What the Deeds Allow

The 114 Livery Companies of the City of London are, taken together, one of the country's most significant philanthropic movements, and one of its least visible. The Livery Impact Report 2025, covering 2024 and the 113 Companies it surveyed, records aggregate giving of £81 million, £33.9 million of it to education, alongside 76,100 hours of volunteer and professional pro bono support. Behind those totals sit hundreds of charitable trusts, most governed by their own deed, and many of them older than the causes they now fund.

That last fact is the interesting one.

How Livery charity came to be

Livery charity rarely arrived as a single fund. It accreted over centuries: a benefaction here, a prize fund there, an almshouse endowment, an apprenticing charity, a war-memorial trust. Each came with its own deed, its own objects and sometimes its own trustees. Many Companies are today corporate trustee of several registered charities at once.

The money is real, but much of it is not free. Permanent endowment yields income and cannot itself be spent. Funds are tied to trades that have shrunk or vanished. Beneficiary classes were defined a century ago, and geography fixed by a Victorian will.

None of this is a criticism of trustees. It is what centuries of good intentions look like without a periodic review.

Two questions worth asking

The first is: what do we actually hold? Not the headline figure in the accounts, but the ledger beneath it, showing unrestricted, restricted and permanent endowment, fund by fund, with values. Most Companies have never seen this on one page.

The second follows from it: how does each fund's purpose sit against what the Company now supports? An endowed trust spending above its income may be doing exactly what it was designed to do, or it may be quietly eroding. From the outside the two look identical, and from the inside they often do too, because the answer lives in deeds and accounts that nobody has consolidated. The reverse case matters as much: a fund accumulating year on year with no stated plan for the surplus.

Money that is neither spent nor purposefully grown is a governance question waiting to be asked.

The position has moved

The reason this is a live question rather than a lament is that the routes open to trustees have widened. The Charities Act 2022, brought into force in stages, gave charities broader powers to amend governing documents, a simpler route for smaller permanent endowments, and scope to invest on a total-return basis.

Whether any of that is available to a particular charity depends on its legal form and on the terms of its own governing document. Those are legal questions, and they belong to the trustees and their solicitors, not to an article. The narrower point is this: the position is not what it was, some Companies have already acted on it, and most have not yet had occasion to ask what has changed for their own funds.

Where a Company might start

Not with the law. With the records. Gathering the deeds, schemes, conveyances and fund records into one place, and building a ledger from the accounts, is ordinary administrative work, and it is the thing that has to happen before any other question can be answered sensibly.

What that produces is a picture and a list of questions: which funds are plainly usable, which are clearly tied, and which are simply unclear and need a solicitor's view. The Charities Committee can then take advice on the ones that matter, rather than on all of them at once, and decide what to do. Trustees make those decisions. Where the Charity Commission's consent is required, the application is theirs too.

A note for Masters

The Master's year is the natural moment. It has a beginning and an end, a Court that is listening, and a well-understood tradition of the Master choosing a theme. A review of the Company's funds is a theme that costs little, offends no one and leaves something behind: a ledger the next Master inherits, a set of decisions minuted, and perhaps a fund that had been waiting a century to be useful again.

A restriction honoured with care, an old donor's purpose given new force, is a better membership story than new money, and a better answer to the perennial question of what the Company is for.