Charity trustees—duties and liabilities

Copyright © 2025 LexisNexis
Produced in partnership with Francesca Quint of Radcliffe Chambers
Practice notes

Charity trustees—duties and liabilities

Copyright © 2025 LexisNexis

Produced in partnership with Francesca Quint of Radcliffe Chambers

Practice notes
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The duties and thus the potential Liabilities of Charity trustees fall into three categories: statutory duties, Fiduciary duties towards the Charity and common law duties towards third parties.

The Charities Act 2022, which is designed to amend the Charities Act 2011 (CA 2011) following the Law Commission Report on various technical issues in charity law, is to be brought into force by stages beginning in the Spring of 2023.

Statutory duties

The CA 2011 imposes a number of specific duties on charity trustees. For example, the charity trustees must:

  1. •

    apply for the registration of a charity which is neither exempt nor excepted from that requirement and has an income of more than £5,000 a year

  2. •

    send the Commission an annual return

  3. •

    send an annual report and accounts which vary in sophistication and auditing requirements according to the size of the charity, as detailed in regulations made under the Act

  4. •

    have regard to the Charity Commission’s guidance regarding the operation of the public benefit requirement

  5. •

    comply with their specific duty to take steps

Francesca Quint
Francesca Quint

Radcliffe Chambers

Professional background
Francesca Quint is best known as a specialist in charity law, an area in which she has been working for the whole of her career to date. Her interest in charity law dates from the time when she was reading law as an undergraduate at King's College, London.

Professional expertise
Charity law naturally overlaps with distinct areas of law in which Francesca also practises which impinge on the activities of charities. These include education, housing, ecclesiastical law and aspects of public law. It also extends to those areas which affect people who wish to support charities, such as wills, trusts and tax, in which Francesca is often asked to advise regardless of any specific charity involvement.

A good deal of Francesca's work is non-contentious but she often finds herself advising charities in trouble, whether financial, constitutional or regulatory, or acting for one side or another in disputes within, between or involving charities.

Publications and speaking engagements
Francesca is a member (and previous executive committee member) of the Charity Law Association, for whom she drafted its model governing documents for charities. Her other publications include Volume 6(2) Charities and Charitable Giving of the Encyclopaedia of Forms and Precedents and Sweet & Maxwell's looseleaf 'Charities: the Law and Practice' with Douglas Cracknell and others and various articles and case notes for the 'Charity Law & Practice Review' and other journals.

Francesca regularly delivers lectures, seminars and in-house courses on charity law and management for Central Law Training, and sometimes for the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners ('STEP') and the Chancery Bar Association.

Memberships
Francesca has been an adviser to the National Association of Almshouses since 1989 and a trustee of the Association of Charitable Foundations, the Bishopsgate Foundation, Charity Forum, St Peter's Home & Sisterhood (Woking), Dulwich College and Elizabeth Finn Care, whose Homes subsidiary she also chaired.

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Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom
Related legal acts:
Key definition:
Charity definition
What does Charity mean?

A charity is an institution which is established for charitable purposes only and falls to be subject to the control of the High Court in the exercise of its jurisdiction with respect to charities (Charities Act 2011, s 1)

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