CLERGY sacked by the Church of England will be able to take their bishops to employment tribunals, under proposed changes to church law agreed by the General Synod last night.

Legislation is now to be drawn up to allow the 3,500 clergy who do not have the protection of a freehold, or job for life, to sue for unfair dismissal. At present these clergy, more than a third of the stipendiary priests in the Church of England, are merely licensed by their bishops and can be sacked at the end of their terms of office or have their licence withdrawn without redress to the secular courts.

To help parishes suffering under the ministrations of incompetent, lazy or merely objectionable clergy, the Church is also to introduce “capability procedures”. These procedures, the synod was told, will apply to the few clergy who are “idle or incompetent” or where the job is being done but pastoral relationships are breaking down because of an “abrasive personality”.

Such incidents might include a failure to take a service or a refusal to have anything to do with the local school or to support others involved with the school. Clergy dismissed under this procedure would also have the right of appeal to an employment tribunal.

David McClean, a lay synod member and law professor at Sheffield University who chaired the working party that reviewed clergy terms of service, said the report confronted issues before the Church for centuries: “In the 18th century there were many cases of assistant curates bundled out of office at a few days’ notice to make way for a poor relation of the squire,” he said.

The first Lambeth Conference, in 1867, had received a petition about the plight of unbeneficed clergy, citing their inadequate protection and lack of representation. Nothing of “great substance” had been done since then to help those clergy not protected by the freehold, in spite of a proliferation of new categories of clergy such as team rectors, team vicars and leasehold canonries who are not beneficed clergy.

Professor McClean said: “The notion of dismissal is irrelevant to someone with the freehold, but it can and does happen to others, in the guise of revocation of a licence or non-renewal at the expiry of a fixed-term or temporary appointment. There is the possibility of injustice, and if it occurs there is no redress.”

The Bishop of Rochester, the Right Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, said: “The question is whether a Christian should go to court against another Christian or Christian body. Christians should never be sanguine about the use of secular courts unless it is absolutely necessary.”

The Rev Simon Cox, Rector of All Hallows, Bispham, in Blackburn Diocese, said the capability procedures could lead to confusion. “It begins to look as if they (clergy) are accountable to multiple bodies and individuals who may have conflicting agendas.” Clergy were already overworking, he said.

The Rev David Felix, Vicar of All Saints Daresbury in the Chester Diocese, who formerly worked as a solicitor specialising in employment law, said: “Salvation does not lie in the hands of the employment tribunal. As any lawyer will tell you, as soon as you go through the door to a tribunal or court you have lost your case.” The litigant was no longer in control of their destiny, he said. “A third party will decide.”

Therefore, he argued, the system for the capability procedure must be open, honest and above reproach, because this was an area that the parties could remain in control of before seeking to go to law.

The Rev Stephen Trott, Rector of Pitsford with Boughton in the Peterborough Diocese, warmly supported the concept of “common tenure” to give freehold-type protection to unbeneficed clergy but called for more radical change. The Church’s exemption from the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act should be removed, he said.

In law, all clergy are designated “office-holders” rather than “employees” of the Church, meaning that when dismissed they have no protection under employment law.

One option that has been considered is to make clergy employees like most people in the secular world, although most clergy do not want this, according to one recent survey.

It is also felt that to make clergy employees would not be appropriate because of the spiritual, liturgical and doctrinal issues with which the clergy deal. Clergy without freehold but with “common tenure” would be able to remain in post until retirement age.

At present 5,500 clergy including bishops, deans and archdeacons enjoy the protection of freehold, which means that they cannot be dismissed from a post before retirement. The increase in licensed clergy coincided with financial crises of the Church and the dwind-ling number of full-time stipendiary priests. Forcing clergy to operate on licences gives bishops flexibility when reorganising parishes, cutting numbers and ousting misfits.

The Church began its review after the Government asked in 2002 for comment on plans to confer employment rights on “atypical” workers, who are not technically employees. The aim now is to confer upon clergy the employment rights set out in the Employment Relations Act, 1999, except where the rights are not applicable, such as the right not to work on Sunday.

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