ABSTRACT

Lloyd LJ: I am prepared to assume in favour of the council, without deciding that the class is defined with sufficient clarity. I do not decide the point because it might, as it seems to me, be open to argument what is meant by ‘an inhabitant’ of the county of West Yorkshire. But I put that difficulty on one side. For there is, to my mind, a more fundamental difficulty. A trust with as many as two and a half million potential beneficiaries is, in my judgment, quite simply unworkable. The class is far too large. In Re Gulbenkian’s Settlements18

Lord Reid said at p 518:

It may be that there is a class of case where, although the description of a class of beneficiaries is clear enough, any attempt to apply it to the facts would lead to such administrative difficulties that it would for that reason be held to be invalid.