Message from the Church of England Pensions Board
Dear colleagues,
We are writing to invite you to join the conversation about how the Church might best enable choice for clergy about their future retirement housing plans.
We recognise that this invitation might feel slightly odd, given you are just right at the start of your ordained ministry journey and retirement is probably the last thing on your mind. However, the ideas published just last week look at financial and retirement planning throughout ministry. These ideas invite a rethink on how the Church offers support with retirement housing, to ensure services are best suited to the diversity of ministry experience in the future and generationally sustainable for the Church.
In summary, we think there is an opportunity for the Church to shift from just focusing on one form of support at one point in the journey (i.e. directly provided retirement housing), to more services, practical help, and guidance at different stages of ministry, that enable choice and put individuals in the driving seat of their retirement housing plan.
Our ideas are set out here at www.churchofengland.org/enablingchoice.
We would welcome your feedback on these ideas.
How to offer your views
To join the conversation, you can:
- Review the ideas at www.churchofengland.org/enablingchoice and respond to the questions by 31 January 2024
- Join one of our planned webinars, on Wednesday 6 December or Thursday 14 December, where you can hear more about this from Board colleagues and ask questions. You can find out more about this at the link above.
What will happen with your feedback?
How many of these ideas can be taken forward depends firstly on whether the ideas resonate and will genuinely help future clergy cohorts. Your feedback will help us determine this.
Moreover, specific proposals arising from these ideas will have to be considered and agreed as part of the national Church’s resource allocation decisions.
Please note that none of these ideas imply any change for those currently retired and in Church retirement housing. And anyone who is due to retire in the next few years, should still get in touch in the usual way to housingservices@churchofengland.org.
Thank you for taking part.
Clive Mather (Chair) and John Ball (Chief Executive)
The Church of England Pensions Board