This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
The top-down managerialism and centralised, bureaucratic control of money by the Church of England’s elite have demoralised many faithful Anglicans. According to analysis by Save the Parish, by 2023 only 14 per cent of head office total Church investment income went directly to parishes.
Now there is Project Spire, the Church Commissioners’ commitment of £100 million to “impact investments” in “communities affected by historic transatlantic chattel slavery”, grants made “through a reparative and intersectional lens” and perpetual research into historic Anglican links to slavery.
Project Spire was launched in January 2023 on the basis that, 300 years ago, the Church Commissioners’ predecessor, Queen Anne’s Bounty, by its association with the South Sea Company, had been complicit in the slave trade and, over time, had also received benefactions from people “likely” to have been “linked” to it.
The Church Commissioners’ original case may be said to be threadbare. An article in this issue of The Critic (“The myth of Church-sponsored slavery”) shows that Queen Anne’s Bounty did not profit by investing in the slave trade. Furthermore, the benefactors whose gifts “may potentially have been linked” to slavery had been identified using vague criteria.
Authoritative critiques of the historical understanding on which the project is founded have been met with repetition rather than detailed engagement with the points made. The rationale for this approach has been explained in correspondence with me in these terms: “We are … especially careful to not publicly respond to, and thereby expose more people to, arguments that are distasteful and offensive to some people”.
How could something so contentious and so divisive, however well meant, be within the Church Commissioners’ charitable purposes?
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At Project Spire’s launch, the commitment was unqualified (except as to detail) and there was no suggestion that delivery might not be possible. An Oversight Group was appointed to “shape, inform and oversee” the process which had been decided upon. However, the technical legal means of delivery had not then been resolved. It is now two and half years since November 2022, when the decision committing the Church Commissioners to Project Spire was made. What has been going on?
Finding the answer vague, I then asked 11 specific questions
I first made enquiry on 25 September last year, receiving no response until 21 November. Finding the answer vague, I then asked 11 specific questions, including this: “Is the problem essentially that the project is, in reality, outwith [the Church Commissioners’] charitable purposes/statutory powers and duties?” I was told, in unspecific terms, that there were “technical issues” which I had identified, and, working with the Charity Commission, they would comply with their legal obligations, recognising “that they would require authorisation to apply their funds for the purposes of their response to Project Spire”.
On 30 March this year, I submitted 39 questions which were not answered until 19 May. Reciting the questions and answers in full is beyond the scope of this article; I have suggested that, in the interests of transparency, the questions and answers be posted online — perhaps, on the dedicated “Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice” website.
This response refers to many “engagement events and opportunities … designed for and targeted at Church audiences”, outreach connecting “key groups”, bespoke sessions for General Synod members, briefings and workshops engaging over 2,000 people, numerous discussions at diocesan, deanery and parish level and a “Tell us what you think” link on the Church of England website, where extensive FAQs are also to be found. These are said to have taken place after the project had been launched.
The Church Commissioners have been in discussions with the Charity Commission, which has provided me with a chronology of those discussions as the result of an FOI request. By this, in May 2024, the Church Commissioners were proposing to ask the Charity Commission to authorise them to set up a new charity and provide it with ex gratia funding, notwithstanding their limited legal powers.
By section 106 of the Charities Act 2011, the Charity Commission may authorise such funding on the basis of a believed moral obligation. It seems that this plan (with others) had been under consideration since July the previous year. These proposals were confirmed by Marsha de Cordova, the Second Church Estates Commissioner, an MP who speaks for the Church Commissioners, as late as 6 May this year (though, just a month before, she had said that “regulatory approvals” only “may be required”).
The reply to my 21st question out of 39, is this: “The Board does not believe its response to the research findings, to establish a Fund for Healing, Repair and Justice falls within its objects; and hence we are in the middle of a process with our regulators to obtain the appropriate regulatory authorisations which we require to undertake our proposed response.” The first part of this answer could have been given to me six months ago.
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The Bishop of Salisbury, speaking for the Church Commissioners, has accepted that this approach is novel. It may be asked how the Church Commissioners may set up a charity for the purpose of doing something they could not do themselves. It may also be asked how the Church Commissioners might reasonably maintain an unequivocal moral obligation to pursue a project, using colossal sums which they look after for others, for a contested purpose, beyond the intentions of donors and on the basis of controversial historical understanding.
I am assured that the Charity Commission will deal with any applications rigorously and that the success rate for setting up a new charity is only 53 per cent. Answer 19 out of 39 said this: “The next step is for the Board of Governors of the Church Commissioners to consider whether it wishes to establish a new charitable fund and to seek regulatory authorisation to settle funds on that new charity.”
The Church Commissioners have pursued Project Spire, spending huge sums (initially, £307,000 just on forensic accountants), devoting to it many hours of staff time and raising expectations that it was bound to happen. So far as I am aware, it has not been suggested before that they might, after all, decide not to make the applications which are necessary to give effect to the project; nor has it been made clear that the applications, innovative and contested as they would be, might fail.
