The Church Commissioners is a body which administers the property assets of the Church of England. It was established in 1948 and combined the assets of Queen Anne's Bounty, a fund dating from 1704 for the relief of poor clergy, and of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners formed in 1836. The Church Commissioners are a registered charity regulated by the Charity Commission for England and Wales, and are liable for the payment of pensions to retired clergy whose pensions were accrued before 1998 (subsequent pensions are the responsibility of the Church of England Pensions Board). The secretary (and chief executive) of the Church Commissioners is Gareth Mostyn. History The Church Building Act 1818 granted money and established the Church Building Commission to build churches in the cities of the Industrial Revolution. These churches became known variously as Commissioners' churches, Waterloo churches or Million Act churches. The Church Building Commission became the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in 1836. An earlier Ecclesiastical Duties and Revenues Commission had been set up under the first brief administration of Sir Robert Peel in 1835 with a wide remit, "to consider the State of the Established Church in England and Wales, with reference to Ecclesiastical Duties and Revenues" (Minutes of the Commission, 9 February 1835); this body redistributed wealth between the dioceses and changed diocesan boundaries, and the permanent Ecclesiastical Commission was formed the following year. The Church Commissioners were established in 1948 as a merger of Queen Anne’s Bounty and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, following the passage, by the National Assembly of the Church of England, of the Church Commissioners Measure 1947. In 1992 it was revealed that the Church Commissioners had lost £500m through over-commitment of the fund leading to poor investment decisions. This figure was later revised up to £800m, a third of their assets. The value of the commissioners' assets was around £5.5 billion as at the end of 2012. By September 2016, it was valued at £7 billion. The income is used for the payment of pensions to retired clergy whose pensions were accrued before 1998 (subsequent pensions are the responsibility of the Church of England Pensions Board) and a range of other commitments including supporting the ministries of bishops and cathedrals and funding various diocesan and parish missions initiatives. In June 2022, the Commissioners acknowledged early links of Queen Anne's Bounty to the Atlantic slave trade. They and the Archbishop of Canterbury apologised. In January