In order for the charitable trust to be valid several factors have to be established for it can be held to be valid. It must be for public benefit, purpose must be charitable and it must be exclusively charitable.

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1.        In order for the charitable trust to be valid several factors have to be established for it can be held to be valid. It must be for public benefit, purpose must be charitable and it must be exclusively charitable.

Firstly we need to look at Charities Act 1993, to have a look at what constitutes a charity. S. 96 (1) defines a charity as being any institution, corporate or not, which is established for charitable purposes.  This wide definition is narrowed even further in schedule 2 of the act, which relate to local charities.

S. 97(1) states charitable purposes means purposes which are exclusively charitable according to the law of the law of England and Wales. It goes on to state that charity trustee’s means persons having general control and management of the administration of a charity,

Public trusts must be in the ‘spirit and intendment’ of the preamble of the Charitable Uses Act 1601. The preamble talked about various aspects of charities which were held to be valid trusts.

This was widened by the case of CIT v Pemsel (1891) in which Lord McNaughton stated that there are four heads which fall in the spirit and intendment of the preamble. He stated that it is charitable if the charity is for the relief of poverty, purposes of religion, advancement of education and other purposes which are beneficial to the community, the latter including recreational pursuits.

It was further recognised that charities were able to allow recreational activities with the introduction of the Recreational Charities Act 1958, and even before this. S. 1(2) states that the facilities must be for improving social life in the following circumstances (a) persons have need for such facilities by reason of youth, age, infirmity or social and economic circumstances, or (b) the facilities are available to members of the public at large.

However, for the gift from Albert to be charitable the gift would have to be beneficial to the community. This must be proved not assumed and benefits must be available for the public or a section of it. It would fail however, it the gift failed the “class within a class test”. Trust for welsh people living in London did not form an appreciable section of the community, as it was such a small part of the community, this might have been different if the trust was in the locality of Wales.

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It would seem that the gift made is to a wide enough audience, as it relates to the people of the parish.

Charity Commissioners have said that “substantial public benefit raised a prima facie assumption of charitability”. Judicial cases have always held that the provision of amenities of sports is charitable – open to the public or inhabitants of a locality.

Re: Hadden (1932)

It is necessary to have all charities registered with the Charity Commissioners, bar exempt charities. S.3 allows the commissioners to keep the register of every charity which is not excluded and appropriate ...

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