Most Anglicans do not support the Church of England’s plan to allocate funds to slavery reparations. A December 2025 poll of 500 Anglican churchgoers revealed that 81 per cent expect the Church to support local parishes rather than use financial resources on reparations, 64 per cent believe it is “not the role of the Church Commissioners, using funds in their care, to atone for previous injustice such as slavery”, and 61 per cent would switch their giving to alternative charities, if the Church proceeds with its policy.
The background story is this. In 2019 the Church Commissioners for England, who are trustees of the Church of England’s endowment fund, appointed researchers to investigate whether a forerunner had links with the transatlantic slave trade. The forerunner in question was the Queen Anne’s Bounty, an 18th century fund devoted to supplementing the income of poorer clergy. In January 2023 a report was published, apparently demonstrating significant investments of the Bounty in the slave-trading operations of the South Sea Company. Without any consideration of the complicated ethical issues raised by this discovery, it seems, the Commissioners proceeded to commit the church to begin making reparations via “Project Spire”, to the tune of £100 million. They then established an independent, black-led Oversight Group to work out a plan of implementation. The Group reported in November 2023 and when their report was published in March 2024 under the title, Oversight Group Recommendations: Healing, Repair and Justice, it was publicly endorsed in full by the Commissioners, including both the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, and the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cotterell.
Then the trouble began.
After examining the historical evidence, the Emeritus Professor of International Banking at Southampton University and author of a book on the South Sea Company, Richard Dale, concluded that the Commissioners had misinterpreted it. Their statement that “a significant portion of the Bounty’s income during the 18th century was derived from sources that may be linked to transatlantic slavery, principally interest and dividends on South Sea Company annuities”, he judged “misleading on several fronts”. As he explained, “First, no investor in the South Sea Company benefited financially from the slave trade, since it was consistently loss-making. Second, the Church Bounty did not even stand to benefit from the trade, because it declined to buy shares in the Company. Third, the investments that it did make, in South Sea annuities, represented, at one remove, claims on the Government which had no connection with the trade in slaves”.
Read it all in The Critic
