A trust was established, claiming charitable status as an education trust. T (i) the conferences sought to improve the minds of the participants, not necessarily by adding to their factual knowledge but by expanding their wisdom and capacity to understand; (ii) the subjects discussed at conferences were recognised academic subjects in higher education; (iii) the conferences operated by a process of discussion designed to elicit an exchange of views in a manner familiar in places of higher education; (iv) the conferences were designed to capitalise on the expertise of participants who were there both to learn and to instruct.’
Held: The appeal was successful, and the gift was charitable.
Slade LJ said: ‘We were referred to a decision of my own in McGovern v Attorney-General [1982] Ch 321, where I held, inter alia, that though certain trusts, declared in a trust deed, for research into the observance of human rights and the dissemination of the results of such research would have been charitable if they had stood alone, they were mere adjuncts to political purposes declared by earlier provisions of the deed.
However, in the present case, as I have already mentioned, the activities of Wilton Park are not of a party political nature. Nor, so far as the evidence shows, are they designed to procure changes in the laws or governmental policy of this or any other country: even when they touch on political matters, they constitute, so far as I can see, no more than genuine attempts in an objective manner to ascertain and disseminate the truth. In these circumstances I think that no objections to the trust arise on a political score, similar to those which arose in the McGovern case. The trust is, in my opinion, entitled to what is sometimes called ‘benignant construction’, in the sense that the court is entitled to presume that the trustees will act only in a lawful and proper manner appropriate to the trustees of a charity and not, for example, by the propagation of tendentious political opinions, any more than those running the Wilton Park project so acted in the 33 years preceding the testator’s death: compare McGovern v Attorney-General, at p.353E-F.’
Judges:
Slade, Robert Goff, O’Connor LJJ
Citations:
[ 1986] Ch 423
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Charity
Updated: 08 May 2022; Ref: scu.556778
