Bath and Wells Consistory Court: Briden Ch, June 1999
A faculty had been granted in 1984 for the construction in the church of a screen containing an engraved glass panel. It was to have been paid for privately by a parishioner whose late wife was to have been commemorated in the panel. The screen was erected but not the decorated panel, the installation of which was abandoned. With the consent of interested parties an order was made in 1998 for the panel to remain blank apart from a written inscription in memory of the benefactor's late wife. The chancellor stated that if a donation was not spent in full on work for which the gift was intended, then there was a resulting trust in the donor's favour unless the court is able to infer an underlying general charitable intent. In this case the donor had made a composite donation, one part for the screen and the other for the panel. The latter was severable from the former and thus repayable. It was not the case that the total amount donated could be set off against the cost of constructing the screen alone, which overran its budget. The chancellor calculated the value of that part of the donation intended for the memorial panel (net of tax recovered from the Inland Revenue) and ordered its repayment to the donor together with interest at an average market rate from the point at which the scheme for the memorial panel was abandoned.
(2000) 5 Ecc LJ 387
