An interesting (but not important) trust case

The Privy Council has today given judgment in A and 6 others v C and 13 others [2026] UKPC 11 on the role of trust protectors. The reassuring news for pensions lawyers is that this is not a case that needs to go straight to the top of the reading pile. The Board was dealing with a specialised offshore trust structure, and considering whether fiduciary protectors asked to consent to trustee decisions are confined to a narrow supervisory role or may exercise their own independent judgment on the merits. In preferring the latter answer, the judgment stresses that “protector” is not a term of art and that everything depends on the proper construction of the trust instrument.

There is a loose pensions analogy wherever one person’s power is made subject to another’s consent, but the decision does not take the law much further in the pensions context as, where (for example) the trustees’ consent to the exercise of an employer’s power is required, they are already expected to reach their own substantive judgment and are not merely procedural watchdogs.

One interesting point is that the Board relied on the decision of the Supreme Court in the pensions case, Barnardo's v Buckinghamshire, as the leading authority on the interpretation of trust instruments.