Whatever Happened to Jay?

A depressing part of attending the recent General Synod debate was the dawning realisation that the expensive, thorough and prescriptive report, Future of Church Safeguarding, produced by Baroness Jay 2 years ago has been all but forgotten, if members ever read it in the first place. After a year, General Synod decided that one of its key recommendations - making safeguarding investigation, etc, independent, was 'not what we want'. But a small step was taken at the recent Synod with the approval of a proposal to introduce a new oversight body (Organisation B in the Jay report). So, whilst the mills of the Church of England have almost ground to a halt, there might yet be hope.

All files can be accessed without downloading here (Wix doesn't allow us to do this on a Blog post so the links below are for downloading the files.)

1. We attempted to build Faithful Responsibility in the light of Jay, IICSA, Wilkinson, Makin, etc., though we recognised the advantages of a measure of localism in case management. This document looks at how well Faithful Responsibility meets Jay's recommendations. In summary, it lacks a few details and is weak on Respondent care:

Jay vs Faithful Responsibility Analysis.pdf

Download PDF • 121KB

This file looks at how well the Safeguarding Structures Programme Board's paper GS2429 matches the Jay Report's (Future Of Church Safeguarding) recommendations, noting that this was only their first paper and we assume that more will follow to fill in the gaps.  

From our analysis, GS2429 only really addresses Section 5B of the Jay Model (Organisation B) and it has good agreement with this. What is not clear to us is how the Board intend to proceed with the Operations side. One analysis suggests that operations will be integrated into the ISA - which is not going to be well-received by the advocates for diocesan control - and another analysis suggests that the ISA will be making final determinations. Our position is that ALL reporting, triaging, investigation and decision making must be independent of church hierarchy (from PSO to ABC).  

Jay vs GS2429.pdf

Download PDF • 107KB