A DEBATE about the mechanics of increasing the clergy pension — currently set at an “indefensible, ungodly, and unchristian” level — must not delay agreement on the moral course of action, a Southwark priest who has helped to organise concerned clergy said on Wednesday.
“This is a justice issue,” the Vicar of the Ascension, Balham Hill, the Revd Marcus Gibbs, said. “We take the decision to do the right thing — and that requires leadership — and then we work out how to do it. . . We need to start with the moral imperative.”
Mr Gibbs, who is the Area Dean of Tooting, has gathered more than 700 signatories to a letter to the Church Times this week calling for “urgent and decisive action on clergy pensions”. In the past three weeks, more than 1800 people have joined a Clergy Pension Action group on Facebook.
Among the signatories is the Revd Dr Ian Paul, an NSM at St Nicholas’s, Nottingham, and a member of the Archbishops’ Council, who, in February last year, brought a Private Member’s Motion to the General Synod which called on the Archbishops’ Council, the Pensions Board, and the Church Commissioners to enable the restoration of the clergy pension to its pre-2011 benefit level (News, 16 February 2024). This would include reversing the reduction of the pension from two-thirds of the National Minimum Stipend (NMS) to half.
During the debate, he accepted an amendment from the chair of the Archbishops’ Council’s Finance Committee, Carl Hughes, which called on the three bodies to “work together with dioceses to explore ways in which the level of clergy pensions and stipends might be improved in a sustainable manner” (News, 1 March 2024).
At last month’s meeting of the Synod, Mr Hughes presented a package from the Diocesan Finances Review for the consideration of the Triennium Funding Working Group that includes an increase in the NMS to catch up inflation since 2011, which will also uplift the starting pension rate (News, 31 January).
This week’s letter from clergy describes this response as “merely a drop in the ocean” and argues that restoration to pre-2011 levels is a “minimum” requirement. “If a stipend is considered the minimum necessary to live in active ministry, why is it deemed acceptable for clergy to receive a fraction of that amount in retirement without housing provision?”
In his own letter this week, Mr Hughes expresses sympathy for clergy concerns and says that there may be “further opportunities to improve pensions”. But he warns against “adding to the financial pressures on dioceses and parishes”.
The position of the clergy signatories — echoing that of Dr Paul — is that it is the Commissioners — who now preside over assets of £10.4 billion — who should meet the cost of increasing the pension. The Church’s pension scheme is in surplus for the first time. The 2007 General Synod motion that lowered the benefit rate included a clause requesting the Archbishops’ Council, “in the event that the pensions climate improves sufficiently, to bring forward recommendations to the Synod, after consultation with the Pensions Board and the Church Commissioners, with a view to restoring pension level”.
It has been calculated that diocesan boards of finance could have gained £2.6 billion if they had invested the sums they have contributed to clergy pensions since responsibility was transferred to them from the Commissioners in 1998 (News, 31 January).
The response from the Diocesan Finances Review, presented by Mr Hughes, was not an adequate response to Dr Paul’s motion, which had commanded “so much support” in the Synod, Mr Gibbs said this week. The amended motion had contained too many “weasel words”, and the clergy pension demanded a separate response rather than being “packaged together with all the other objectives”.
The Church was guilty of hypocrisy, he suggested: “Here we are preaching justice and morality and integrity, and calling out in the House of Lords people who are not doing things correctly, and we are not even looking after our own people.” He spoke of a retired friend in his eighties, still serving in his parish church, who had had to resort to using a foodbank. The pension level militated against the drive to grow vocations from working-class backgrounds, he said (News, 6 October 2023).
Emphasising that he was speaking in a personal capacity, he described being sent into a “tailspin” on learning, on turning 50, that, if he retired at 68, after 30 years of ministry, he would be entitled to £9400 a year. “I initially thought there had been a mistake.” He had felt “really alone,” he said, and “quite ashamed” to talk about his concerns. “You feel as if you are not trusting God enough.”
He has calculated that a priest who starts ministry at 26 and retires at 68 will retire on £13,370. The Synod’s secretary-general, William Nye, has argued that clergy will also be entitled to the state pension, and that that combined sum will, in many instances, exceed the NMS.
