ABSTRACT
The ‘beneficiary principle’ is best understood as operating in addition to the rules on certainty of beneficiaries considered in chapter 3. The ‘beneficiary principle’ is best stated as a requirement that there must be an identifiable beneficiary or beneficiaries for a trust to be valid.6 The policy underlying this principle, and
arguably the whole of the law of trusts as considered in chapter 2, is that there must be a beneficiary in whose favour the trust can be exercised by the court and that there must be beneficiaries with proprietary rights in the trust fund. If there were no beneficiary, the rationale for the trust would be the pursuit of some identified but abstract purpose. Trusts for abstract purposes (that is, trusts not for the benefit of identifiable persons as beneficiaries) are void under English law.7
