I want to thank Dame Christine, Bishop Joanne, and their team for bringing GS 2429. It is a product of an enormous amount of hard work, careful thought, but maybe most importantly – attentive listening over many months.

I am grateful to Dame Christine for her sober, honest assessment of where we are today and for proposing a constructive way forward through what has seemed like intractable challenge.

As the Church, we should aspire to be a model for others in how we protect children, young people and vulnerable adults, and how we respond to abuse, and to the misuse of power, and any attempt to use theology to justify such acts.

Today, I am supporting this motion because I believe it is a sensible solution that can be delivered at pace. In that way, it is an important next step for us moving forwards, to be a safer church.

In my view, it provides three things:

Firstly, a mechanism for greater scrutiny and consistency.

Secondly, it honours the people up and down the country who commit themselves daily to making the Church safer. It builds on what is already there and strengthens the areas that we could improve.

Thirdly, it provides independence where it matters–whilst ensuring that we rightly retain ultimate responsibility for Church safeguarding.

By defining independence specifically as the autonomy of professional safeguarding function, this allows safeguarding professionals to pursue impartial judgments.

This is not an abdication of our safeguarding responsibility, legally or morally. We will still be required to discharge our charitable duties. But this proposal provides the professional rigour to do that with greater confidence.

The plan will move us away from our current fragmentation and help us to focus our energy and resources on where they are required.

For me, seeking to meet our aspiration on safeguarding is an integral part of my call to be a shepherd to the flock. Synod, I am voting for this motion because it is a positive step forward. This proposal enhances our ability to care for those who are vulnerable—and for those who are victims and survivors.

Yet, Synod, we must recognise that this is just the next step. Earning people’s trust—inside and outside the Church, as individuals or as an institution—will take more than one motion. Earning trust, creating an environment of transparency and the willingness to speak truth to power when abuse occurs, will require more work over the long term.

But Synod, let us take this next step.