Details of the proposed financial award framework for the Church of England’s national Redress Scheme have been published. If approved, the framework would be used to calculate offers of financial redress to survivors and victims of Church-related abuse. Details of the proposed approach to funding the Redress Scheme have also been announced.
Financial Award Framework
The Redress Project Board has agreed the recommended financial award framework for the national Redress Scheme. If approved through the Church of England’s legislative processes, the framework would result in individual awards of between £5000 and £660,000 in rare and exceptional circumstances.
The Redress Project Board recommendation follows many months of detailed conversations and consultation with survivors of Church-related abuse.
The Chair of the Redress Project Board, Bishop Philip Mounstephen, said: “The recommended financial awards framework, developed with guidance and input from survivors and external experts, aims to address the range of suffering experienced, offering financial redress in a clear and transparent manner.
“No amount of money can ever undo the past. Our hope, nonetheless, is that this could be a significant step both towards the acknowledgment of wrongdoing, and, however incompletely, towards helping rebuild lives.”
The Redress Project Board has benchmarked the framework calculations against other similar schemes and has also received external specialist input. The Board has aimed to ensure that the levels of financial redress that could be offered are in line with or exceed those found in comparable schemes.
Financial awards would be calculated by taking into account factors such as the nature of the abuse and its impact on the applicant. In addition to individual financial awards, the Redress Scheme will offer eligible applicants other forms of redress, such as emotional and therapeutic support, and apology.
A member of the Project Board and the Redress Survivor Working Group, which is helping to design the Redress Scheme, said: “Survivors have worked extremely hard over a long period of time to try to ensure that the Redress Scheme will be as generous as possible whilst still being able to help as many applicants as it can. We are pleased that the Scheme is now another step closer to becoming a reality.”
The proposed financial award framework, if approved, would calculate individual financial awards across four stages. At stage one, an application would be assessed according to the type of abuse experienced. Secondly, any aggravating factors would be considered. Thirdly, an application would be assessed regarding the impact the abuse has had on the applicant. Finally, at stage four, in rare and exceptional circumstances where other significant factors were unable to be accounted for adequately in the first three stages of the calculation, a discretionary uplift of 20% could be applied.
Those involved in designing the Church of England’s Redress Scheme are working with the appointed Scheme Administrator to create a process for assessing different types of abuse and their impacts. Detailed and sensitive conversations with members of the Redress Survivor Working Group, and others, will be held in the months ahead to carefully consider this critical aspect of the Scheme. Further details regarding the assessment criteria will be published in due course.
Redress Scheme Funding
The Church of England is committed to a whole-Church approach to the funding of its Redress Scheme.
At its meeting in March, the Redress Project Board agreed to recommend that for each financial award made through the Redress Scheme, the Church body the Scheme deems to be closest in governance terms to where the abuse occurred should be invited to make a voluntary financial contribution.
It is proposed that illustrative amounts would help to guide Church bodies in their decision as to the level of discretionary contribution they wish to make based on the resources available to them, recognising that some local Church bodies have extremely low levels of financial resources.
The proposed Redress Scheme funding also includes the allocation of up to £150m of funding from the Church Commissioners, which was announced last year. This financial commitment will underpin the funding of the Scheme to ensure applications for redress are resolved promptly.
In February, one major insurer announced that it had chosen not to participate in the Redress Scheme, prompting the Redress Project Board to revise its approach to the Scheme funding.
