The Representative Body of the Church in Wales

The Representative Body of the Church in Wales

The Representative Body of the Church in Wales was established in 1914, six years before the Welsh Church Act 1914 formally disestablished the Anglican Church in Wales in 1920. Unlike the Church of England, the Church in Wales receives no state funding. The Representative Body holds the Church's ancient and modern assets — including parish churches, glebe land, commercial property, parsonages, and financial endowments — in perpetuity to fund the ministry, pensions, and mission of the Church's six dioceses. The Archbishop of Wales serves as an ex-officio member, while Professor Medwin Hughes chairs the Body's deliberations. The portfolio spans four broad asset classes. Public equities and fixed income form the liquid core, managed externally under a responsible-investment mandate. The Church began divesting from thermal coal in 2018 and excluded all fossil-fuel producers from its equity and corporate-bond portfolios by 2021 (public record, 2021). Private-market exposure includes direct property holdings across Wales — commercial mixed-use buildings, residential parsonages, and glebe farmland — alongside infrastructure and private-credit allocations managed by external GPs. The Body is a signatory to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment and a member of the Church Investors Group and the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change, using those networks to coordinate engagement on climate and social issues. The finance committee, chaired by Dean Nigel Williams, oversees day-to-day investment governance, supported by the Chief Executive, Simon Lloyd. Total assets under management are not regularly published, though the Church's real-estate footprint alone encompasses more than 1,400 church buildings and associated glebe lands. The Body's most recent audited financial disclosures place total funds under trusteeship in the hundreds of millions of pounds (per the Church in Wales Annual Report, 2023). The Body also administers the Church Growth Fund, a dedicated vehicle that directs capital toward congregational development projects across the six dioceses of Wales. Unlike diocesan-level endowment funds in England — which operate within the national Church Commissioners' umbrella — the Representative Body operates as an independent, province-wide trustee. This structure concentrates Welsh Anglican wealth under a single fiduciary roof, allowing coordinated ethical screening, direct property management, and collective engagement via PRI working groups that individual parishes could not accomplish alone.