Justin Welby was too ‘overwhelmed’ by scale of abuse in C of E to take action

Justin Welby told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that ‘as archbishop there are no excuses’. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

Justin Welby, the former archbishop of Canterbury, has said his failure to take effective action over a serial sadistic abuser was because he was “overwhelmed” by the scale of the abuse crisis in the Church of England.

In his first interview since resigning last November, Welby said: “Every day more cases were coming across the desk that had been in the past, hadn’t been dealt with adequately, and this was just, it was another case. It was an absolutely overwhelming few weeks.”