CLERICAL accountability must be “vigorously tackled” and is “the key issue for the Church to tackle and should not be a protracted debate”, a report on trust in the Church of England concludes.

The report, Trust and Trustworthiness in the Church of England: Listening and responding to usual and unusual challenges, was produced by Professor Veronica Hope Hailey, a former Dean of the Business School at the University of Bristol, drawing on 74 interviews with bishops, clergy, lay people, and members of the national church institutions.

“Whilst no one wants to return to the feudal patriarchal structures of the past, if the institution is to restore trust with the society it is meant to serve, clerical accountability must be vigorously tackled,” Professor Hope Hailey writes.

“It’s not simply about formal control but also the need to change the culture of individualism some clergy seem to think they deserve. That love of autonomy means that they can be inconsistent and unpredictable in their promises to implement policy.”

Accompanying the report, due to be debated by the General Synod next month, is a theological reflection by the theologian Professor David Ford. This recommends that mandatory reflective pastoral supervision be introduced for clergy.

The two documents are the final output of the Trust and Trustworthiness project, which began in 2022. A preliminary report presented to the Synod in 2024 warned that distrust was “pervasive” in the Church (News, 28 June 2024).

Professor Hope Hailey’s report sets out challenges that are “usual for many large, complex, and mature institutions to face from time to time” but also “unusual” challenges. Listed as “extremely unusual” is “the lack of accountability, both formally and informally”. It is a problem that has been exposed by the Church’s handling of abuse, she suggests. “The failure to adequately hold to account the perpetrators and colluders in any forms of abuse has severely damaged the public trustworthiness of the church as an institution.”

Her report goes on to explore the power — of lack thereof — enjoyed by the Bishops. “What the outside world understands as a figure of authority, a bishop, is not legitimised within the current structure. I was told by some that Bishops can only operate soft power. Yet few within society understand the current limitations to their role. It is at odds with an authority their ceremonial appearances suggest. . .

“Bishops seem to be in an impossible position. The twilight role that they currently inhabit makes it is difficult for them to display sufficient evidence of trustworthiness through the role alone.”

Her comments echo those of bishops in recent months. In 2024, the Bishop of Blackburn, the Rt Revd Philip North, lamented that the diocese’s hands were “tied” when it came to handling allegations against a canon at Blackburn Cathedral. Bishop North called for priests to be employed directly by the diocese rather than serve as office-holders (News, 23 August 2024).

Both Archbishops have criticised the current accountability structures. Archbishop Mullally compared them unfavourably with the NHS’s (Comment, 10 February 2025).

Professor Ford suggests in his reflection that “Reflective Pastoral Supervision” would “meet the urgent need, revealed in the report, to combine accountability with support”. It would need to be mandatory, he writes. He is Regius Professor Emeritus of Divinity at Cambridge.

Professor Hope Hailey does not limit her critique to clergy and bishops. The “inability to hold volunteers to account” is also unusual, she observes. Some lay volunteers she interviewed “seemed to relish the impenetrability of the Church’s idiosyncratic rules and regulations”. Comprehensibility is key, she writes. “To rebuild internal and external trust, structures and decision-making systems need to be sufficiently simple such that every member of the Church can understand them.”

She also refers to the Synod and its “powerful and very vocal pressure groups” who “use Synod to insist their priority concerns are addressed immediately”.

More broadly, a “blame culture has flourished”, she suggests. “Few interviewed seem to think they, or their tribe, or their diocese or their parish, were personally doing anything wrong at all. . . People have a great sense of their own and their tribe’s ‘rights’ but a less well-developed sense of their ‘obligations’ to the greater whole.”

Professor Hope Hailey also lists several positive aspects of the Church which are also unusual. They include “the willingness of many, volunteer and clerical, to deliver magnificent Christian acts of pastoral care at a local level despite everything”.

A summary note from the Bishop of Peterborough, the Rt Revd Debbie Sellin, who chairs the Trust and Trustworthiness Task Group, concludes that Professor Hope Hailey’s work points to the need for “broad, deep, and sustained cultural change”.