UNITED KINGDOM
The Tablet
20 March 2014 by Christopher Lamb and Elena Curti
The Church’s safeguarding office is to be relocated from Birmingham into the headquarters of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales at Eccleston Square in central London.
The Catholic Safeguarding Advisory Service (CSAS) will move to London before the lease expires on its current offices in February 2015. In a statement, the trustees for the Catholic Trust for England and Wales (the legal entity of the Bishops’ Conference) said the relocation will fulfill recommendations of the 2007 Cumberlege Commission, which called for CSAS to be fully integrated into mainstream church structures.
CSAS is funded by the bishops’ conference and advises the Church on child protection. In recent years it has completed safeguarding audits of all 22 dioceses in England and Wales. Its work is overseen by the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission (NCSC), which lists the same Birmingham address as CSAS on its website.
Both organisations replaced the fully independent Catholic Office for Child Protection and Vulnerable Adults (Copca) that was set up in compliance with the recommendations of the Nolan Report of 2001.
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