarding operations and act as a final point to which complaints can be escalated.
The Response Group formed to consider the recommendations of Professor Alexis Jay and Dr Sarah Wilkinson in their respective reports was, Dr Grenfell reveals, unable to reach a consensus on which model to endorse.
Her paper says that both models “require substantial work to develop and deliver, which cannot be achieved overnight”, but such “radical steps” are, Dr Grenfell argues in the paper, “necessary”.
The establishment of the scrutiny body is widely supported, but responses to a consultation process last spring made clear that there is a divergence of views about whether operational safeguarding should be conducted by a new body. The majority of Church safeguarding professionals opposed the proposal (News, 30 May 2024).
Thursday’s paper reveals that some members of the Response Group that developed the proposals being put to the Synod “oppose it very strongly”, and sets out their reasons.
These include the likelihood of a waiting period “of at least three years” before it can be achieved, which, Dr Grenfell writes, “is likely to affect recruitment and retention of staff”. Other objections include the argument that it is an untested model for institutions such as the Church, and that it could “make the Church less safe” if responsibility for safeguarding is “not clearly embedded within the organisation”.
Despite these objections, Dr Grenfell backs the more extensive option of transferring all safeguarding teams to a new body. “The reasons for doing this are about consistency, timeliness, and evenness of resources” across the dioceses, Dr Grenfell told the Church Times on Thursday afternoon.
Funding disparities were one reason for differences between dioceses in safeguarding provision, she said, but merely to even out financial resources would not necessarily lead to a “consistency of practice” across the country.
“Of course it gives me pause for thought that there would be resistance to it from safeguarding professionals. I don’t doubt their expertise or wisdom,” she said, but the question had gone “beyond a technical safeguarding management issue; it’s about how the whole Church steps up and creates the right environment in which those brilliant professionals” could work “in the most effective way and be trusted”.
While Dr Grenfell is proposing the more extensive option for outsourcing operational safeguarding, she hopes that Synod members will give proper consideration to the alternative, which itself would be “good for the Church of England”. Both models, she said, were “considerable progress from where we are at the moment”.
The paper emphasises that, in both models, “support for parishes and frontline settings is prioritised, with safeguarding practitioners who serve dioceses continuing to offer training, advice, and practical support to office-holders and volunteers in parishes”.
The difficulty of presenting two options for consideration under synodical procedures means that Dr Grenfell will formally propose the second model — full outsourcing of safeguarding — but will welcome an amendment to allow the alternative model to be discussed and a vote to be taken on which is carried forward.
The part played by the Synod was vital, Dr Grenfell suggested, to enabling the “whole Church to own” safeguarding. The Synod, she said, had shown that it could be “mature and wise” in its decision-making, and commended the range of its members’ experience.
The paper outlines the approach to “independence” taken by the Response Group as focused on guarding safeguarding officers from “undue actual or perceived influence or from pressure to act in a way which protects the interests of an individual, group or Church body”. Nevertheless, the paper says, people working in safeguarding “report no evidence of current pressure from within the Church to compromise safeguarding priorities and no conflict of interest”.
Dr Grenfell said that it was correct that safeguarding professionals in the Church had reported that there “isn’t undue pressure or influence. . . None the less, I think what we’ve tried to do is go back to ‘Why did we start this work?’ Because there are perception issues around either undue influence or around actual or perceived conflicts of interest, and they matter.
“So, in all of this work, I think the two threads that run through it are about both effectiveness and trust, and that the two are connected with each other, and so it’s become important to the Church — partly because of the criticism it’s received, partly because of the really, truly dreadful legacy of abuse that is still being uncovered — that people can have trust and confidence in how safeguarding is done.”