Church Commissioners for England

Fabric is the same venue which temporarily lost its licence in 2016 after the drug-related deaths of two people attending the club before winning it back on appeal.

And separately, the church commissioners, the body that manages the church endowment fund, have committed £100 million with the ambition for the wider fund to grow to £1 billion.

to a reparations fund for the slave trade.

Now, I made a whole video about this one because it deserves its own treatment, and you can watch that here.

But here's the thing that I want you to see, because this is the part that almost nobody online is actually saying.

Every one of those stories comes from a different person in a different building making a different decision.

Lambeth Palace, a single parish rector in Leeds, a cathedral chapter negotiating a commercial contract, the church commissioners managing the church's endowment fund.

four separate failures of judgment being reported and repeated as if they are one thing with one world behind it and that matters because the church of england isn't an organization with a single voice it's around 12 000 parishes with tens of thousands of clergy and lay leaders serving it most of whom has never met the archbishop have no say over what a cathedral signs and And we're never asked whether their trust fund should be spent this particular way.

Do we have anybody who's interested in this, who are accountants, who are auditors, who understand this thing? And a group came forward, a number of people came forward, and they set up a thing that we called the Financial Scrutiny Committee, and they started delving into the finances of the Church of England.

And... created a map of the whole economy of the Church of England from what little parishes produce and need up to the vast endowments of the church commissioners.

And we presented this in one of the first synods.

And the deputy chief finance officer of the Church of England came up and said, where did you get these figures from? And we said, well, your accounts.

And if we want to be even more contentious, it's over 17 billion.

So the Church of England is not a poor church.

The Church of England has endowments that have been left by previous generations that are scattered in three different places, the largest of which sits with the church commissioners, and the endowment stands at £11.6 billion.

It was substantially left by Queen Anne in Queen Anne's Bounty, although there was also the ecclesiastical commissioners, which drew together a number of other assets, both of which were set up to quote the Act, for the provision of the cure of souls in parishes where such assistance is most required.

So here it is.

171 people wrote formal objections to the church commissioners and 23 wrote in support and i need to correct something here because in the video series i got something wrong and somebody wrote to tell me those objections did not all come from cornwall they came from across the country now i could treat that as a weakness in this case but i think it is actually the opposite Because people who have never set foot in Carrier Deanery read what was being proposed for 22 places of worship in one corner of Cornwall and they recognised it.

They have seen the same way for work.

They know what is coming.

Real villages, real churchyards, real people who have been baptised and married and buried in those buildings for a thousand years.

And here is where it gets serious because the church is not poor.

The church commissioners own endowment stands at eleven point six billion pounds.

All of the diocese hold on top of that another £6 billion.

yeah I think that's that's it I was like intrigued by the use of that word too and I think it's often seen as a negative and it's a no not was he assertive but actually I like the fact that you're reclaiming it I do love that it's So, Eve, and in your professional life, when did you first realise that the way things are weren't good?

I had a very peculiar first job in theology at university and then got a job as a sort of fasting graduate trainee person for an outfit called the Church Commissioners for England, which is essentially an enormous fund manager with a few other sort of churchy things attached.

And I was seconded to a policy unit to help a big governance review.

And it was a very classic sort of charity sector thing where you have a lot of the great and the good on a committee and you have some very junior people staffing it.

And then you're lucky enough, obviously, you started working for a company called Crystal, which is part of S&P.

you stayed there for a few years and then obviously afterwards you were able to find a quantitative research strategist role with the church of church commissioners what what do you think enabled you to make the transition from those two companies and uh did you like the fact that that actually brought you closer to the investment decision making process

So actually, I don't think there was a lot of transition apart from moving house.

Basically, in Kryzla, I was like an offshore quant working with Bank of America.