Is the Church of England safe for children and young people?

After multiple complaints about safeguarding and five police investigations, Blackburn-based Canon Andrew Hindley received a six-figure pay-off, writes Professor Helen King – who argues the case raises huge questions about where power in the Church really lies...

Canon Andrew Hindley had worked in the Blackburn diocese in the Church of England (Peter Byrne/PA) (PA Archive)

As the established Church – headed by the monarch, represented in the House of Lords – the Church of England has over 4,500 church schools, so the safety of children and young people is clearly central.

Yet safeguarding within the Church remains a contentious issue. Every parish has its safeguarding officer, members in many roles must take compulsory training modules and each diocese has a team to support parishes – and policy to follow. The Church actively promotes the message that there’s a clear line between historic cases of sexual abuse – and a much improved current situation.

But any claim that abuse is all in the past has been dealt a serious blow by the story uncovered by BBC File on 4, around claims of a safeguarding risk at Blackburn Cathedral. This covers around three decades and goes right up to 2022 when the cleric involved – Revd Andrew Hindley – left his post as Canon Sacrist.

By any standards, it is an extraordinary tale, raising many questions around where power really lies, including the bishop’s threat to close the cathedral if Hindley refused to leave.

The response to multiple complaints about Hindley and five police investigations, after he was assessed as a potential risk to children and young people, was a pay-off (according to the BBC, £240,000), presumably accompanied by a similar sum spent in legal fees.

Hindley has never been charged with any criminal offences and says he has never presented any safeguarding risk to anyone. The settlement was agreed on 28 February 2022.

This outlay comes while the Church of England is still putting together its Redress Scheme for victims and survivors of abuse, which will include financial compensation where appropriate. That scheme is now running nearly two and a half years behind schedule; while the Makin Review, into the sexual abuser John Smyth, is more than four years late. These delays do nothing for the confidence of survivors.

Blackburn Cathedral commissioned a “lessons learned” review into these “immensely regrettable past failings ”. In File on 4, the current Bishop of Blackburn Philip North still insists the important question is “what do we learn from it?” While he was not the bishop when the six-figure settlement was agreed, he was a suffragan bishop in the same diocese and was acting dean of the cathedral in 2016-17. But “lessons learned”, the current Church of England mantra, has an increasingly hollow sound to it.

Just what do we learn? Perhaps, that behind events like those at Blackburn there are complicated issues around unease with openly gay clergy like Hindley. In 2023, Revd Canon Judith Maltby, a member of the House of Clergy of General Synod, put together a report drawing together many of the conclusions from the various “lessons learned” reports into other cases in the Church of England.

Her report was presented to the National Safeguarding Steering Group. She concluded that “our lack of inclusion of LGBT+ people has a serious and detrimental impact on the Church’s ability to deliver good safeguarding”.

One factor is secrecy. What was happening in Blackburn was “an open secret”, with Rowena Pailing, then Safeguarding Lead at the Cathedral, explaining on File on 4 that those in other dioceses were well aware of what was going on.

In the case of abuser and murderer Ben Field, dramatised in BBC’s The Sixth Commandment, the independent reviewer commented that the relationship between Field and his victim Peter Farquhar, was “a well-known secret”. Here, the Church’s policy of opposing homosexual practice put Farquhar at risk of exploitation.

Relevant to what happened at Blackburn is the Church’s poor record on conflating homosexual relationships with child abuse. At the hearings into the Church of England at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), Fiona Scolding KC commented that the Church “didn’t really have an understanding of what was an appropriate same-sex relationship and what was an inappropriate same-sex relationship”.

A police officer who gave evidence to IICSA in 2018 observed that church witnesses to abuse were reluctant to speak in case they were “exposed as homosexuals in court”. Rowan Williams, then Archbishop of Canterbury, offered a different reading of the situation; that trying not to be judgemental about homosexual clergy could lead to “overcompensation”, and the feeling that they should have a second chance if abuse had happened.

So, is the Church of England any safer than it was in 2018? Probably not. For all the talk of “lessons learned”, until the Church can distinguish between health and unhealthy sexual relationships there will continue to be secrecy – and danger.

Helen King is Professor Emerita, Classical Studies at The Open University – and is an elected member of the General Synod