Church of England Safeguarding - An insight with Martin Sewell - The God Cast Interview.

The God Cast with Fr Alex Frost and Guests.

One individual who works tirelessly for the cause of survivors at General Synod and in many other ways is the retired lawyer and Synod member Martin Sewell. He has been an occasional contributor to Surviving Church and has taken a prominent part in supporting the cause of survivors, becoming especially involved in the case of Dean Percy. As a lawyer, he brings all his analytical skills to the table and helps the rest of us understand the legal complexities of the structures set up by the CofE. He was one of the authors of the so-called Micah 6:8 letter. http://survivingchurch.org/2020/08/12/letter-to-charity-commissioners-over-concerns-about-church-of-england-safeguarding/ This was addressed to the Charity Commission (CC) and drew their attention to the failings of CofE safeguarding processes. As far as I can tell, this 2020 letter was never replied to but it was a significant support to survivors in the way it articulated some of their longing for justice and transparency in the safeguarding processes. Recently Martin Sewell has written a further letter to the CC. This time it is not a letter which supporters were invited to sign. https://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Sewell-letter-to-Charity-Commission-Earner-5.8.2022-v.2-9.8.2022.pdf It is a letter of some 13 pages, so it requires to be read more than once to extract its meaning. In essence it is claiming that the CofE has gone beyond its level of competence in trying to resolve numerous failings in the safeguarding sphere. Its efforts to set up safe and independent structures to bring support to the survivor community are failing. There are two key case studies where these failures are explored, the Dean Percy case and the anomalies and problems for the CofE in setting up the so-called Independent Safeguarding Board (ISB). Sewell does not mince his words in the CC letter. He looks back over the last few years of safeguarding activity in the Church and finds that word ‘incompetent’ is a good description for what has gone on. He mentions the Matt Ineson affair and the Makin review on John Smyth, now 800 days late. More recently we have had the failures revealed in the Fr Griffin case and of course the never-ending Percy scandal. Martyn Percy has written a detailed complaint to the Archbishops’ Council (AC) about the many legal and moral failures in his case. He still awaits a complete response to the many issues he raised. What the AC have put in place is a ‘lessons learned’ enquiry from the body set up less that two years ago, the ISB. This was commissioned before the Chair of the Group, Maggie Atkinson, was required to ‘step back’ from her position at the request of the AC. Given the fact that Atkinson was the most experienced of the three (part-time) members of the ISB, it is hard to see how they are equipped to tackle the much-needed review of the issues in the Percy affair even if they had their full complement of members. Having lost their Chair, the ISB will find it difficult to function effectively even with the most straightforward of commissioned tasks. According to Sewell’s detailed analysis of the problems surrounding the ISB, the needed expertise is simply not there to undertake something as complex as examining the Christ Church affair and the questionable behaviour of certain clergy in the Diocese of Oxford.