Nolan Review - Final Report

Introduction

1.1 A year ago, the Archbishop of Westminster invited Lord Nolan to chair an independent committee to carry out a review on child protection in the Catholic Church in England and Wales. The Committee members are:

The Rt Hon The Lord Nolan (Chairman)
The Rt Hon Sir Swinton Thomas (Vice-Chairman)
Retired Lord Justice of Appeal
Caroline Abrahams
Director of Public Policy, NCH
The Rev Tim Bryan
Detective Chief Inspector, Metropolitan Police (joined the Committee in October 2000)
Hilary Eldridge, BA(Hons), Dip SW, CQSW
Director, Lucy Faithfull Foundation
Monsignor Jack Kennedy
Child Protection Co-ordinator, Liverpool Archdiocese
Dr Maurice Lipsedge, MPhil, FRCP, FRCPsych, FFOM(Hon)
Formerly Consultant Psychiatrist, South London and the Maudsley NHS Trust
Gill Mackenzie
Chief Probation Officer of Gloucestershire and Chairman of the Association of Chief Probation Officers until April 2001
The Rt Rev Peter Smith
Bishop of East Anglia
David Veness
Assistant Commissioner, Metropolitan Police

Four members of the Committee are Catholics and six are not. Donald Findlater of the Lucy Faithfull Foundation has attended most of our meetings and his contribution has been invaluable.
Chris Brearley, formerly Director General in the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, is Secretary to the Review. We are greatly indebted to him and to many others for their help but particularly to Paddy Victory, Charles Wookey, James Parker, the Rt Rev Kieran Conry, Tom Horwood, Toby Mountford, Nicholas Coote and Conor Taaffe.

1.2 Our terms of reference are:

To examine and review arrangements made for child protection and the prevention of abuse within the Catholic Church in England and Wales, and to make recommendations.

It has not been our role to investigate or comment on individual cases and we have not done so.
1.3 The Committee met for the first time on 25 September 2000 and has held sixteen meetings in all. We received information about the present arrangements in dioceses and how they are working. We sought contributions to our work from all who wished to make them, and received over two hundred written submissions from both individuals and organisations. We also met with leading organisations in the field. We are most grateful to all those who took the time to contribute to our work; very many helpful suggestions have been made. We are also most grateful for an opportunity Lord Nolan had to discuss child protection issues with Bishop Laurence Forristal, Bishop of Ossory, and other members of an advisory committee of the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference.

1.4 Our approach has been to identify good child protection practice and, wherever possible, to apply it to the policies and procedures of the Church in England and Wales. In the seven years since the bishops issued their pastoral and procedural guidelines on child abuse much has been learned in the UK about how to ensure that sound principles are translated into effective action on the ground.

1.5 This is our final report. It follows up the First Report, which we presented at Easter for the bishops' Low Week conference, and which made 50 recommendations about the structures and actions the Church should put in place to enable it to be an example of best practice in the prevention of child abuse, in responding to it, and to rebuild confidence. That report has been generally well received. Our work and discussions since then have not led us to make any radical changes in what we proposed, but they have enabled us to refine and develop those conclusions. This final report is available on our website at www.nolanreview.org.uk.

1.6 Our intention is that this final report should be free-standing. The future reader should not have to read both our reports in order to have a full understanding of our reasoning and conclusions, but only this one. In consequence, while Chapter Two reviews the issues we have considered further since the First Report and our conclusions about them, Chapter Three summarises our thinking and conclusions on all the issues we have studied. It sets out the whole of our recommendations

Because of Chapter Three's comprehensive nature, there is inevitably some duplication between Chapters Two and Three of this report. In writing about the Catholic Church as well as about child protection we have had to use a number of specialised terms and, so far as possible, these are explained in the glossary at Annex A.

1.7 This final report, like our First Report, is unanimous. We emphasise that our recommendations complement and reinforce each other. They constitute a single programme of action.

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