Signs of cracks in support for Bishop Hugh's vision for the Diocese of Truro

Significant dissent emerged at today's Truro Diocesan Synod in St Erme, Cornwall, when more than one in five elected representatives either voted to send the 2025 budget back for further work or abstained.

The budget passed comfortably eventually with 40 votes in favour. But nine people supported sending the budget back to the Diocesan Board of Finance (DBF) and three abstained.  This is the biggest challenge the Diocesan machine has received in recent years at the Synod. It is a sign that the dissent caused by controversial restructuring plans known as On The Way is growing, not receding.

The now approved 2025 budget is deeply concerning: it proposes further heavy drains on reserves and no increase in clergy numbers. Click here to read more.

Those who voted to send the budget back, or abstained, are not alone. Answers are needed, Bishop, please.  The budget draft states that the current drain on Diocesan reserves is not sustainable. How it will be financed in the future (other than through the increasing use of reserves)?

Other Dioceses (e.g. Exeter) have frozen their Net Zero objectives due to expense. As expenditure on this agenda has resulted (in part) in the sharply higher than expected deficit, should the Diocese of Truro not consider doing the same?  Bishop Hugh recently publicly stated his commitment to maintaining clergy numbers. Could he comment – and explain – the fact that the 2024 budget envisages a fall in the number of clergy?

The budget draft acknowledges that not all deaneries are ‘signed up’ to the new deanery plans.  Perhaps the acting Bishop will soon - somewhere- address the fact that he has previously said that, as the deanery plans were ‘drawn up’ by the deaneries, they therefore had their full commitment. And in view of this acknowledged discontent over the plans, how does the Bishop propose encouraging disillusioned congregations to keep up Mision and Ministry Fund (MMF) payments in these circumstances?

Despite repeated promises over the past few years by both Bishop Hugh and the former Bishop of Truro, central costs will rise yet further in 2025. Public tolerance is already stretched to the breaking point: the spectacle of a top-heavy bureaucracy at Church House, with ever increasing layers of part-time jobs dealing with deanery plan ‘implementation’ - e.g. the Director Change and Renewal and her team - is disheartening to many and discourages giving on a parish level.  How does the acting Bishop justify further central costs?

For readers who are interested in the fine detail in the budget, here are some specific questions that it raises:

·       Has the 66% increase in rental income from £240k to £400k been based on a property by property analysis of rental potential and what level of confidence does Diocesan management have that the increase will be achieved?

 ·       What cost benefit analysis has been carried out on the increased central roles created in the last few years?

 ·       What steps has Diocesan management taken to assure itself that increased head-office spending on new roles will deliver sufficient benefits to justify the additional costs?

·       What projects are being funded by the £444,967 allocation of LICF (Lowest Income Community Fund)?

·       Why does the 2025 budget only show an increase of five stipendiary clergy and curates, when the Synod papers report elsewhere that seventeen ministers have been recruited?

·       The clergy headcount numbers are bewilderingly difficult to understand and to reconcile. Can we have a definitive reconciliation of headcount showing opening and closing actual to reforecast numbers for 2024 and reforecast to budget numbers for 2025, showing leavers and joiners

 ·       The Acting Bishop’s note about Strategic Rural Deans was incomprehensible and impossible to reconcile with the brief comment in the budget introduction about halting recruitment of Dean of Area roles. Can we see a proper explanation of why the Dean of Area role has proved to be a failure, what lessons have been learnt from the inability to recruit to this role?

 ·       Why were the additional parsonage costs already in the 2024 budget given that the number of ministers recruited has not exceeded budget?

·       Before Synod approves any further substantial sums being laid out on Transforming Mission (c£560k is budgeted), can we see a thorough analysis of benefits delivered by TM?

 ·        Of the 15 extra Church House FTEs, how many are funded by external sources and how many by transfers of TDBF Reserves.

 ·       What exactly are the five change and renewal people in Church House doing? What quantified benefits will they deliver that justifies employing so many?

 ·       Church House staff costs are budgeted to increase by 21% 2024 to 2025. How can this increase possibly be justified?

 ·       The 2025 budget shows 61 posts for stipendiary clergy and curates whilst the budget also shows 61 FTEs employed at Church House. How can employing the same number of central staff as practising clergy be justified? (The problem is even worse if account is taken of the amount of time that oversight ministers and rural/area/strategic deans have to spend on non front line clergy roles).