“How can we bring ourselves to do that which will deprive the Court of Chancery of one of its most attractive features?”
W S Gilbert, Iolanthe
Racial and religious hate crime
The Home Office has published statistics for Hate crime, England and Wales, year ending March 2026. Overall, hate crimes in England and Wales increased by 7% in the year up to March 2026, rising to nearly 147,000,
The figures reveal a 13% rise in religious hate crimes recorded by police during the year to March 2026, with 11,419 recorded offences in total. Of those, there was a 15% rise in hate crimes against Muslims and a 10% increase in hate crimes against Jews.
The increase in hate crimes targeting Muslims (from 4,479 to 5,132 offences) showed a particular rise in September of last year, which, said the Home Office, “coincided with a number of protests and incidents of public order”.
Bisdom Gent, Case C-12/25
Further to recent news item on the COMECE Position Paper on Erasure from baptismal registers, Bisdom Gent, Case C-12/25, on 1 October Advocate General Laila Medina issued her Opinion on the case.
This confirmed that the GDPR applied to the case: the baptismal register contains a ‘structured’ set of personal data of the baptised individuals and, hence, constitutes filing systems within the meaning of that Regulation. The autonomy of churches and religious organisations does not call this conclusion into question. Consequently, the data processing in question – its storage and, where appropriate, retrieval and use – must be in line with the GDPR.
Further, the Advocate General considered that the processing of the complainant’s personal data by the Church – prior the submission of the withdrawal request from the Church – could be regarded as lawful under the GDPR, even absent express consent by the person in question. Nevertheless, that person may, in principle, request 5 the erasure of those data from the baptismal register by formally objecting to the processing.
COMECE’s response is here: COMECE expresses strong concerns over the EU Court Advocate General’s Opinion on erasure from
Changes to Online Faculty System
An earlier post reported that the new Portal was due to launch on the 6 October 2026. The Online Faculty System closed permanently at midnight on 30 September 2026 and was replaced by the Building Management Portal. From 6 October 2026, all new faculty applications, List B applications, List A records, notifications and other church buildings work must be submitted through the Building Management Portal.
Existing cases and historical records will be transferred to the new platform as part of the migration. Users are advised to download any reports or information they may require from the Online Faculty System before it closes. Further information about the transition, together with guidance and support materials, is available on the Church of England website.
The Church Times notes that the main change is that List A, List B, and faculty applications will be managed through one consistent national system. Church House says that it will be easier for users to see what stage their application is at and what happens next. The BMP will also provide improved tools for uploading, organising, and reviewing supporting documents.
Parochial Fees 2007
The calculation of Parochial Fees for 2027 follows that used in previous years. The table in Schedule 1 of the draft Order sets out “base figures” which represent the level of parochial fees at current prices. The fees payable for each year covered by the Order are determined by adjusting the base figures in accordance with the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), as specified by article 4 of the Order. 8. Those for 2027 will be the base figures increased by the percentage increase in CPI over 12 months as at August 2026. These were reported by the Office of National Statistics in September 2026.
These data indicate that the relevant annual increase was 3.3%. The Archbishops’ Council staff will perform the necessary calculations and towards the end of the year a table showing the fees payable for 2027 will be available.
Forthcoming Ecclesiastical Law Society lectures
- Rt Revd Jonathan Baker: “Faithfully to execute: the ministry of the Bishop Suffragan”: 10 November 2026, 18:00-19:30, Grosvenor Chapel, South Audley Street, Mayfair, London W1K 2PA.
- Lady Hale: “Do we have the right to die?”: 8 December 2026, 17:30-19:00, Wrigleys Solicitors, 3rd floor, 3 Wellington Place, Leeds LS1 4AP.
- Bitesize Ecclesiastical Law #19 ‘What is the law of marriage?’, online, 13 October 2026, 17:30-18:00.
Quick links
- Elizabeth A Clark, BYU LAW: Correct Bits that Do Not Fit: on the ECtHR Grand Chamber judgment in Lautsi v Italy.
- UK Human Rights Blog, Discrimination in prison medication dispensing – objective justification and an unjustified failure to think about it: on the recent judgment in Birmingham Community Healthcare NHS Trust v Ibrahim[2026] EWHC 2468 (KB), in which Soole J upheld the lower court’s decision that the Trust had breached the Muslim Claimant’s rights under Article 14 ECHR when it failed to adopt an alternative procedure for dispensing codeine outside of daylight hours during Ramadan in 2019.
- Church Monuments Society, Student Spotlight: New Research on Church Monuments, (On line, Saturday, March 20, 2027).