A SURVEY to explore trust and trustworthiness within the Church of England has been cancelled, the episcopal lead for the relevant task group, the Bishop of Peterborough, the Rt Revd Debbie Sellin, has announced.

Last year, members were told that the Trust Task Group had invited Professor Richard Jackson of the University of Bath to help to design a survey to “widen the range and number” of people feeding into the research on trust, as requested by the Synod. This followed a report that identified a need to “repair and preserve trust in the Church’s organisation and structures” (News, 24 June 2024).

In an update published with the General Synod papers last week, Bishop Sellin announced that the Task Group had “advised to cancel this survey and focus on repair strategies, which the House of Bishops and Archbishops’ Council has accepted . . . The key reason for this choice is the conclusion that running such a survey is unlikely to tell us anything new and may do more harm than good — to all of us in the Church of England that we seek to serve. I recognise some may disagree with this reasoning.

“We know we have a problem here — a problem of distrust that has been highlighted in General Synod time and again. If the survey will foster distrust further, its benefit does not seem worth the cost.”

By the end of this year it is expected that a full report of the findings of the research to date, with supporting theology, will be published, “focussed on trust and trustworthiness repair strategies”.