Choir leaders, church wardens and bell ringers who refuse to
submit to criminal records checks will no longer be welcome, the Archbishop of
Canterbury warned last night.
All church volunteers
who come into contact with children including Sunday school teachers and people
running parent and toddler groups now face checks by the Criminal Records
Bureau (CRB).
Flower arrangers,
refreshment stall staff and Church sidesmen could also face checks if they have
“substantial” contact with children.
The Most Rev Justin
Welby warned that the Church is now being “utterly ruthless” in its approach to
CRB checks despite saying that cases of abuse are now “negligible”.
In his most outspoken
comments on the issue since his appointment earlier this year, the Archbishop
said that volunteers refusing checks are being told: “You can’t come to
church”.
A source close to the
Archbishop last night insisted that people who refuse the checks will not be
banned from services, but would be prevented from volunteering or working for
the organisation.
"The whole
structure has changed,” the Archbishop said in an interview with Total Politics
magazine. “I know a safeguarding officer who went into a very traditional
church recently…a number of people who had been members of the church for years
and years and years, refusing to fill out the CRB forms.
“And they said, 'Well
were not going to do it, we've been members of this church for 50 or 60 years',
and the safeguarding officer said, 'Fine, don’t do it, but you can’t come to
church’.”
The Archbishop’s
comments come after a series of cases where volunteers including flower
arrangers complained about “overzealous” CRB checks.
Critics have warned
that the strict checks are deterring and demoralising church workers across the
country.
The Archbishop said
that he understood why an “elderly woman” who had served her church with
“dedication and love” for 40 years would “grumble” about the enforced CRB
checks.
“We are being utterly
ruthless,” he said. “You often understand why people grumble…But it's changing
the culture and that has effectively largely happened across the church from
about five or six to ten years ago. We really started turning the screw. And
we're tightening up the whole time.”
The Archbishop said
that the Church is demanding the checks because it is “turning the screw” on
suspected child abusers.
Asked whether the
Church has come through the worst of the revelations about historical cases of
abuse, the Archbishop said: “No. We’re not.”
“We got it wrong,” he
said. “Loads of other people did but that’s not an excuse. We got it wrong over
many years when society had a different view of these things.
“Post-Savile, quite
rightly – I'm not complaining about this, quite the reverse, I think it's
excellent – the police and social services are going back, often over half a
century, and seeing where did they get it wrong.
“Are there survivors
of abuse still around who need to have their voices heard? And so there will be
cases, some of which go back for 40, 50 years in which people were overlooked
and ignored. Utterly inexcusable. So that means quite a bit of stuff will go on
coming out.”
Professor Frank
Furedi, a sociologist who works for the University of Kent, warned that the
increase in CRB checks “fosters a climate of suspicion” in the Church.
“It is particularly
said when this occurs in the context of volunteering and particularly in an
organisation founded on an ethos of faith and service,” he said.
“The real damage is
not so much the decline in volunteering it can cause… [but that] it fosters a
climate of suspicion which is precisely what the Archbishop wants to avoid.”
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