Church of England yet to set up £100m slavery reparations fund after a year

The Church of England is yet to set up a promised £100 million slavery reparations fund a year after announcing it was “time to take action to address our shameful past”. The Church said in January last year that the investments into “communities affected by historic slavery” would be “delivered over the nine years commencing in 2023”. However the Church is still to announce how the fund will work or set a date for when its first investments will be made. A 2022 report had found that the Church’s £10 billion endowment had partially benefited from 18th century investments in the transatlantic slave trade. “We hope that the new fund will be operational by the end of this year,” the Rt Rev Stephen Lake, the Bishop of Salisbury, said in a written reply to a question submitted to the General Synod, the Church’s legislative body. He added: “We are trying to do our very best here in a situation which is in many ways impossible to ever repair.” The Church denied it had ever planned to start distributing the funds in 2023 and told The Telegraph it rejected “the suggestion of a delay”. “This work is too important to rush...