ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned to consider the ways in which trusts are used to provide personal welfare protection. Of course, the core use of the trust from its earliest beginnings has been to protect the income and the homes of the landed classes. Latterly trusts have come to be used by means of charitable trusts and most recently in the forms of pension funds for the benefit of ordinary individuals. Building on what was said in the last chapter about the commercial uses of trusts, what will be observed in this chapter is that the private trust device has been adapted for particular welfare purposes. In relation to charities it was an historical accident that the Courts of Chancery acquired the jurisdiction over charities previously held by the ecclesiastical courts and thus introduced the language of trusts to a context where it did not really belong because charities operate in the public interest and not in the private interest. By distinction pension funds have become a very important feature of modern life with the shrinkage of state pensions within the welfare state in the UK. As such pension funds, built on the private trust model, have acquired their own statutory, regulatory and judicial frameworks distinct from ordinary private trusts. This chapter aims to map some of those distinctions.
