Terms & Conditions

[Mike Hughes]

There are an awful lot of such trusts where one of the trustees is also a beneficiary. Not sure you can draw an inference there to any great purpose in isolation. What is the specific evidence the other trustee has no say and is not blocking a sale? “I don’t think…” again falls into speculation and subjectivity.

I’m also unconvinced by “… has the means to fund his rent.” If you were a claimant who was a recent amputee I would hazard an educated guess that if you have accommodation then looking at alternatives to that would be absolutely bottom of your list for a long long time. In particular in future you are going to need to fund an increasing number of care needs because of the limitations to your mobility and the many restrictions that imposes just on doing simple things like getting out of the home and travelling to the most basic of events such as medical appointments, shopping, seeing family and friends and just having a life. How, at this point, do you weight what the costs of that will look like? The answer of course is that you don’t. You either make a stupidly uninformed guess or you wait and see what your actual expenditure looks like. I would suggest it would be absolutely reckless and irresponsible of anyone in the position of your claimant to access their capital for a change of accommodation only to find within 12 months that they are living so far beyond their means and with negligible to no capital to access that they would in fact need to move again to a property funded by… you guessed it…

I’d venture to suggest this scenario is actually exactly that envisaged by the welfare system as an appropriate one for support at a difficult time.