Safeguarding with Confidence - Cumberlege Report

“Diversity of policy and practice, insufficiency of resources and a lack of national support and co-ordination will, in our view, lead to a weakened, inconsistent, and inadequate response.” Lord Nolan 6

The positives

“I am quite confident that the one who began a good work in you will go on completing it until the Day of Jesus Christ comes” (Philippians 1, 16)

2.1 ‘A Programme for Action’ laid the foundations for sweeping new procedures and structures for responding to allegations of abuse and its prevention in the Catholic Church in England and Wales. Its aspiration was to deliver a safeguarding culture of constant vigilance. Its great strength was to emphasise to the whole Church that in the matter of child protection (and by implication the protection of vulnerable adults) it was only as strong as its weakest link. Hence, the focus on a common approach which was considered vital if everyone was to know that there could be ‘no back doors into the Church for those who wished to abuse’.7

2.2 A great deal has been achieved in a remarkably short time to implement the Nolan recommendations and raise the profile of child protection on local agendas. Within a year of the Conference of Bishops and Conference of Religious acceptance of the final report in 2001 the new Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults (COPCA) was established under the leadership of the chair of its management board Archbishop Vincent Nichols and its Director, Eileen Shearer.

2.3 It is clear from the testimonies we have received and the documentation we have analysed that COPCA’s achievements have been considerable and some would say much against the odds. We recognise that there was some good, but fairly isolated, child protection practice in the Church prior to the implementation of Nolan. However, since its establishment, COPCA has made a huge contribution to strengthening the Church’s capacity, as One Church, to keep children safe. As a result the Church has been able to demonstrate a new professionalism and greater transparency and accountability in the way it deals with child protection issues, now justly recognised by the statutory authorities, and mirrored in the establishment of new child protection structures across the dioceses and religious congregations. As the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children told us:

“We applaud the significant achievements in implementing child protection procedures which have been made since the publication of ‘A Programme for Action’8

2.4 Of the 83 recommendations in ‘A Programme for Action’, 79 have been addressed either completely or partially. We shall return to the remaining four, and comment on those where there has been a significant departure from Lord Nolan’s original recommendations, later in the report.9 In the meantime we would wish to note for the record some of the major achievements to date:

In delivering greater transparency and accountability:

(i) The appointment of (mostly) external Chairs of Child Protection Commissions in
dioceses and religious congregations who have expertise in child protection;

(ii) The appointment of professional staff at COPCA and in the majority of dioceses
and more recently at CoR;

(iii) The establishment of organisational lines of accountability for child protection;

(iv) The creation and dissemination of a set of national policies, available to all via the
COPCA website;

(v) The creation of a COPCA Management Board with independent membership;

(vi) The requirement to ensure that supervision, monitoring and support is available to all who have roles in the child protection system in the Church and who work with
children at grass roots level;

(vii) The publishing of Annual Reports for the years of 2002-2006.

In upholding and promoting the paramountcy of the welfare of the child:

(i) All allegations of abuse are required to be reported to the statutory authorities who must decide whether a statutory investigation is required;

(ii) All child protection cases are required to be risk assessed to inform decisions about any return to active ministry for those accused, and cases are required to be risk
managed;

(iii) There are measures in place to monitor offenders among parish congregations;

(iv) Policies require support to be offered in cases, both to alleged victims and those accused of abuse.

In promoting sound safeguarding practices:10

(i) There are new policy and procedures for recruitment and selection in line with best practice elsewhere;

(ii) More than 55,000 CRB disclosures have been completed between the beginning of 2003 and the end of 2006;

(iii) More than 85% of the 2400 parishes have Local Child Protection Representatives in post (as at the end of 2006);

(iv) Around 1130 training sessions have been delivered within the Church;

(v) 18,000 participants have received training;

(vi) The principles of “Safe from Harm” are enshrined in national policy.

In promoting good partnership working with the Statutory/Voluntary agencies:

(i) External Chairs and statutory agency membership of Child Protection Commissionsin dioceses and religious congregations;

(ii) External, professional membership of the COPCA Management Board;

(iii) External members of policy development working groups;

(iv) The use of trainers and conference contributors at National Child Protection Coordinator/Officer meetings and at the National Conference;

(v) The use of professionally qualified and competent experts to undertake independent risk assessments of clergy & religious accused of abuse;

(vi) The provision of support to those who have suffered abuse or who have been accused of abuse from external professional organisations;

(vii) The use of external agencies’ materials for distribution throughout parishes;

(viii) COPCA Chairmanship of the Faith Sector Consultative Group for the Criminal Records Bureau and membership of intergovernment and leading national agencies and children’s safeguarding consortia.

In promoting the active management of risk:

(i) The implementation of pre-CRB recruitment & selection procedures for those who work with children;

(ii) The process of risk assessing all blemished Criminal Records Bureau Disclosures through Child Protection Commissions;

(iii) Temporary withdrawal from role of those accused of abuse;

(iv) A risk assessment of placements where the accused is withdrawn from role during an investigation or at the conclusion of a risk assessment;

(v) Child Protection Commissions undertake risk assessment of all cases and there is the option of an independent expert risk assessment, in particular for clergy and religious;

(vi) A written agreement (the Covenant of Care) is completed for accused clergy and religious and also for parishioners who may attend Church and pose a risk to children.

In moving towards a One Church Approach:

(i) The COPCA Management Board contain members of both dioceses and religious congregations;

(ii) Commissions exist in both dioceses and religious congregations and four Regional Religious Commissions have been established;

(iii) National meetings take place with Religious Child Protection Co-ordinators as well as Diocesan Child Protection Co-ordinators and Officers;

(iv) Bi-annual meetings of Diocesan & Regional Religious CP Commission Chairs have been established.

2.5 The Church owes an enormous debt of thanks to everyone who has been part of this work: those in the parishes, religious congregations and dioceses who willingly participated in these developments for the good of the Church, the lay members of the Diocesan and Religious Commissions whose wealth of expertise helped drive them through, the paid staff of COPCA and the unpaid volunteer members of the COPCA Management Board who have given so generously of their time. The COPCA leadership throughout this period deserves explicit recognition.

2.6 We too, would wish to reaffirm from the outset the importance of all that has been achieved and the role that safeguarding children, young people and vulnerable adults must play in the work of the Catholic Church locally and nationally. The Church is now a safer place so there can be no going back to a pre Nolan mindset; no relinquishing of the values implicit in Nolan; no reversing of the thrust of the work in this challenging area. This strongly held conviction goes to underpin our first recommendation.

Recommendation 1
The Conference of Bishops and Conference of Religious should publicly declare and renew their affirmation of the One Church approach to safeguarding children, young people and vulnerable adults through the promotion of a sustained and sustainable culture of constant vigilance.

2.7 It is a truism to say that ‘A Programme for Action’ was a product of its time. There can be no doubt, however, that the Nolan review was a response to the continuing adverse, predominantly media, pressures facing the Church to address the historic child abuse in its midstand its damaging consequences. Many of the shortcomings Lord Nolan observed - the failures to recognise the extent and prevalence of abuse, the failures to scrutinise rigorously candidates for the priesthood, the failures to communicate suspicions or even proof of misconduct and the failures to heed such communications when made - stemmed from an ignorance of the very nature of paedophilia. This ignorance, he concluded, was compounded by a desire to protect the Church and its faithful from scandal and a Christian instinct to forgive the sinner. Earlier work within the Church to address some of these shortcomings – most notably Bishop Budd’s Working Party report of 1994 “Child Abuse: Pastoral and Procedural guidelines” - focussed on the proper response by the Church to cases of child abuse. ‘A Programme for Action’, which built on the foundations laid by Bishops Budd’s 1994 report, turned its attention to the prevention of abuse. Not surprisingly, it contained some unpalatable recommendations; yet all 83 recommendations were accepted almost immediately by the Conference of Bishops and Conference of Religious. With the benefit of hindsight, a more measured period of reflection, debate and genuine consensus around the report’s recommendations and the priorities for implementation, may have produced a rather different medium term outcome and, arguably, one that was more in keeping with the spirit of ‘A Programme for Action’.

2.8 As it is, the implementation process has been flawed. The reality of delivering Lord Nolan’s recommendations translated into so many policies and procedures by the Catholic Office for the Protection of Children and Vulnerable Adults (COPCA) and approved by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (CBCEW) and the Conference of Religious (CoR) as the national policies of the Catholic Church in England and Wales has exposed a number of deeply felt tensions. Five years on and the Church can quite rightly take pride in the progress it has made and in beginning to distance itself from negative public perceptions. But the task is far from done and if the tensions that have come to the fore in this review are left unaddressed by those in the Church with the authority to deliver, we believe they risk a serious reversal of some of the important gains made to date.

2.9 What follows in this chapter is an overview of our findings from the evidence placed before us. We offer, too, our vision that the Church might set as an example of excellent safeguarding practice in another five years. In the remaining chapters we make our recommendations for change to help deliver that vision. Some of these involve fine tuning and some are of considerably greater substance and go to the very principles of natural justice – but all are designed better to address the needs and hopes of those who put their trust in the Church.

A One Church approach

2.10 ‘Programme for Action’ assumed that the Catholic Church operated as a functioning, hierarchical organisation capable of responding to, and implementing, a secular (in essence a social work) model of child protection and prevention.

2.11 The reality, however, is very different and many within the Church have been critical of this approach. The Church is collegiate, not a homogenous organisation working to a clearly established hierarchy with lines of accountability as generally understood by the secular world. Authority rests with each Bishop in his diocese and each Congregational Leader in his or her congregation. Though they come together through the Conference of Bishops and as a federation in the Conference of Religious respectively, they have differing priorities and, just as importantly, different levels of resources upon which to draw.

2.12 So the Nolan prescription has compelled the Church to work in ways that are unfamiliar to it and where ‘internal’ partnership working – dioceses working with each other and congregations working with dioceses – let alone ‘external’ partnership working with the secular child protection world – has limited precedent.

2.13 The system, too, is heavily dependent on a volunteer rather than a paid employee workforce. Lord Nolan recommended the presence of at least one volunteer Local Child Protection Representative (LCPR) in each of the 2400 parishes whom he described as the very heartbeat of the community. But whilst these volunteers freely and generously give of their energy and time they need to be properly supported and trained and their capacity to do all that is asked of them, and in ways that are not just about ‘ticking the boxes’, is necessarily limited. The Criminal Records Bureau (CRB) monitoring and vetting process in particular, important as it is, has taken an enormous toll on local resources and goodwill. And it is the erosion of this goodwill which has seriously put at risk the numbers willing to undertake child protection work as well as those who volunteer to work with children, young people and vulnerable adults.

2.14 This problem has been exacerbated by the organisational and resourcing gap between national and parish levels as most of the changes that have been put in place have been at the national and diocesan level. We were told that in 2004 the cost to the dioceses of delivering the Nolan agenda – we have no comparable information for the religious congregations – was £1.1million rising to £1.2 million in 2005 but this needs to be set against total diocesan service spend.11 Comparable budget figures for 2007 suggest local child protection costs amount to between 4.5 and 5.5% of this total diocesan spend.12 Limited resources for child protection are an issue for what many mistakenly argue is not the core business of the Catholic Church. As a result the Church uses a range of people with a variety of backgrounds. Some at diocesan level have little or no experience in this complex and demanding work so it is perhaps unsurprising that the achievement of consistently good practice is proving an elusive goal.

2.15 A culture of vigilance, moreover, depends fundamentally on engaging ‘hearts and minds’ from the leadership down through to the grass roots, clergy and laity alike. Producing much needed policy documents and introducing structural changes can only go so far. Some have argued that the implementation of child protection policies and procedures has been tolerated rather than embraced because they lack any sound theological and spiritual context and the professional language they use is not the language of church communities steeped in the gospel. Many more say they are just too long, overly bureaucratic and impenetrable.

‘It is not that the two … are either contrary or even incompatible. It is just very difficult to grasp. The policies can appear so foreign, bureaucratic and even irrelevant’13

2.16 For some therefore ‘A Programme for Action’ remains a report addressed to, and for, the laity. This may go some way to explaining why the cornerstone of child protection policies nationally, the ‘paramountcy principle’, which sets out to make the child’s welfare the paramount consideration in matters concerning their upbringing, is still not yet universally accepted within the Church. Indeed there exists a misguided interpretation that sees its unequivocal adoption as a means of protecting the Church and its leaders at the expense of the accused, especially where the accused is also a priest.

2.17 This latter is indicative of a far more damaging tension that has driven a wedge between Bishops and priests. A strong and vocal lobby of priests now believe that the system for dealing with allegations against them leaves them exposed and vulnerable and is a breach of Canon Law and natural justice. They believe they can no longer count on the support of their Bishop/ Congregational Leader because they perceive the system (and by implication COPCA) as being weighted against priests. This has both eroded the trust between priests and Bishops and between religious and Congregational Leaders and has engendered a fear among them (and those in formation) of the false or malicious allegation; a fear which is tenacious and persistent despite there being no evidence of any upturn in the numbers of allegations made against priests. Addressing this concern through the introduction of a transparent and fair process that complies with Canon Law and with natural justice, and which deals with the accused with respect, is a matter of some urgency if priests are not to shun working with children and young people altogether as a way of protecting themselves.

2.18 Doing so should also bring some welcome assistance to Bishops who, in the wake of a succession of current and historical abuse allegations have had to take such difficult decisions in relation to accused priests and have had to respond to, and shoulder, the emotional trauma of those allegations for the victim and the community. The increasingly stressful lives of Bishops, and the pressures they face in this and other areas, with little in the way of peer support and formal leadership preparation and development offered by the Church has been commented on recently:

“As well as the emotional tragedy associated with the crime and the allegations the turmoil at parish level can be considerable. Even if allegations against a priest do not proceed to trial, it may not be appropriate for him to return to the parish, for reasons that must remain confidential. This causes upset among a congregation who invariably blame the Bishop.”14

2.19 We received far fewer direct communications from survivors of abuse and their families. For some victims the life long damage they suffer in the wake of their experience results in such a loss of confidence in the Church that trust has been replaced by positive distrust of any initiative associated with the Church. Those we did hear from, and those who spoke on their behalf, have given evidence as to the continuing tension that victims experience between the perceived requirements of insurers and lawyers to protect the financial interests of the Church and their own need to tell their story and be listened to with compassion and empathy, to receive an apology and be provided with appropriate pastoral care and support.

2.20 Religious congregations were a late addition to the diocesan led thinking and recommendations underpinning the Nolan review. Five years later they continue to be so. The very nature and diversity of these religious congregations – there are about 300 affiliated to the Conference of Religious from international orders to small contemplative communities - bring with it a particular challenge to the One Church approach. That the Conference of Bishops and Conference of Religious came together for the very first time to deliver the safeguarding agenda is a credit to Lord Nolan’s vision but in no way lessens the complexity of the task. Nor is there much visible evidence that this collaborative leadership has been sustained. The four Regional Religious Commissions (themselves something of a compromise) have only just been established whilst uptake among the religious of the national policies is hugely variable. It is slower and more grudging in some places, especially among those congregations whose concerns are not primarily with children or vulnerable adults but whose apostolic work comes under the broader definition of ‘active ministry’; others are more willing to engage with the new processes than their diocesan counterparts. Substantial inputs of support and training are required to enable all religious congregations, given their diversity and later inclusion, to embrace the One Church approach.

2.21 Ultimately, Lord Nolan’s prescription for a culture of constant vigilance depends on the Church at every level taking ownership of the safeguarding agenda. Responsibility for driving that agenda, however, belongs firmly with the Bishops, because they are the chief shepherds for their communities, and Congregational Leaders who have similar responsibilities within their own religious congregations. Yet it is clear from the evidence before us that the will needed to do so is patchy. In part this is due to a growing confidence – some would say complacency - that with the establishment of COPCA child protection has been adequately addressed. In part it is due to a lack of preparation and a willingness to train and be trained. We are concerned that five years after Lord Nolan reported Bishops and Congregational Leaders may be minimising the distressing consequences, the harmful impact and the anguish that follows in the wake of child abuse. This, coupled with some resistance to change and a fear and suspicion that the authority of the leadership is being undermined, has impeded the delivery of consistently good – let alone excellent – safeguarding arrangements.

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