SOCIETY OF TRUST AND ESTATE PRACTITIONERS
LONDON CENTRAL BRANCH & CHARITY SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP
CHARITY LEGACY UPDATE
29 NOVEMBER 2012
THE DISAPPEARING LEGATEE – RECENT CASE LAW
BARBARA RICH TEP
5 STONE BUILDINGS
Is the disappearing charitable legatee really a problem in estate administration?
A
comfortable assumption made by many practitioners, myself included, is that a modern
professionally-drawn will is likely to anticipate the problem of the disappearing charitable
legatee by including a comprehensive lapse-saving provision. However, not all wills
containing charitable legacies and admitted to probate are modern or professionallydrawn, and not all lapse-saving provisions are as comprehensive as they might seem, or
can withstand unusually testing facts, as recent case-law demonstrates.
Starting in the right place
To start with a very basic proposition, scarcely ‘recent’ but 40 years old, Brightman J, in
Re Recher’s Will Trusts [1972] Ch 526, said:
“the most elementary duty of a professional adviser in a case such as the present, [is] not
only to get the name of the unincorporated association right, but also to confirm that the
association is still in existence when the will is made, and not to rely, as presumably this
professional adviser relied, on inaccurate information furnished by the client.”
This issue arose, but was ultimately compromised, in a case in which I was recently
professionally involved on behalf of one of the charitable beneficiaries. The will of Eric
Taylor made in November 1994 contained a gift of residue
“for the Liberal Catholic Church of 205 Upper Richmond Road the Cats
Protection League and the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals in equal shares absolutely and I direct that the receipt of the Treasurer
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or other proper officer of the said Church League and Society respectively shall
be a sufficient discharge to my Trustees for each relevant share of my residuary
estate”
Eric Taylor was in his spare time a high-ranking cleric in the Liberal Catholic Church
(and fond of cats), and the author of a pamphlet entitled “The Liberal Catholic Church –
what is it?” and in his day job a senior Parliamentary civil servant and author of a Pelican
book entitled “The House of Commons at Work”. The Liberal Catholic Church is one
of the many schismatic churches which came into existence in several countries following
the first Vatican Council of 1869-70, and which continue to flourish across a broad and
esoteric spectrum of beliefs and rituals, typically run by small numbers of spare-time
clergy without any permanent financial endowment but sometimes with a degree of
grandiosity quite disproportionate to their size and influence. Many of these churches
are also fiercely fissiparous in their doctrine and leadership, with even a sympathetic
commentator comparing them to the satirical ‘Judean People’s Liberation Front’.
The solicitor who drafted the will relied on Eric Taylor’s annotation of his draft, taken
from an earlier will and showing a previous address for the Church, without asking
questions which would have avoided much later confusion. Following Eric Taylor’s
death in 1995 the executors and the draftsman formed the view that the identity of the
recipient of the Church share of residue was uncertain, as the address at 205 Upper
Richmond Road (which included a church building) was the home of several vaguely
constituted but apparently separate entities: the worldwide Liberal Catholic church, the
Province of Great Britain and Ireland, and the parish of All Saints, and also the registered
address of the Liberal Catholic Church Corporation Ltd. The Corporation was the
registered owner of the church building. It took a breathtaking period of sixteen years
for these uncertainties to be eventually resolved so that the estate could be distributed.
No claim against the draftsman was ever made before the expiry of all limitation periods
in negligence, and when the issue was raised in the context of dispute over the executors’
costs, it was defended on the basis that the draftsman had reasonably relied on the
testator’s primary knowledge of the constitution of the Church and general intellectual
grasp of procedure and terminology. How far this defence would have been persuasive
in a negligence claim is a matter for conjecture.
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The task of the court
If the draftsman fails to identify the intended charity, then the court must do so. See Re
Broadbent [2001] EWCA Civ 714:
“The court’s task is to identify in each case the charity which the testator really wanted to
benefit by the bequest. This involves a careful examination by the court of the scheme
and language of the will, the relevant surrounding circumstances and the events which
have thrown the continued existence of the charity into doubt.”
The problems of disappearing legatees do not arise only from failure to identify the
intended charity, but also from “events” such the merger of the original charity with
another, or its constitutional and/or factual disappearance, either before or after the
testator’s death.
The recent case law
Kings v. Bultitude [2010] EWHC 1795 (Ch)
In early January 2008 a Mrs Pamela Schroder died and left the residue of her estate, in a
professionally-drawn will made as long ago as 1975:
“to the person who . . . shall be or act as the Trustee of the Ancient Catholic
Church known as the Church of the Good Shepherd at present meeting at
Rookwood Road London N16 in the London Borough of Hackney for the
general purposes of the said Church”
The will contained no lapse-saving provision at all.
Mrs Schroder was a childless widow, survived by one of her sisters and some nephews
and nieces. She had been a deaconess of the Ancient Catholic Church (of which more
below), but at her death the Church had no other clergy, nor any trustee of its property.
Mrs Schroder conducted her last service just before Christmas in 2007. No further
services were held after her death. Her own memorial service was held at Walthamstow
Spiritualist Church and recorded in an obituary in Psychic News. As Mrs Schroder’s
server, a Mrs Gray, described in evidence, by the time of Mrs Schroder’s death the
congregation had dwindled to four, all of whom went their separate ways afterwards.
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The signboard outside the Church as it appeared towards the end of Mrs Schroder’s
lifetime gives a flavour of the services that she conducted and the extent to which they
departed from conventional Christian worship.
As the judgment records, the Church originated as a “new religious denomination” in
1950, led by its first Primate, Harold Percival Nicholson.
In his secular life Harold
Nicholson worked variously as a head waiter in a restaurant and in soft furnishings and
haberdashery.
The Church started its official life in a former Baptist chapel in Lower
Sloane Street which had been damaged during the second world war. In addition to its
ornate ecclesiastical charter and the splendid ceremony of archiepiscopal consecration in
1950, the Church also acquired a legal constitution. This was as an unincorporated
association in which governance by the Primatial Synod with a significant concentration
of power in the Primate himself was firmly entrenched.
The Church flourished in Chelsea and in 1951 was said to have 5,000 supporters.
Sunday evening services of animal blessing conducted by Harold Nicholson were wellattended, and this work was supported by the well-known painter Sir Alfred Munnings,
who gave the Church a painting to express his gratitude. Nicholson also acquired a
reputation for divine healing. Mrs Schroder and her sister sang in the Church choir. Mrs
Schroder introduced her husband, Clive Schroder, to the Church, and on Harold
Nicholson’s death in 1968 he succeeded him to become Mar Clive, and was in turn
succeeded following his death in 1985 by Mrs Schroder as deaconess.
In 1956, the Church moved to Rookwood Road, Clapton. The remarkable building
which it occupied there had been built in the late 19C by and for the then-flourishing
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Agapemonites, a Christian sect which had no doctrinal connection with the Ancient
Catholic Church at all, and which had originated with a charismatic Regency priest who
persuaded wealthy and naïve young women to part with their fortune and in some cases
their virtue against the inevitably unfulfilled promise of eternal life in a utopian
community - “the Agapemone” (Abode of Love) - in Spaxton, in Somerset.
The
founding priest was succeeded after his death in the later 19C by John Hugh SmythPigott. In September 1902 Smyth-Pigott acquired notoriety by declaring himself to be
the Messiah from the pulpit of the church in Rookwood Road, and was challenged by a
large jeering crowd to prove it by walking across Clapton Pond.
Somerset and the church building fell into disuse.
He returned to
Over half a century later, in 1956,
Smyth-Pigott’s “spiritual bride” Ruth Preece died, and Harold Nicholson was the only
minister of religion who was prepared to officiate at her funeral. This contact between
the Church and the remaining Agapemonites led to an arrangement permitting the
Church to use the Rookwood Road church, as it did until Mrs Schroder’s death in 2008.
The church building has a number of striking features, including outstanding stained
glass by Walter Crane. Its listing in 1969 noted its “special historic interest as a built
manifestation of the plurality of religious ideas that emerged in the C19, evidencing the
more bizarre end of the belief spectrum.”
Although a purported successor to Mrs Schroder rapidly appeared on the scene
immediately after her death and noisily (much of the noise being made on various
websites controlled by him, and in the form of imposing ‘encyclicals’ from his Oratory of
the Holy Spirit, based in Acacia Road, Enfield) proclaimed the continuance of the
Church under the title of the Liberal Catholic Apostolic Church, his claim was quite
clearly spurious. It was not based on any valid constitutional right of succession, and the
would-be successor positively ran away from the prospect of joining in legal proceedings
to pursue a claim to the residuary estate on behalf of his new organisation.
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Mrs Schroder’s executor, Mr Kings, asked the court to determine whether the residuary
gift could be applied cy-pres, or whether it failed and passed to her intestacy
beneficiaries.
The issues were to an extent factually novel and were starkly divisive, but were limited in
scope. They did not include:
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Any issue as to whether or not the gift was a gift for valid charitable
purposes. Although the Church had never been registered as a charity, there
was no dispute that its purposes were valid charitable purposes for the
advancement of religion. This would have been the case both before and
after the Charities Act 2006. The religion followed by the Church was
monotheistic and involved acts of public worship.
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Any rival institutional claims to entitlement to the gift.
There was no
difficulty in identifying the institution which Mrs Schroder had intended to
benefit and it was clear that there had been no successor institution which
was validly constitutionally connected with the Church.
The sole issue which the court had to determine, therefore, was whether the residuary
gift could be applied to another charity cy-pres or whether it failed entirely and was held
as on a partial intestacy. This question itself depended on two subsidiary questions.
Firstly, whether the point at which the Church ceased to exist and its purposes became
incapable of fulfilment was a case of initial failure or subsequent failure. If it was a case
of initial failure, then the gift might still be applied cy-pres if Mrs Schroder had any
paramount charitable intention. If it was a case of subsequent failure, then the gift might
be applied cy-pres irrespective of any paramount charitable intention. So the second
subsidiary question was whether there was any such paramount charitable intention
ascertainable from the terms of her will. There was also a minor separate issue as to the
ownership of some of the contents of the church building and of the Church archive and
of the modest credit balances in bank accounts in the name of the Church operated by
Mrs Schroder.
Proudman J held that this was a case of initial failure, with the activities of the Church
coming to an end on Mrs Schroder’s death, and its general purposes also becoming
incapable of fulfilment at that point.
“It seems to me that if an institution and its purposes come to an end by virtue
of a death there is nothing for the legatee to inherit and it is becomes impossible
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to carry out the purposes at the moment of death. Logically it cannot therefore
be a case of subsequent impossibility.”
The judge considered that the purposes of the Church continued up until Mrs Schroder’s
death, despite the fact that its constitutional arrangements could no longer operate after
Mr Schroder’s death in 1985. Mr Schroder was the last Primate, and without a successor
or a means of constituting a Primatial Synod, the Church governance was paralysed.
Mrs Schroder could not have become Primate in any event as she was a woman.
However, the judge drew a distinction between the legal and factual position, observing:
35. After her husband's death Mrs Schroder's ministry did not conform to the
provisions of the Trust Deed or to the tenets of the Validation document or the
Canons Ecclesiastical. She administered the sacraments as a (indeed the only) full
priest of the Church. She regarded herself as the only person authorised to ordain
clergy. This contravened the requirement at paragraph 1 of the appendix quoted
above and also the express provisions of Canon 16 of the Ecclesiastical Canons.
She assumed sole responsibility for the governance of the Church and there was
neither Primatial Synod nor Primate to give authority to her actions.
36. The weekly clairvoyance and medium address at the Building plainly went far
beyond the original "spiritual vision" of the doctrines of the Church. They
contravened the prohibitions against Psychic Matters contained in Canon 15,
which stated in terms that "It is declared that this church is not a Spiritualist
Church". I note from what Mr Kersey has said that most of Mrs Schroder's small
congregation moved after her death to worship at Walthamstow Spiritualist
Church. The inference that the Church had assumed a spiritualist dimension is
supported by the obituary of Mrs Schroder in Psychic News.
...
38. However, there is a distinction between the de jure (strict legal) position and the de
facto (factual) position. Although the Church had departed from its constitution, it
continued as an institution under Mrs Schroder's ministry in accordance with the
tenets and beliefs that she prescribed and which she plainly believed
fundamentally conformed to those of Mr Nicholson and Mr Schroder. In her
mind and for her purposes the Church continued, and I interpret her Will in that
context.
39. I therefore hold that the purposes of the Church continued after 1985
Proudman J rejected the Attorney General’s argument that the Church continued in
existence for a short time after Mrs Schroder’s death
It seems to me that Mrs Schroder was essential to the activities of the Church
and without her it simply ceased to exist.
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and also held that the purposes of the Church were no longer capable of fulfilment after
her death and that the gift was dependent on the continuation of the Church as a named
institution.
50. the Church became constitutionally defunct on the death of Mr Schroder. I
would add that it, and, importantly, its purposes, went on to become defunct in
practical terms on the death of his wife. She believed passionately in the Church
as a separate denomination. That is borne out by a letter from Mrs Schroder to a
Mr Biggs of 10th July 1989 in effect refusing his application to be ordained a
minister of the Church on the ground that "I would need to be satisfied that I am
not ordaining someone who has fundamental differences of belief to me." By
that stage she was treating the views of the Church as being the same as her
personal idiosyncratic views.
51. I agree with Mr Kings's observation that all the independent Catholic churches
were doctrinally distinct from one another, "which is why they remain doggedly
independent and pursue their separate paths". The Church under Mrs Schroder
was particularly dogged in pursuing its separate path, to the extent of complete
separation from all other schismatic institutions
She also had little difficult in finding that there was no paramount charitable intention in
the will, which contained no other charitable gifts at all, and accordingly the residuary gift
failed entirely as a charitable gift and was distributed to Mrs Schroder’s family on a partial
intestacy. However, Proudman J held that the bank accounts and other property of the
Church was not Mrs Schroder’s personal property and that this should be dealt with cypres, with the Church archive being offered to a museum of local history.
An article published in The Conveyancer – Kings v. Bultitude, a gift lost to charity (Conv.
2011 (1) 69-74), by John Picton of the University of Liverpool, questions whether the gift
could have been saved. The author suggests that if the court had focussed on the
constitutional purposes of the church as set out in the documents, rather than as
idiosyncratically interpreted and carried on by Mrs Schroder, it could have held that the
purposes remained capable of fulfilment irrespective of her death, and therefore that this
was not a case of initial failure, but of subsequent failure with a consequential application
cy-pres.
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Berry v. IBS-STL UK Ltd (In Liquidation) [2012] EWHC 66 (Ch)
This case involves the interpretation of a lapse-saving provision. The provision was in
these terms:
IF any charity or charitable organisation which I have named as a beneficiary in this Will
is found never to have existed or to have ceased to exist or to have become amalgamated
with another organisation or to have changed its name before my death then the gift
contained in this Will for such charity or charitable organisation shall be transferred to
whatever charitable institution or institutions and if more than one in whatever
proportions as my Trustees shall in their absolute discretion think fit and I EXPRESS
THE WISH but without imposing any obligation on my Trustees that the gift be given
to such charitable institution or institutions whose purpose is as close as possible to
those of the charity or charitable organisation named by me in this Will.
The will divided the residue into six equal shares for named charities with the
introductory words “to my TRUSTEES upon trust to divide in equal shares between
such of the following charities as shall to the satisfaction of my Trustees be in existence
at the date of my death”. The sixth named charity, the International Bible Society (UK),
had transferred its assets to IBS-STL UK Ltd and ceased to exist before the testatrix’s
death.
After the testatrix’s death the successor charity had gone into insolvent
liquidation, so any payment to it would have gone to the charity’s creditors, not to
charitable purposes. The court had to decide whether the consequences of the merger
provisions in what is now s311 of the Charities Act 2011 applied. This section applies
where a charity merger is registered in the register of charity mergers and provides that
any gift which is expressed as a gift to the transferor, and takes effect on or after the date
of registration of the merger, takes effect as a gift to the transferee. The court held that
the statutory merger provisions did not apply, as the named transferor charity was not in
existence at the date of the testatrix’s death.
The trustees were free to choose a
substitute object for themselves.
Phillips v. RSPB [2012] EWCA 618 (Ch)
This case also involves the interpretation of a lapse-saving provision, which was in these
terms:
"if before my death (or after my death but before my Trustees have given effect to the
gift) any charitable or other body to which a gift is made by this Will... has changed its
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name or amalgamated with any other body or transferred all its assets then my Trustees
shall give effect to the gift as if it were a gift to the body in its changed name or to the
body which results from the amalgamation or the body to which the assets have been
transferred"
The testatrix, Mrs Spear, left a quarter of the residue of her estate to “the Owl Sanctuary,
Crow, Ringwood Hampshire . . . . for their general purposes”. It was accepted that the
intended recipient of the gift was the New Forest Owl Sanctuary, a limited company and
a registered charity, which “ceased to operate in circumstances of some scandal”. These
circumstances were the exposure of its mismanagement and maltreatment of its birds in
a television programme. The closure was a long drawn-out process, in the course of
which another bird charity, the North Wales Bird Trust, which was a party to the
proceedings, acquired some of the birds and other assets of the former owl sanctuary,
whilst others went elsewhere. The company that ran the owl sanctuary was removed
from the register of charities on the grounds that it had ceased to operate, before Mrs
Spear’s death, and was eventually dissolved a few days after her death in early 2007.
The North Wales Bird Trust argued that it was the body to which all the assets of the
owl sanctuary had been transferred, and was therefore entitled to the gift under the lapsesaving provision. The judge rejected this argument, holding that the reference to “a body
to which all the assets have been transferred should be construed as being a body which
as a result of the transfer is so far as the transferor can achieve it, in a position
substantially to take over and carry on the activity of the transferor” and that this was not
the factual position as regards the transfer of assets in this case. Accordingly, the North
Wales Bird Trust was not entitled to take the gift under Mrs Spear’s will under the lapsesaving provision. However, the court went on to consider firstly whether the gift was a
gift to the New Forest Owl Sanctuary and formed part of its assets on dissolution or
whether the will established a separate charitable trust, concluding, unsurprisingly, that
the former was the case, and secondly whether the gift could be applied cy-pres. The
court held that this was a case of supervening failure, as the gift could have taken effect
right up until the date of dissolution of the company, and so there was no need to find
paramount charitable intention before applying the gift cy-pres. By that route, the gift
went to the North Wales Bird Trust after all.
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TOXIC PHILANTHROPY – A TOPICAL INSERT
Prompted by the recent furore over the posthumous re-evaluation of the character and
activities of Jimmy Savile, and the implications for charities associated with his name, we
have included a brief note on ‘toxic philanthropy’, or the problems of charitable
perpetuation of an individual personality or a lifetime’s endeavours in the light of
changed perceptions of the personality or the endeavours.
Re Pinion [1965] Ch 85, is a well-known early example of personal vanity in purported
philanthropy1 living on, not as envisaged by the testator, but solely in the pages of the
Law Reports. Mr Pinion, a long-lived dilettante artist who died in 1961, drew up a
“rambling and half-coherent” home-made will under which he left his home and studio
and its contents, including his own paintings and various objects which he had collected,
to the National Trust, to be kept intact and shown to the public in a similar way to other
National Trust properties, and further provided that if the National Trust should be
unwilling to take this on, an independent establishment along the lines of the John Soane
Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields should be created for the same purpose. The National
Trust refused the gift. Wilberforce J held that the independent establishment was a valid
charitable gift, but the Court of Appeal upheld the intestacy beneficiaries’ appeal against
the validity of the gift. The judicial observations, rooted in the opinions of the experts
who had given evidence at the trial, are memorably caustic, describing Mr Pinion’s own
paintings as “atrociously bad” and those he had collected as worthless, and concluding
that “there was no useful object to be served in foisting upon the public this mass of
junk”.
“Apart from pictures there is a haphazard assembly - it does not merit the name
collection, for no purpose emerges, no time nor style is illustrated - of furniture and
objects of so-called "art" about which expert opinion is unanimous that nothing beyond
the third-rate is to be found. Indeed one of the experts expresses his surprise that so
voracious a collector should not by hazard have picked up even one meritorious object.
The most that skilful cross-examination extracted from the expert witnesses was that
As Harman LJ observed in the Court of Appeal, reading the will led him to the view that the
testator’s object was not to educate anyone but to perpetuate his own name and the repute of his family.
1
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there were a dozen chairs which might perhaps be acceptable to a minor provincial
museum and perhaps another dozen not altogether worthless, but two dozen chairs do
not make a museum and they must, to accord with the will, be exhibited stifled by a large
number of absolutely worthless pictures and objects.”
The underlying legal point articulated by the Court of Appeal was that simply describing
a place housing an assortment of objects as a museum was not enough to qualify for
charitable status: the court must receive evidence of the quality of the collection in order
to determine whether it has the requisite element of public benefit.
Much more recently, the legacy of the former Prime Minister Edward Heath, who died in
2005, has failed to have continuing effect as he envisaged.
His will established a
charitable foundation in which he directed his trustees to preserve and conserve his
home, Arundells, and its contents, and open it to the public. The trustees’ experience of
the depletion of the limited financial resources of the foundation through keeping
Arundells open led them to apply to the Charity Commission in 2010 for a scheme
authorising the sale of the property. Although the foundation’s constitution included a
power of sale, this power was only to be used in furtherance of the objects of the
foundation, and a sale of Arundells would frustrate some of those objects, so it was
uncertain whether the power could be relied on for this purpose. The Commission
published a draft decision permitting the sale, but on review following further
representations, decided not to authorise the scheme, this decision of 23 September 2011
being published at
http://www.charity-commission.gov.uk/library/about_us/sehcfdec.pdf
The reason for refusing to authorise a sale was that the reviewer was not satisfied that the
trustees had explored all of the ways in which they could generate sufficient income to
make keeping Arundells open to the public a viable proposition. The reviewer had to
consider whether a cy-pres occasion had arisen, either under what is now s62(1)(a)(ii) of
the Charities Act 2011, or under what is now s62(1)(e)(iii) of that Act, recognising that
that it was not a straightforward cy-pres case.
The conclusion was that a cy-pres
occasion had not arisen: the spirit of the gift was not simply the memorialisation of Sir
Edward Heath, but Arundells was an “essential and integral part of the trust’s purpose”.
Even though the trustees acknowledged that public interest in the life and legacy of Sir
Edward Heath was declining, and the reviewer appears to have accepted that this was
part of the “social and economic circumstances” within the meaning of s62(2)(b), the test
in s62(1)(e)(iii) was not satisfied.
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At the end of October 2012 the trustees announced their intention to reapply to the
Commission for a scheme, having adopted various proposals for generating income from
the property but concluding that there was no possibility of achieving financial viability
for the charitable foundation whilst Arundells was retained and remained open to the
public. The trustees propose that funds raised from the sale of the house and its
contents should be applied to other objects permitted by the terms of the trust and
which were supported by Sir Edward Heath in his lifetime or which can be associated
with his name.
And finally, Jimmy Savile. The trustees of both the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust and
the Jimmy Savile Stoke Mandeville Hospital Trust, with joint total funds of c.£5.5M have
announced their intention to distribute the entirety of their funds to other charities and
to close, rather than simply to change their names in order to break the primary
association of their activities with a now-tainted personal reputation.
Presumably the
constitutional powers of both charities were sufficiently widely drawn to permit the
trustees to take these steps and thus effectively dissolve themselves without intervention
from the Commission or the court. Interesting questions might have arisen in the
absence of such constitutional powers and/or willingness on the part of the trustees to
use their powers in this way. Under s42 Charities Act 2011, the Commission has power
to require a charity’s name to be changed – the only possible qualifying ground here
being that in s42(2)(e): that the name of the charity is, in the opinion of the Commission,
offensive. Section 62 of the 2011 Act sets out the occasions for applying the property of
a charity cy-pres. These provisions are concerned with failure of charitable purpose
through obsolescence of the purpose itself, and not with circumstances where a purpose
remains perfectly capable in itself of being fulfilled but is tainted by association with a
name behind it. The only possible qualifying occasions here might be the same as those
discussed in relation to the proposed sale of Arundells by the trustees of Sir Edward
Heath’s charitable foundation: s62(1)(a)(ii), which would require finding that the name
association was part of the “spirit of the gift”, or s62(1)(e)(iii), which would require
finding that the tainted association was part of the “social circumstances” which are
integral to the definition of “appropriate considerations” in s62(2).
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62
Occasions for applying property cy-près
(1)Subject to subsection (3), the circumstances in which the original purposes of a
charitable gift can be altered to allow the property given or part of it to be applied cy-près
are—
(a)where the original purposes, in whole or in part—
(i)have been as far as may be fulfilled, or
(ii)cannot be carried out, or not according to the directions given and to the spirit of the gift,
(b)where the original purposes provide a use for part only of the property available by
virtue of the gift,
(c)where—
(i)the property available by virtue of the gift, and
(ii)other property applicable for similar purposes,
can be more effectively used in conjunction, and to that end can suitably, regard being had
to the appropriate considerations, be made applicable to common purposes,
(d)where the original purposes were laid down by reference to—
(i)an area which then was but has since ceased to be a unit for some other purpose, or
(ii)a class of persons or an area which has for any reason since ceased to be suitable,
regard being had to the appropriate considerations, or to be practical in administering the
gift, or
(e)where the original purposes, in whole or in part, have, since they were laid down—
(i)been adequately provided for by other means,
(ii)ceased, as being useless or harmful to the community or for other reasons, to be in law
charitable, or
(iii)ceased in any other way to provide a suitable and effective method of using the
property available by virtue of the gift, regard being had to the appropriate considerations.
(2)In subsection (1) “the appropriate considerations” means—
(a)(on the one hand) the spirit of the gift concerned, and
(b)(on the other) the social and economic circumstances prevailing at the time of the
proposed alteration of the original purposes.
(3)Subsection (1) does not affect the conditions which must be satisfied in order that
property given for charitable purposes may be applied cy-près except in so far as those
conditions require a failure of the original purposes.
.