THE Bishop of Lichfield, Dr Michael Ipgrave, was “clearly correct” in taking no further action against the Revd Tim Hastie-Smith concerning the handling of reports about John Smyth’s abusive behaviour, the Church of England’s President of Tribunals, Lord Justice Males, has ruled.
“The critical point, as it seems to me, is that the respondent did report appropriately the disclosures which were made to him,” the decision, published last month, states. “The respondent has been the subject of much unfavourable criticism. Now that the complaint against him has been fully investigated, it is apparent that this criticism was unfounded.”
In February, it was announced that ten members of the clergy could be subject to disciplinary proceedings in connection with the abuse by Smyth, if the President of Tribunals permitted the National Safeguarding Team (NST) to bring complaints under the Clergy Discipline Measure (CDM) out of time (News, 28 February). In June, the NST announced that it had received permission in seven out of the ten cases — including that of Mr Hastie-Smith, Team Vicar in the South Cotswolds Team Ministry (News, 6 June).
Mr Hastie-Smith was national director of the Scripture Union (SU) from 2010 to 2019. He was informed about “non-recent abuse disclosures” in 2014 and has said that he must have been “grotesquely insensitive” or “extraordinarily incurious” not to have known about the abuse earlier. He told the then President of the SU, the Rt Revd Paul Butler, in 2015.
The SU did not run the camps organised by the Iwerne Trust (chaired for a time by Smyth, who also served as a leader on its holiday camps for young people), but employed three of the staff at Iwerne and supported its operations. Smyth was also a SU trustee.
The complaint against Mr Hastie-Smith was delegated to Dr Ipgrave by the Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek. In his answer, Mr Hastie-Smith said that he had referred the reports about Smyth both to the SU safeguarding lead and to Bishop Butler. It was, he said, the responsibility of the safeguarding lead to ensure that a disclosure was made to the appropriate authorities. He had been been informed that the matter had already been reported to a number of police forces as well as the Church of England’s National Safeguarding Adviser. The SU board had agreed with the approach being taken, he said. He had been frustrated that the various police forces were not taking the matter forward.
In his decision, taken in October, Dr Ipgrave concluded that Mr Hastie-Smith had “followed proper safeguarding procedures in a clear and consistent way” and demonstrated a “conscientious approach”. His actions “reflected a genuine concern for the welfare of victims of John Smyth, that the evidence showed that multiple police forces were already informed about the allegations against Smyth, and that the respondent had no additional information that could have materially advanced the police investigations.”
Dr Ipgrave’s decision was referred to Lord Justice Males by the national safeguarding director, Alex Kubeyinje. The complaint against Mr Hastie-Smith was that his response to the reports had been inadequate. There had been, Mr Kubeyinje argued, a number of errors in the Bishop’s decision.
In his response, upholding Dr Ipgrave’s decision, the judge said that the “necessary clarity” that he had sought from Mr Kubeyinje about what more Mr Tim Hastie-Smith should have done had not been provided.
The judge’s decision includes a quotation from Mr Hastie-Smith’s answer to the complaint: “The last few years have been extraordinarily traumatic and painful. Writing this statement has been cathartic and I have an unexpected gratitude for the opportunity to tell my side of the story.”
Responding to the decision, a Smyth survivor, Graham, highlighted the conclusion of Keith Makin in his report on the Smyth case, that Archbishop Welby had a “personal and moral responsibility” to ensure that action was taken in response to disclosures of the abuse. The same applied to Mr Hastie-Smith, given his connections to Smyth and the survivors through Cambridge University and the Iwerne camps, Graham suggested. Almost nine years after the Channel 4 exposé, and almost 14 after he had first made disclosures, he found it “staggering that . . . in effect no one has been held to account”.
“The Church has got to codify, whether through mandatory reporting or new policy documents, what people’s obligations are when they get a disclosure of abuse,” he said.
