Has the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Team (NST) been over-zealous in bringing disciplinary complaints against clergy named in the Makin Review into the John Smyth abuse scandal? The decision by the C of E’s President of Tribunals, Sir Stephen Males, to clear six out of the 11 clergy the NST has brought complaints against since the publication of the Makin report in November 2024 surely presses the question.  

Lord Justice Males has last week announced his decision concerning the Ven Roger Combes that there was ‘no case for the respondent to answer’. Combes, who retired as Archdeacon of Horsham in Chichester Diocese in 2014, told the Makin Review that at a meeting in 1982 with Canon Mark Ruston, then Vicar of the Round Church in Cambridge, he was handed a copy of the report on Smyth’s abuses that Ruston had written. Combes said he did not open it, believing ‘the victims would be embarrassed if he knew the details’.

Lord Justice Males has also dismissed an out-of-time complaint the NST brought last October against the Revd Iain Broomfield. From 1987 to 2000 Broomfield was the commandant (leader) of the Iwerne evangelical camps in Dorset which targeted pupils from the ‘top 30’ English fee-paying boarding schools. Smyth groomed his victims on the camps in the 1970s and early 1980s.

The Makin Review reported that in around 1998 Broomfield told a young ordained minister that there was a ‘previous issue’ regarding Smyth and that ‘something bad’ had happened at Winchester College, the boarding school attended by many of Smyth’s victims.

Lord Justice Males’s ruling on Combes and Broomfield follows his decision last December to squash the NST’s allegation against the Revd Tim Hastie-Smith, a team vicar in Gloucester Diocese. The Bishop of Gloucester, Rachel Treweek, had delegated the handling of the NST complaint in February 2025 to the Bishop of Lichfield, Michael Ipgrave. Bishop Ipgrave cleared Hastie-Smith last October. After the NST’s director, Alexander Kubeyinje, disputed the decision, Lord Justice Males upheld Bishop Ipgrave’s ruling.

Hastie-Smith was national director of the Scripture Union (SU) from 2010 to 2019. In 2014 he was informed of ‘non-recent abuse disclosures’ about Smyth. Though the SU did not run the Iwerne camps when Smyth was savagely beating boys and young men in the garden shed of his Winchester home, the SU employed some Iwerne staff and supported its operations. Smyth was an SU trustee.

The Church Times reported last December: ‘In his decision, taken in October, Dr Ipgrave concluded that Mr Hastie-Smith had “followed proper safeguarding procedures in a clear and consistent way” and demonstrated a “conscientious approach”.’

Bishop Ipgrave ruled that Hastie-Smith’s actions ‘reflected a genuine concern for the welfare of victims of John Smyth, that the evidence showed that multiple police forces were already informed about the allegations against Smyth, and that the respondent had no additional information that could have materially advanced the police investigations’.

In the 1970s, Hastie-Smith attended the Iwerne camps as a pupil at one of the ‘top 30’ boarding schools targeted by ‘the work’. He was a Iwerne ‘officer’ (leader) as a Cambridge University undergraduate and as an ordinand at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, in the 1980s. When in 1986 Iwerne camp commandant, the Revd David Fletcher, became Rector of St Ebbe’s, the conservative evangelical flagship church in Oxford, he appointed Hastie-Smith as his curate. In early 2025 Channel 4 News exposed Fletcher, who died in 2022 and had been central in covering up the abuses detailed in the Ruston report, as an abuser of women and girls.

After St Ebbe’s Hastie-Smith became chaplain of Stowe, a boarding school in Buckinghamshire, which was among Iwerne’s target schools. In 1998 he became headmaster of Dean Close, a private school in Cheltenham. In 2008 he became the youngest ever chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC), the association for the leaders of Britain’s independent schools, now known by the more politically correct title of the Heads’ Conference. But within a month of his appointment he resigned as HMC chairman and also as headmaster of Dean Close.

The BBC reported at the time: ‘The resignation follows the outcome of a disciplinary hearing of another teacher, Michael Clarkson. During that hearing it emerged that Mr Hastie-Smith had given him a teaching job despite his having been caught at a previous school making a recording of a teenage pupil having sex. The General Teaching Council for England (GTC) had found Mr Clarkson “guilty of unacceptable professional conduct” while at Shrewsbury School.

‘The GTC found that Mr Clarkson, on a school trip to Portugal in 2006, had allowed a pupil to have sex in a room in which he had set up a video camera. Later that year, Mr Clarkson was employed at Dean Close School – with Mr Hastie-Smith saying that the school “believes in offering forgiveness and giving people a second chance”.’

In June 2025 Lord Justice Males refused to allow out-of-time complaints brought by the NST under the C of E’s Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) to proceed against three clerics named in the Makin report – former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey; Canon Hugh Palmer, former Rector of All Souls Langham Place in central London; and the Revd Paul Perkin, former Vicar of St Mark’s Battersea Rise in south London.

Lord Justice Males has allowed out-of-time CDM complaints against five other clerics named in the Makin report to proceed. Bishop Paul Butler, Canon Andrew Cornes, the Revd Nick Stott, the Revd Sue Colman, and the Revd John Woolmer still have CDM complaints hanging over them.

But Lord Justice Males’s decisions on Carey, Palmer, Perkin, Hastie-Smith, and now Combes and Broomfield are a defeat for the NST. It is understandable that NST staff would find the Iwerne sub-culture with its snobbery, arrogance, and elitism extremely abhorrent. The question arises whether a moral revulsion within the NST against the Iwerne world has clouded judgements on who the guilty men actually were in the cover-up of Smyth’s abuses. Whatever the answer to that question, Lord Justice Males seems determined to be judiciously objective.

Julian Mann, a former Church of England vicar, is an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire, UK.