The eagerly awaited Cathedrals Working Group Draft Report was published last week. It is now out for consultation. I’d like to offer this blog as a contribution to that process.

I confess I had misgivings about setting up yet another review of cathedrals. My worry was that this process was a clear consequence of the much-publicised crises at Peterborough and Exeter Cathedrals. It would have been so easy for the Working Group’s debates to be driven by anxiety towards quick-fix solutions that would, hopefully, deal with the “problem” of cathedrals once and for all. Such imagined solutions, applied to institutions centuries old, would at best have been premature, and very probably, entirely wrong.