In 2019, the Church Commissioners discovered a horrifying secret — the historic endowment of the Church of England had been polluted by profits from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Emerging amidst parallel controversies over the death of George Floyd and historic links to slavery in British institutions, the scale of the Church’s response exploded to grand heights in the intervening years. A £100 million reparations fund was authorised, to be distributed to the communities still affected by the horrors of historic enslavement.
On the surface this might seem a bold and just response to a great evil. As St Ambrose said, when he had melted down the eucharistic chalice to ransom enslaved Christians, “The glory of the sacraments is the redemption of captives.” And as he also wrote, “The Church has gold, not to store up, but to lay out, and to spend on those who need.” Many decent and well-meaning people will see such phrases as “atonement for enduring evils” or “the legacy of racialised inequality” and take them at face value. Who could oppose such lofty aims, and who could dispute the need for repair and healing in response to as grave an evil as chattel slavery?
There is a unique British genius, well-honed in the Church of England, in putting a superficially plausible and moralistic face on the most absurd and foolish of notions. Anyone who has read the “Healing, Repair and Justice” report has received a masterclass in this dark English art. It is based on a faulty premise, inconsistent and self-serving logic, and recommends solutions that are ethically dubious, ideologically slanted and extraordinarily wasteful.
The initial 2019 report has since been severely questioned in the press and academia, and research has already deconstructed or limited the initial claims. According to leading historians, the investments in the South Sea Company occurred over a short period, the scale of the slave trade was relatively small, and losses were substantial — in other words, there is no basis for saying that the Church of England materially benefited from or derived funds from slavery. But the train had already left the station. Under Justin Welby, the Church fully embraced the gospel of modern “racial justice” and guilt by association. It simply dismissed any criticism as inaccurate and bad faith, when it bothered engaging at all.
However, the factual problems with the policy are not the only ones, and the legal issues may be less easy for the Church to wave aside. In Parliament, Katie Lam MP recently quizzed the Second Church Estates Commissioner on whether the use of millions of pounds of Church funds on reparations fell within its charitable purpose. The response was ambiguous, saying only that “informal discussions” were being held with the Charity Commision.
When I spoke to Katie Lam, she expressed deep concerns about the use of these funds:
The Church Commissioners are supposed to oversee these funds on behalf of parishes; this money is for parish churches and their clergy. I don’t understand how spending it on anything else — no matter how worthwhile you think that might be — can be lawful.
If it is all above board, why do the Church Commissioners need to discuss it with the Charity Commission at all? Why does the Church need to seek “authority,” in the Bishop of Salisbury’s words, for something it is already allowed to do?
And why all this secrecy? If this is legitimate, the Church Commissioners should tell parishes, tell churchgoers and tell Parliament why they think it’s lawful, what discussions they’re having with the Charity Commission and why, and any legal advice they’ve received.
Getting clear answers out of the Church of England on such questions remains challenging. A spokesperson for the Church Commissioners for England told me that the new fund was likely “not within its charitable objects” and recognised that “we will need to seek regulatory authorisation”. It remains unclear just how far along in the “informal discussions” mentioned in parliament the commissioners are, or how confident they are that what they’re proposing will be legal. The more basic question of how morally legitimate it is to transfer £100 million and simply transfer it to a separate charitable body is also, of course, unanswered.
The details of what the HJR report sets out only deepened my concerns. The vast sum of £100 million that the Church of England reassures us is merely 1 per cent of its endowment and isn’t coming from parish churches, is by no means the end of the story. The report suggests that “The sum of £100 million is very small compared to the scale of racial disadvantage originating in African chattel enslavement.” It goes on to describe the £100 million as “a start”, emphasises that in its consultation “an overriding and consistent belief expressed by respondents was that £100 million is not enough”. It further sets out that “We recommend that the Church Commissioners deliver on their commitment of £100m as an initial allocation [emphasis theirs] from the endowment that may be re-evaluated and expanded in the future.”
Aside from holding out for more cash, if the recommendations of the report are fully implemented the Commissioners will be spending a lot more than £100 million. It is suggested that the Church Commissioners cover the entirety of the Fund’s operating expenses for the next decade, as well as giving substantial free services and support. Given the wide sphere of operation countenanced by the Fund, which is to act at once as a charitable grant making body, advocacy organisation, and investment group, those operating costs may be substantial. As a cherry on top, the report further suggests the Commissioners fund yet more in depth research into the Church’s alleged links with slavery.
The potential for this money to be squandered and misused is vast
Astonishingly, this is not the limit of the potential misuse and misallocation of Church funds proposed by the report. Whilst the Commissioners have been swift to denounce the claim that £1 billion could be diverted to reparations, emphasising that the number is a long term target based on attracting outside investors, this is far less clear in the report itself. In brief, its proposals extend to substantial changes in the way the Church of England invests. These include a racial quota for investments to go into black-owned businesses, racial quotas for social impact investment, cut-price rent and leases for black-owned businesses, as well as broad commitments to expanding “diversity” across the organisation. All of these commercially and ethically questionable policies could involve the entire £10.4 billion investment fund managed by the Church commissioners.
When you consider alongside these proposals that the fund is to be “initially housed within the Church Commissioners”, its operating costs paid by the Commissioners, and its investment team drawn from the ranks of the Commissioners, we begin to see a picture of a dangerously ambiguous organisation — one with the ability both to extract substantial funds and exert significant influence on the Church’s investments. The idea that it is a separate charity, on this evidence, looks like a legal myth designed to escape the limits of the Church Commissioners’ charitable objects. Should the Charity Commision allow the process to go ahead, the proposed structure would be dangerously unaccountable, hopelessly entangling and confusing the aims, staff and funds of the two charities.
And consider just who will be overseeing the fund. According to the report, the staffing of the organisation would be overseen by the Oversight Group, and its “investment committee” staffed in part by members of the Group. And just who are the members of this august body? Well, the Oversight Group is a “Black-led” committee appointed by the Church Commissioners to tell them what to do. It is chaired by the Bishop of Croydon Rosemarie Mallet, who moved from the Caribbean to become a “senior medical sociologist and ethno-cultural mental health research scientist”. Her academic research involved such hypotheses as the claim that the greater preponderance of psychosis and schizophrenia amongst Afro-Caribbeans in the UK could be attributed to the “stress of living in a white majority culture”. The vice chair, Geetha Tharmaratnam, also has interesting ideas, such as the notion that the £1 billion Fund target could be reached by donations from the wealthy descendants of slave owners.
The Oversight Group authored the Healing, Justice and Repair report without any form of peer review or external editorial oversight. Not only was their work unchecked, it is virtually uncheckable because it has no references or bibliography despite making a number of controversial claims. In a worst of all possible worlds scenario, the group has no real independence, having been appointed by the Church Commissioners, yet because of its notional autonomy has the ability to exercise power and influence without accountability.
But the risk to the Church of England’s waning public legitimacy is still greater
The Group, stuffed full of activists and post-colonial academics, has a strong set of ideological preconceptions at considerable variance with most people within the Church of England. One of the reports recommendations suggested, astonishingly, that the Church must “apologise publicly for denying that Black Africans are made in the image of God and for seeking to destroy diverse African traditional religious belief systems.” Not only does this badly mischaracterise historic Anglican theology – it appears to suggest that the Church of England must apologise for evangelisation in Africa altogether.
But, incredibly, the 41 recommendations of the report, including that one, were accepted in full by the Church Commissioners’ Board of Governors in November 2023. The Church of England has empowered a group of ideologues to spend over £100 million taken from funds meant for the upkeep of Anglican worship, and to have broad, poorly defined influence over the entire £10.4 billion investment fund. It is doing this within a context where the Archbishop of Canterbury has been forced to resign over the John Smyth scandal, and has yet to set out any plans to formally compensate his victims, many of whom may not be eligible for recompense under the National Redress Scheme, which has in any case yet to be implemented. The potential for this money to be squandered and misused is vast. But the risk to the Church of England’s waning public legitimacy is still greater. Will the next Archbishop of Canterbury have the courage to overcome institutional inertia and stop this disastrous project before it is too late?
