Peter Saville : God, GDPR And The Breakaway Church Copy

Today’s Chambers Chatter stays at 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square, where associate member barrister Wendy Miller operates after representing both Cummins and Cepac against Lee Thompson. Wendy can put the Employment Tribunal bundle away. We are going to church, although the collection plate, children’s register and diocesan disciplinary paperwork suggest we should probably bring an accountant, a data-protection officer and something considerably stronger than communion wine.

Our guide is Peter Saville, a barrister called in 2020, former churchwarden and regular Proctor for the Church in Wales. His professional biography includes charities, chancery litigation, regulatory work and ecclesiastical law, a specialism that sounds wonderfully medieval until somebody produces an application for an iPhone.

In 2025, Saville acted in disciplinary proceedings against the Reverend Ryan Forey, formerly vicar of Citizen Church in Cardiff. The charges involved improper payments from church-charity funds, a mobile application displaying children’s names to other users, and the establishment of a breakaway congregation while Forey still held his position within the Church in Wales.

Forey admitted all three.

Then, apparently dissatisfied with the amount of entertainment already provided, he sent confidential penalty information to a church leader before the tribunal had finalised its judgment, accompanied by assertions the tribunal subsequently described as inaccurate and misleading.

Christ almighty.

Even the disciplinary proceedings needed disciplinary proceedings.

Peter Saville Opens The Ecclesiastical Filing Cabinet

Peter Saville’s chambers biography is rather more interesting than the standard solicitor-facing parade of commercial expertise and reassuring adjectives. He graduated from Oxford with a first-class degree in history, became a barrister, served as a churchwarden in the Diocese of London and developed a practice involving the obscure machinery of ecclesiastical discipline.

His work for the Church in Wales involves acting as a Proctor. That is not somebody supervising an examination in a draughty school hall. In this context, the Proctor prepares and presents disciplinary charges under the Church’s constitutional procedures. Saville acted on behalf of the Representative Body of the Church in Wales, exercising independent professional judgment rather than simply taking instructions from the Bishop who referred the case.

The chambers profile describes the Forey proceedings as an unusual prosecution involving trustee misconduct and secession. That is quite a sentence to find between ordinary descriptions of property disputes and charitable trusts.

Secession.

Not insolvency, breach of contract or an argument over who owns the church organ. We are talking about a vicar establishing another church while still licensed to the original institution, apparently deciding that the existing ecclesiastical hierarchy had become an optional subscription service.

Yet the split was only one element of the case. The money and children’s data were waiting in separate folders, and neither made especially pleasant reading.

The Church Plant With A Missing Instruction Manual

The background begins in 2020, when Forey moved to Wales and took responsibility for Citizen Church, based at St Teilo’s in Cardiff. The congregation formed part of a project aimed particularly at younger worshippers, offering a more contemporary approach than the traditional parish model.

The timing was appalling. Britain had entered the pandemic, the Church was adapting to restrictions, and Forey received responsibility for the congregation just a week after his ordination as a priest. Consequently, he missed much of the structured mentoring and supervised development normally associated with a traditional curacy.

The tribunal accepted that this mattered. Indeed, it concluded that inadequate supervision and guidance contributed significantly to the circumstances that eventually brought him before the disciplinary panel.

There is a particularly British institutional flavour to this arrangement. Take a newly ordained priest, hand him a developing congregation during an international public-health emergency, provide insufficient structured supervision and then discover several years later that governance has developed the consistency of custard.

None of that excuses the admitted misconduct. However, the Church’s own failures belong in the picture. It is difficult to demand impeccable governance from an inexperienced office-holder while acknowledging that the people responsible for preparing and supervising him had left substantial gaps.

Apparently somebody considered divine guidance an adequate substitute for management training.

£300 For Ceremonies That Never Happened

The first disciplinary charge concerned payments from Citizen Church’s charitable funds between October 2020 and February 2024.

Forey authorised monthly payments of £300 to himself and the clergy team in place of fees associated with occasional services such as marriages and funerals. The difficulty was that the team had not actually conducted the relevant services.

The rationale was that Citizen Church attracted a different congregation from a traditional parish. Its clergy therefore conducted fewer weddings, funerals and similar services and missed out on the fees that might ordinarily supplement income elsewhere.

That is one solution to a difficult remuneration question.

Unfortunately, it resembles invoicing the absence of a funeral.

Alongside those arrangements came a further £500 per month paid to Forey’s wife under a clergy spouse allowance. The tribunal found that these payments did not qualify as legitimate expense reimbursements and breached the charity’s governing arrangements and the Church’s constitutional requirements.

Forey maintained that he genuinely believed the arrangements were permissible, having encountered similar practices previously. Moreover, the payments had appeared in budgets approved by the Parochial Church Council rather than being hidden from the accounts. The tribunal recorded those explanations, and the case did not establish a criminal fraud offence.

Nevertheless, approving a payment in a budget does not magically authorise expenditure that the governing rules prohibit.

That is the trouble with charitable money. It belongs to the charity, not to whichever charismatic bastard happens to occupy the nicest chair in the vestry.

The collection plate is not a subscription to the vicar’s household finances.

Next came technology.

Citizen Church developed a mobile application intended to improve communication and help the congregation manage activities. One feature allowed children to sign in for church events.

The concept sounds straightforward enough. Instead of relying entirely on paper registers and volunteers, the church could streamline its administration through a modern digital platform.

Then somebody examined what the bloody thing was displaying.

According to the tribunal, the app revealed users’ names, including those of children and looked-after children, to other users during sign-in. Concerns about GDPR compliance and safeguarding had arisen during development, yet the church launched the application and used the affected feature between February and March 2023.

That is not merely an awkward software bug. Information revealing that a child attends particular activities can create safeguarding concerns, especially where looked-after children are involved.

The tribunal did not establish that a child had actually suffered harm. It identified a serious risk and found that the use of the feature breached the relevant requirements.

Forey knew concerns had arisen. Nevertheless, he initially declined to withdraw the app because he considered doing so a “backward step” for Citizen Church.

There it is.

A modern church, marching boldly into the digital future with children’s names visible to other app users and the person in charge worrying that fixing the problem might interrupt the technological revolution.

Somewhere in Cardiff, a safeguarding officer presumably developed the urge to introduce the development team to the concept of a private database.

God Has Read The Privacy Notice

The extraordinary thing about the app episode is how mundane the underlying failure was.

Nobody needed a sophisticated cyberattack, an international hacking syndicate or a Russian server farm. The names appeared through a feature the church itself had commissioned.

The problem was not that the system had become inaccessible. It was that the system made information accessible to people who should not necessarily have been able to see it.

That is an exceptionally efficient way to get data protection arse-backwards.

Forey subsequently accepted responsibility. His submissions explained that the children’s sign-in facility was secondary to the app’s wider communication purpose and that, after staff committed to making the feature private or disabling it, he instructed them to discontinue its use shortly afterwards.

That mitigation matters. The faulty feature did not remain in operation indefinitely, and the tribunal considered the steps taken to limit harm.

However, the central problem remained. People had raised concerns before and after launch, and the vicar responsible for the project initially treated retreat as a threat to progress.

Innovation is wonderful.

So is not advertising vulnerable children’s attendance through the congregation’s login screen.

The second commandment of modern technology ought to be: thou shalt test the permissions before pressing Publish.

Be Church Cardiff: The Great Subscription Cancellation

By January 2024, the ecclesiastical arrangement had developed another complication.

Forey wanted to establish a church outside the Church in Wales and Anglican Communion. His proposed alternative, involving people from Citizen Church, eventually became known as Be Church Cardiff.

There is something wonderfully startup-like about that name.

Be Church.

Two words, minimal branding, no unnecessary theological furniture. Presumably the marketing agency considered Actual Church but decided the domain might already belong to somebody.

The disciplinary tribunal found that Forey took deliberate steps towards establishing the alternative congregation while he remained licensed as vicar of Citizen Church. He also participated in attempts to persuade members of the existing congregation to join the new operation.

One particularly revealing detail concerned 12 January 2024. Forey had a difficult meeting with the Bishop of Llandaff and, on the same day, enquired about booking event spaces at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. The tribunal concluded that the proposed booking related to Be Church.

That is gloriously concrete.

A meeting with the bishop, followed by venue enquiries for the new congregation.

One can almost imagine the afternoon: difficult theological conversation before lunch, hospitality requirements and seating arrangements afterwards.

Eventually, Forey resigned his position. The breakaway congregation briefly began meeting after his departure, but the preparations had already occurred while he remained inside the existing Church’s structure.

That was the disciplinary issue.

Not the mere existence of another denomination. Britain has plenty of those without needing to send everybody to court. The problem was preparing to secede while continuing to hold the responsibilities and licence of a Church in Wales vicar.

Ecclesiastical governance, it turns out, also has rules about working your notice.

Peter Saville Brings Three Charges, Not Every Rumour

By April 2025, Peter Saville had prepared the disciplinary charges.

The Bishop’s original referral contained additional matters of concern. However, the preliminary tribunal process found no case to answer on some issues, while Saville decided not to pursue others because he considered that there was no realistic prospect of securing an adverse disciplinary finding.

That is an important detail about the prosecution.

Saville did not simply tip the entire parish filing cabinet onto the tribunal table and demand that everything inside become misconduct. He exercised judgment about what the evidence could support.

Three charges proceeded, and Forey admitted every one.

Consequently, the final proceedings did not require a sprawling contest over whether the misconduct occurred. The parties supplied written submissions, and the tribunal considered the appropriate penalty.

This is where the ecclesiastical system begins to look rather less medieval than its vocabulary suggests.

A Proctor, a Bishop, a constitutional charge and a disciplinary tribunal sound like characters from an illuminated manuscript. Yet the actual case involved written submissions, video-conferencing, administrative deadlines, data protection and arguments about what the evidence justified.

The Church may have kept the ancient terminology, but the bureaucracy has acquired broadband.

Unfortunately, Forey was about to demonstrate that having an email account was not necessarily the same thing as knowing when to use it.

The Confidential Draft Escapes The Vestry

After considering the submissions, the tribunal circulated a draft penalty on 24 July 2025. The accompanying instruction made clear that the decision remained confidential until publication of the final judgment.

Forey requested permission to share the penalty with certain Church of England bishops so he could discuss his prospects of future ministry. The Registrar authorised that limited disclosure.

Perfectly sensible.

A priest considering where he might serve next would naturally want to understand the restrictions governing his future work.

Then Forey sent at least one email containing penalty details to a church leader who was not a bishop.

That was outside the permission he had received.

The tribunal regarded it as a clear confidentiality breach and expressed considerable concern. Forey subsequently explained that he had not fully understood the restriction, offered to apologise and said he would seek guidance before sending similar correspondence in future.

So far, a procedural embarrassment.

But the email contained something considerably more interesting than premature disclosure.

It offered an account of the disciplinary process that the tribunal did not recognise as accurate.

And suddenly the paperwork got a second wind.

No Safeguarding Concerns? You Must Be Taking The Piss

The tribunal recorded that Forey’s email suggested the Bishop of Llandaff had interfered late in the process and caused a more severe penalty than one supposedly agreed earlier.

The panel rejected that account.

Saville had consulted the Bishop about an appropriate penalty, but the Proctor exercised independent judgment. Moreover, he confirmed that he had never agreed a joint proposed penalty with Forey’s lawyers.

There had been no agreed penalty for somebody subsequently to make more severe.

Then came two even more remarkable assertions.

The email reportedly suggested that the tribunal’s findings involved “no safeguarding concerns” and “no questions about leadership”.

Read those phrases again.

This was the same proceeding involving children’s names displayed to other app users, payments that breached charity rules and a vicar taking steps to establish a rival congregation while still licensed to the original church.

The tribunal regarded the assertions as inaccurate and misleading. It stressed that the app had created safeguarding concerns and that the charges necessarily raised questions about Forey’s leadership.

In other words, the disciplinary panel had spent months examining what went wrong, only to discover that somebody was circulating a version of events in which two of the central problems had apparently disappeared.

It is a remarkable approach to reputation management.

Receive criticism.

Remove the criticism from the summary.

Circulate the summary.

Hope nobody opens the original document.

Unfortunately, the tribunal had retained its own copy.

The Tribunal Considers A Sequel

The confidentiality episode concerned the tribunal enough that it invited further submissions from the parties.

Saville suggested that reopening the hearing or making a further disciplinary referral might be appropriate. The panel reconvened in August 2025 to consider what should happen.

Ultimately, it decided that additional proceedings would not be proportionate. The episode was unlikely to produce a substantially different penalty, although it reinforced concerns about Forey’s ability to comply with instructions and rules.

That was a measured decision.

Yet the tribunal took a further precaution. Because Forey was considering ministry in the Church of England, the final order required the full judgment to accompany requests for relevant ministerial references until he completed the prescribed supervision.

That is a magnificent administrative response.

The man had circulated an account suggesting the tribunal saw no safeguarding or leadership concerns. The tribunal responded by ensuring that future bishops seeking formal references would receive the actual findings.

No more condensed executive summary.

No selective highlights.

Just the full document.

The ecclesiastical equivalent of replying to a questionable sales pitch by attaching the entire bloody audit.

A Monition, Not A One-Way Ticket To Hell

The tribunal imposed a monition, a formal ecclesiastical disciplinary admonition, with conditions on Forey’s future ministry.

The order required successful completion of safeguarding training before consideration for ordained ministry within the Church in Wales. Furthermore, Forey could not hold specified leadership posts, including roles involving ultimate responsibility for a church organisation, until he had completed at least two years of supervised ministry under an experienced incumbent.

The supervision requirements included regular meetings, written records, developmental work and periodic reviews.

That distinction matters. The order did not amount to a blanket prohibition on undertaking every possible form of ministry for two years. Rather, it established training and supervision requirements before Forey could return to positions carrying particular authority and responsibility.

Forey had argued that he could resume a fuller role while developing the necessary skills through experience. The tribunal was unimpressed by that proposal because it considered the request inconsistent with a proper understanding of the gravity of his admitted failings.

Essentially, the panel decided that learning church governance “on the job” was not a particularly attractive option after several years of demonstrating why the training might have been useful in the first place.

There is mercy in the decision, but mercy arrived with a supervisor, a training plan and enough written records to keep the diocesan stationery supplier in business.

God forgives.

The disciplinary tribunal requires quarterly reviews.

The Church In Wales Has Some Explaining To Do Too

Here is where the story becomes more substantial than another entertaining account of one clergyman making a mess.

The tribunal accepted that Forey was talented and charismatic. It recognised the exceptional circumstances in which he took responsibility for Citizen Church, the disruption caused by the pandemic and the absence of the structured supervision he should ordinarily have received.

Those were not token remarks inserted to make the decision look compassionate. The panel concluded that inadequate support contributed significantly to the situation.

Yet it also found that Forey displayed an element of arrogance, minimised his failures and ignored objections from people around him. In particular, he pressed ahead with the app despite safeguarding warnings, disregarded charity-governance requirements and pursued his own vision for the congregation even when that meant bypassing established authority.

Both things can be true.

An institution can place an inexperienced person in a position of authority without adequate preparation, and that person can still make decisions for which they bear responsibility.

The Church in Wales had built a modern congregation for a younger audience. Unfortunately, some of the old-fashioned requirements surrounding charity money, children’s privacy and accountable leadership still applied.

You cannot replace all the hymns with contemporary worship music and assume the Charity Commission has left the building.

Nor can an institution pretend that enthusiasm and charisma automatically qualify somebody to run a charity, oversee safeguarding and navigate ecclesiastical constitutional law.

Somewhere between the mission statement and the management structure, somebody should probably have checked whether the new vicar had received the fucking instructions.

Wendy Miller And The Ecclesiastical Department

And inevitably we return to barrister Wendy Miller.

Miller operates as an associate member of 4-5 Gray’s Inn Square after representing Cummins and Cepac against Lee Thompson in separate Employment Tribunal proceedings. She had no involvement in the Forey prosecution, and nothing in this story suggests otherwise.

Her contribution to Chambers Chatter remains wonderfully straightforward. She provided the original reason to investigate the chambers and its wider professional cast.

Since then, the building has proved a remarkably productive source of material. We have found elaborate election disputes, gang-injunction arguments, vexatious-litigant proposals, international litigation, financial-regulatory disasters and now a barrister whose ecclesiastical practice includes prosecuting a vicar over charity payments, children’s data and a breakaway church.

Peter Saville is particularly interesting because he actually brought the disciplinary case. His role was to assess the evidence, pursue sustainable charges and assist the tribunal in reaching an appropriate outcome.

The professional connection to Wendy is the chambers address, not the conduct.

Still, I rather enjoy imagining the contrast in the chambers diary.

One conference concerns a property dispute. Another involves commercial litigation. Someone is preparing an argument about a trust deed. Then Peter Saville appears with a vicar, an app, a clergy spouse allowance and what the Church’s lawyers rather grandly call secession.

No wonder ecclesiastical law survives.

Civilisation would be poorer without this level of specialised nonsense.

Peter Saville And The God Of Administrative Consequences

The funniest part of the Forey case is not that a clergyman made mistakes. Religious organisations are run by human beings, and human beings have been making a comprehensive arse of administration since somebody first decided the apostles needed a treasurer.

What makes this case extraordinary is how neatly its failures connect.

The charity payments raised questions about stewardship. The mobile app exposed shortcomings in privacy and safeguarding. The proposed breakaway congregation challenged institutional loyalty and proper authority. Finally, the premature email about the draft penalty demonstrated that even the disciplinary instructions were proving difficult to follow.

Different episodes.

Same underlying argument.

Who gets to make decisions, under what authority, and what happens when somebody treats the rules as an inconvenience to their preferred outcome?

Saville’s prosecution forced those questions into the open. The tribunal answered them through the Church’s own disciplinary framework, while also recognising the institutional failures that contributed to the mess.

There is a lesson somewhere in that for organisations considerably larger than a Cardiff congregation.

Governance is not a decorative heading on a website. It is what prevents the person with the microphone from deciding that every rule becomes optional once the presentation looks sufficiently inspiring.

So what have we learned from Peter Saville’s ecclesiastical excursion?

Citizen Church authorised payments for occasional services its clergy team did not conduct, alongside a monthly clergy spouse allowance that the governing rules did not permit. Its mobile app displayed children’s names, including those of looked-after children, to other users despite safeguarding and privacy concerns. Meanwhile, its vicar made preparations for another congregation while still serving under the Church in Wales.

Forey admitted the three charges. The tribunal considered substantial mitigation, recognised shortcomings in his preparation and supervision, and imposed a conditional monition rather than permanently excluding him from ministry.

Then came the confidential draft penalty, the unauthorised email and the assertions that the tribunal had found no safeguarding or leadership problems.

That last episode might be the most spectacular of the lot.

An institution trying to establish what went wrong had to explain, in its own published judgment, that the person facing discipline had circulated an inaccurate account of what the institution was about to decide.

And there stood Peter Saville, Proctor for the Church in Wales, helping bring the whole extraordinary business through the ecclesiastical process.

4-5 Gray’s Inn Square calls it a rare prosecution involving trustee misconduct and secession.

TCAP sees a charity account, an app permissions screen, a booking enquiry, a confidential email and a priest discovering that modern church leadership involves considerably more than enthusiasm and a decent sermon.

The Holy Spirit may move in mysterious ways. The audit trail generally doesn’t.

Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project