Note from Nazir

15 March 2024

The audit report pages on our website are getting increasingly full. This is as it should be – we are first and foremost a regulator – so publishing the results of safeguarding audits  is, in a nutshell, is what we are here for.

In many ways our job is straightforward – we publish what we find- after scrutiny against the –eight national safeguarding standards  of safeguarding today in the Catholic Church.

But as I say often on these pages, safeguarding is about people. Preventing future harm is never straightforward. It is complex. And sometimes reflecting the past is painful.

We have become all too aware recently of the impact the publication of our reports has on people, particularly victims and survivors of church-related abuse.  We know that what our auditors find today does not always reflect the personal experience of some individuals.  The tension is a difficult one.  We want to be sensitive to the huge hurt, and sometimes huge injustice, of the past. But more than anything we want to ensure it doesn’t happen again. So, we need to allow space for improvement, opportunity to drive up standards, and we must acknowledge what is being done right in safeguarding today – so we can move on with our prevention agenda.

At the CSSA we want to ensure that we don’t just reflect the voice of survivors, but we allow space for them to speak directly. We’re pleased to be growing our survivor reference panel with new members.  And I hope to hand over the editorial reigns for their views soon. We’ve learnt much from our survivor reference panel and we are acting on what we have heard. Particularly around audits. More on this to come.

The CSSA audit team are starting to look ahead to the completion of their baseline audits of dioceses, and to audits of religious life groups.  The baselines have been about the starting point, the number one priority – whether safeguarding is at a level today where people are being kept as safe as possible. But as the CSSA moves to the next stage of audit – our expectations grow – expectations of the Catholic Church and expectations of ourselves.

So, there has never been a better time for survivors to both scrutinise our process, speak of what they find, and work with us towards an even more robust future in preventing harm.

I look forward to commenting more about some of the developments around safeguarding audits soon.

Nazir Afzal, OBE, Chair, CSSA