SAFEGUARDING professionals across the Church of England have urged the General Synod’s members not to back a proposal to outsource their work to a new national body.
In a letter sent on Wednesday and signed by 106 members of diocesan and cathedral staff, they argue that transferring frontline diocesan safeguarding to a new body risks making safeguarding provision in the C of E worse, owing to the disruption of the process and the creation of extra bureaucracy.
The letter was sent in advance of the Synod’s meeting in London next week, at which members will debate two options for the future structure of church safeguarding (News, 31 January). The option recommended by the lead bishop for safeguarding, the Bishop of Stepney, Dr Joanne Grenfell, is known as Model 4. It is this option that the letter criticises.
The alternative, Model 3, would move the National Safeguarding Team to a new external body, but keep local teams in the employment of the dioceses. Both models would involve the creation of a new independent scrutiny body, which the letter supports.
The signatories — which include at least one member of safeguarding staff from 90 per cent of dioceses — write that they are not opposing Model 4 out of self-interest. Their jobs are not at risk, they say, as it has been guaranteed that these would be transferred to any new body. A national structure might increase promotion opportunities.
“We have not written and signed this letter because we are concerned about our jobs, but because our priority is, and always has been, the protection of children and adults in the Church of England,” they write.
Model 4, they suggest, “may be inherently less safe” than the existing structure in which safeguarding teams are employed by the relevant cathedral Chapter or diocesan board of finance.
“Detaching the Church of England’s safeguarding staff from their current employers will almost inevitably create additional barriers to communication and cooperation, harming service delivery. Given that ‘service delivery’ in this context involves protecting children and vulnerable adults, any barriers whatsoever could have the most serious consequences,” the letter says.
“There is no doubt that transferring staff from 85 current employers to one yet-to-be-created employer will be destabilising, expensive, and likely to take far longer than expected,” the letter argues. “No other equivalent organisation in the UK employs its safeguarding staff in a separate body.”
It continues: “The disruption to recruitment and retention of staff, to existing relationships, and to morale would be considerable. Moreover, new structures bring new problems: a large national organisation is at least as likely to multiply layers of management as it is to improve frontline service delivery.”
In a Synod paper published last month, and in a subsequent interview with the Church Times, Dr Grenfell suggested that achieving consistency of practice across the dioceses was a key reason for pursuing Model 4.
The signatories to Wednesday’s letter agree that consistency is important, but suggest that Model 4 is not the best way to achieve this. They refer to the development of safeguarding codes of practice and national standards, and the employment of “Regional Safeguarding Leads”, as evidence of how changes are already taking place to standardise safeguarding provision across the country.
Their letter also seeks to put Professor Alexis Jay’s recommendations for the Church into the context of her brief, which was, they say, to set out “a roadmap for independent operational delivery of safeguarding”. The “destination” was chosen by the Archbishop of Canterbury, they write, and Professor Jay was not asked to analyse whether this was the best option for the Church.
The signatories set out what they describe as a “better way forward”: for money from the central Church to be invested in front-line safeguarding services. “The era of under-resourced frontline safeguarding teams must end,” they write.
A change to the terms under which clergy serve is also needed, they write, because canon law currently leaves safeguarding staff without “the tools they need to manage risk”.
Central to their argument is that the point that operational safeguarding in the Church is not fundamentally broken, but in a process of steady improvement. Work is needed to increase consistency, and to ensure that there is adequate independent scrutiny, but these aims can be achieved without radical upheaval, their letter argues.
Low public trust in the Church, they acknowledge, should not be a reason for overhauling safeguarding structures that can be more reliably improved with piecemeal changes that are already in progress. “Whilst public confidence is important, putting perception above practice is at the heart of many of the Church of England’s safeguarding failures. The Church must not repeat that error here,” they tell the Synod’s members.