Against independent safeguarding

The General Synod came to an unusually sane conclusion yesterday when it rejected a fully independent safeguarding scheme. The case for full independence rests on two arguments, of which only one is ever made explicit: that is the notion that the Bishops and the Church of England more generally cannot be trusted to do safeguarding right. That is a far more extreme position than the claim that they have made mistakes in the past. Of course they did and so did every other organ of society, especially and most important in this context the police.

But it is the claim of the survivors and victims lobby, henceforward SVL, goes a lot further than that. The SVL position, which is taken as common sense by the press, is that the bishops have learned nothing from these mistakes, that they they are institutionally corrupt and irredeemable, and that they cannot be trusted to get anything right. Now this makes sense if you are a humanist lawyer much of whose business is suing the church, like Richard Scorer. It can make emotional sense if you are a survivor. It is an advantageous pose to strike for a church politician, and it makes a nice simple angle for a journalist to take.

But it isn’t very realistic. The bishops of the Church of England are often useless but seldom malevolent. They try, sincerely, to perform impossible tasks. They are slow learners but they sometimes learn. If you really believe they are wicked incompetents why are you still in their church?

So much for the explicit claim.

There is also an implicit claim: that independent safeguarding will do much better than the Church’s own. In the place of unquestioning deference to bishops who get everything wrong we will have unquestioning deference to safeguarding experts and they will get everything right. You’d have thought that the performance of Keith Makin would rob anyone of that illusion.

I’ve written about that elsewhere so I won’t rehearse his inadequacies here. But it was a careful study of the Makin report that led me to reject the conventional position that fully independent safeguarding was an unequivocally good thing.

The arguments so far all apply to safeguarding as it is narrowly defined – the protection of children from predatory adults. But in practice and in the debates of the last seven years, safeguarding has been much more widely defined, to cover all kinds of bad or inappropriate behaviour towards adults and also to cover the care and treatment of those who were abused under the old regime. These are two separate and distinct mistakes.

Consider the case of David Tudor. He should not have been a priest, still less one with freehold. It follows that he shouldn’t have been made an honorary canon of Chelmsford Cathedral either, and that Stephen Cottrell should not have renewed the appointment, although he inherited the earlier mistakes and the impossible position in which they placed any bishop. But Tudor, in Chelmsford, presented a reputational risk and a disciplinary problem. He was not an active safeguarding risk. He was monitored, kept out of schools, and had been assessed as no risk by independent professional safeguarders. The problem that he represented was partly one of discipline or HR: he was legally protected against anything a bishop might do to remove him. It was also in part problem about the care of his past victims and the ability to care for them. Both these are questions of justice in the way that safeguarding narrowly defined is not.

There is a paradox emerging here: a very large part of the revolt of the clergy against the Welby regime is a resentment of pointless managerialism, yet the proposal for wholly independent safeguarding is an intrusion of managerialism on a very large scale indeed.

John Quiggin defines the central doctrine of managerialism like this: “the differences between organisations … are less important than the similarities, and that the performance of all organisations can be optimised by the application of generic management skills and theory.”

“Managerialism and neoliberalism are at one in their rejection of notions of professionalism. Both managerialists and neoliberals reject as special pleading the idea that there is any fundamental difference between, say, the operations of a hospital and the manufacturing and marketing of soft drinks. In both cases, it is claimed the optimal policy is to design organisations that respond directly to consumer demand, and to operate such institutions using the generic management techniques applicable to corporations of all kind.”

The flaws of this approach are obvious to the clergy when it is applied to evangelism, and they are widely and deeply resented.

But the drawbacks he identifies are clearly visible also in the reforms suggested by the SVL: “The main features of managerialist policy are incessant organisational restructuring, sharpening of incentives, and expansion in the number, power and remuneration of senior managers, with a corresponding downgrading of the role of skilled workers, and particularly of professionals.”

Sixteen years ago I went along to a friend’s installation as a country vicar, and was photographing her toddler on the church floor when a worried woman stopped me. Apparently I was a danger to children since my photograph might have been used for unsavoury purposes. That particular confusion was soon cleared up – and the ubiquity of smartphones must have made the doctrine a dead letter – but no doubt an independent safeguarding regime would require the vicar to fill out a form attesting this had been done.

I’m not making an argument against all independence of safeguarding: independent scrutiny of the church’s decisions is clearly a good thing, as the Carlisle report demonstrated. It will help to improve the decisions themselves and the public’s confidence. But that the whole of the decision-making function be outsourced to an independent body with its own agenda would have been a ludicrous act of self harm. Nor would it make anyone actually safer.