The Bishop, the Revenue Man and the Cheeky Little Editor

An extraordinary saga is unfolding in England regarding the expenses of the Church of England's bishops.  Like all professionals, including professional clergy, bishops run up expenses.  The Inland Revenue accepts this, provided these expenses are incurred (to use the official formula) "wholly, necessarily and exclusively" in the course of their work.

Entertainment, for example, is a legitimate expense.  But the Revenue guidelines are quite tight.  According to a recent advisory note from a group of taxation consultants,
 

Thus entertaining at a business meeting is tax-deductable, whereas entertaining as mere 'entertainment' is not.  Payments could be made by a PCC to cover the latter, but these would count as income, and would themselves be taxable.  Naturally, expense claims can be scrutinized by the Inland Revenue so that, given the strictness of the guidelines above, there is very little chance of Anglican clergy running up inflated bills for entertainment - or any other item!

For some time, however, there have been rumours circulating about the expenses of the bishops.  These seem to have been exacerbated by the difficulty of obtaining figures in response to questions.  The body holding the figures is the Church Commissioners.  A bishop's expenses are paid not, as in the case of a vicar, by a local church council, but by the Church Commissioners who administer the historic assets and investment income of the Church of England.  The Commissioners are themselves subject to tight controls, including controls through Parliament, particularly since losing some £8,000 million via unwise investments in the 1980s.  It would thus be difficult to imagine them being guilty of ‘shady dealing'.

Until the late 1950s, the income from the Commissioners paid the majority of the wage bill for clergy in England.  However, the monetary inflation of the 1960s and 1970s, coupled with the inevitable decline of income from investments, meant that by the 1980s the contribution of the Commissioners to parish costs was being severely restricted.  In most Anglican dioceses it will be phased out by the year 2005.  From then on, the Commissioners' income will pay the pensions of clergy (who, extraordinarily, until recently had no contributory pension scheme!), the costs of Cathedral staff and the costs of the bishops - including, of course, their expenses.

The money administered by the Commissioners is no longer added to by public subscriptions, but equally it can no longer supplement public contributions to the local costs of the Church of England.  Put simply, money spent by the Commissioners on the bishops cannot be spent on parish clergy.  And this is undoubtedly is another reason why the figures for bishops' expenses have been so doggedly pursued.

Indeed, because the Commissioners are part of the structure of the legal establishment of the Church of England, questions about the bishops' expenses can be, and have been, asked in the English Parliament.  In January 1998, Stuart Bell, the Second Church Estates Commissioner, was asked about "the total cost of supporting the bishops within the Church of England".  His answer, recorded in Hansard (the edited account of proceedings in Parliament) was candid and detailed:

In 1996, the commissioners spent £13.7 million--10 per cent. of their total expenditure--on supporting episcopal ministry. That included the stipends, staff and administrative costs of the 44 diocesan
bishops and 66 suffragan bishops and the housing, including Lambeth Palace, of diocesan bishops. The housing of suffragan bishops is funded by dioceses, and full details of that expenditure are not held by the commissioners.
Mr Bell added, in response to a further question, that,
... the vast bulk of bishops' expenses - 84 per cent.- goes on staff salaries. The remaining 16 per cent. comprises office expenses, including equipment, sundries, resettlement costs, hospitality, travel and, for diocesan bishops, heating, lighting - not lightening [a Commissioner's joke] - cleaning and house and garden items. Almost every piece of legislation passed by the General Synod and approved by Parliament imposes some new responsibility on bishops. They need adequate office back-up if they are to fulfil their very wide range of responsibilities.
When another representative of the Commissioners was asked about the approval and monitoring of bishops' expenses, his answer was equally open and fulsome:
The Commissioners' spending on episcopal housing and expenses--both capital and revenue--is subject to close budgetary control. Budgets follow detailed consultation each year with the bishops and, in the case of episcopal housing, with See house surveyors-architects. The See house budgets are the minimum the Commissioners feel is consistent with the proper maintenance of those properties. Working expenses budgets aim to enable the bishops effectively to perform their duties. After initial
consideration by the Bishoprics Committee the budgets are recommended to both the General Purposes Committee and the Board of Governors for approval.

Expenditure is closely monitored, including a quarterly audit of those official expenses met directly by the bishops themselves. The Bishoprics Committee receives quarterly reports outlining the capital and revenue position and separate reports on items of major expenditure.

In the face of similar requests, the Commissioners insisted that everything was ‘above board'.  Yet the actual figures continued to be impossible to obtain - until, that is, they were leaked.  This leak followed a consultation between the bishops and the Church Commissioners at which a substantial paper was circulated, not only listing the expenses of the bishops but pointing out what a large part of the Commissioners' expenses they accounted for.

The leaked copy of this document first reached the hands of Jonathan Petre, a journalist on the English Sunday Telegraph.  Petre subsequently wrote an article titled 'Secret expenses of Britain's bishops', which described the figures it contained as "some of the most closely guarded in the Church".  Alongside this, there also appeared a chart showing the ‘highest and lowest spenders', which is reproduced below (NB: the Archbishops of Canterbury and York are not included in this chart).
 
 
. Diocesan Bishops, the Top 10 Spenders - Their  Official Expenses,1997 . .
Total 
£		 House & garden Heating, lighting & Cleaning Secs & Chaplains Office Travel Drivers Hospitality Sundries
1 138,713 2,256 6,068 79,532 16,479 3,627 15,758 8,736 6,257
2 110,023 2,985 12,326 39,880 19,481 9,620 12,952 5,032 7,746
3 104,214 2,736 2,146 41,264 21,695 5,585 19,888 5,185 5,695
4 99,842 1,133 2,756 47,321 11,882 4,436 14,268 11,255 6,791
5 95,512 1,948 2,208 42,684 18,097 11.368 12,797 4,727 1,682
6 93,363 1,736 2,857 36,043 30,328 18,698 0 2,087 1,614
7 93,115 1,629 5,882 40,536 13,126 10340 13,247 5,999 2,355
8 90,920 2,454 3,368 39,325 16,544 5,190 8,591 9,273 6,175
9 90,136 3,140 5,706 45,095 10,400 6,534 9,830 4,803 4,629
10 89,762 2,872 6,604 48,840 10,597 4,163 13,315 3,093 278
. The  Bottom  5  Spenders . . . . .
5 55495 889 2,056 36,690 7,984 3,983 0 3,515 4,516
4 54,447 2,158 2,186 30,565 8,599 2,740 14,605 3,654 2,100
3 46,176 2,111 4,000 19,298 8,262 1,552 0 3,183 7,770
2 42,079 1,270 1,923 18,963 5,581 4,214 1,320 3,199 5,610
1 34,745 433 2,966 15,997 2,811 11,027 0 1,629 (118)

 

As can be seen from this chart, however, no names - not even the names of dioceses - are attached to the figures (which also include the non-diocesan bishops, generally known as suffragans).  Such is the attitude of secrecy surrounding these figures that at their consultations with the Church Commissioners even the bishops themselves did not know whose expenses were whose.  The only figures they would be able to identify were their own.  This may, of course, have been designed to spare the blushes of individuals - though whether through the embarrassment of the high spenders or the humility of the low spenders must also be a matter of speculation.

The figures published by the Sunday Telegraph could, of course, be regarded as ‘public domain'.  Indeed, they are freely available on the Internet.  Certainly, no action was taken by the Church Commissioners, though it was suspected that they were none too pleased.  However, a copy of the same Commissioner's document also found its way to the editors of a small journal called New Directions.  This is published by a slightly disgruntled group opposed to certain trends in the Church of England, specifically the ordination of women.  At its best, New Directions is a kind of Anglican Private Eye, a famous satirical journal dating back to the 1960s and often the subject of court action.

Robbie Low, a member of the editorial staff at New Directions, subsequently wrote an article on the bishops' expenses which appeared in the October edition.  However, whereas (as can be seen) the Sunday Telegraph published only the top ten and bottom five figures from the Commissioners' document, the editorial page of the same edition of New Directions offered to send the entire set of figures to members of the Church of England's General Synod, or anyone else who sent them a cheque for £5 made out to a children's charity.

This was, of course, a mischievous suggestion.  However, the response from the Church Commissioners was nothing short of Draconian.  The week following publication, a letter was received by the editor of New Directions from solicitors acting for the Commissioners threatening her with court action under the Data Protection Act.  This was followed, within 72 hours, by a demand for a reply and an undertaking that the leaked figures would not be released.  In the face of these threats, the editor reluctantly complied.

There thus resulted the extraordinary situation of a church body threatening to take action against a church publication for releasing church expenditure figures to church members.  The legal justification for this has not been tested.  The moral justification, however, defies belief.  Indeed, such an action is (more or less) forbidden by the Bible:
 

In a recent edition of the Church Times (a rather more sedate Anglican publication than New Directions) a spokesman for the Commissioners justified their action as follows:
  Given there is no suggestions of ‘fiddling', however, the wonder must be why the Commissioners feel so sensitive about figures, many of which have already been released.  Their reason, given by the spokesman, is that, Quite so.  But the obvious answer, given the interest of church members in this matter, is to publish the figures officially.  As has been observed, no individual can be identified by the figures, and in any case they are all legitimate claims, ratified by the Inland Revenue.   It is therefore hard to imagine why the figures continue to be treated as if they were state secrets.

The bishop of Blackburn, in his address to his Diocesan Synod on the 12th June this year, said he hoped that the Archbishops' Commission on Bishops' Expenses would answer "deliberate misinformation" which he felt was being aired by some people.  Yet that anxiety could easily be addrssed by making public true information.  Similarly,  in January the bishop of Exeter complained that:
 

Bishops' expenses are a favourite target [of the media]; so easy to add them up end present a misleading picture; so easy not to mention that in any other organisation's accounts the office cleaning, travel on duty, communications costs, would be shown as those of the firm and not of the individual department heads.
Yet in a business, the accounts are available to the shareholders and in a charity they are available to the public.  There is therefore no conceivable reason, particularly taking into account that lack of illegality or immorality, why the expense of bishops should not be made public knowledge.

It must be emphasised their expenses do not represent "bishops' perks", although they do contribute to a lifestyle some might question for servants of the church.  They are part of the real and entirely legal costs of running the Church of England.  Provided they are justifiable, they should no more be a matter of embarrassment than the costs of running Sainsburys or Woolworths.  Indeed, a document recently published by the Commissioners themselves (Called to be a Bishop), points out that compared with a Member of Parliament on £47,000 a bishop is paid under £30,000.  This document also notes that the average budgetted office cost for a bishop is £7,800 per annum, the average spent on travel is £5,100 and the average spent on hospitality is £4,750.  (The maximum and minimum in the figures released by the Sunday Telegraph are £30,328 and £2,811 on the office, £18,698 and £1,552 on travel [the first figure being from a bishop who spends nothing on a driver], and £11,255 and £1,276 on hospitality.)
 

Given that so much is already public knowledge, and that the Commissioners are so anxious to allay suspicions, we can only hope that eventually everyone will see reason, that the rest of these figures are made available.
 

In the interests of this, I would invite Anglican bishops voluntarily to make their own figures public.  Indeed, any bishop who wishes to submit them in the form given in the Sunday Telegraph above can have them posted on this website!

John Richardson
20 November 1999

(This article may be freely reproduced)

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