Assets of The National Fund
The assets of The National Fund (c £500m) could be released, either by expediting the existing case under consideration by the Attorney General or by nationalising through primary legislation.
The National Fund was originally set up when an anonymous donor supplied £500,000 with a mandate to build an endowment large enough to pay off the UK’s national debt. With this debt standing at £1,821.3 billion in March 2019, the fund is equivalent to less than 0.03% of it. In 2009, the fund’s trustees concluded that there was no prospect of it being able to pay off the debt and applied to the Charity Commission to change its constitution so it could donate money to charities.
The Charity Commission sought the permission of the Attorney General in 2011. On 22 May 2018 an application was made to the High Court by the Attorney General for the release of the National Fund for the purposes of reducing the National Debt. An original court date set for November 2019 has been pushed back to October 2020. Complicating matters further, in early 2020 a claim was made on the funds by an unnamed party “X”, who purports to be a descendant of the original anonymous founder of the National Fund. Hence, freeing up the National Fund’s assets via standard means is more complicated than at first glance, as not only under the terms of the fund must its value be left to accumulate until such time as it is sufficient to pay off the National Debt in full, but now there is the additional issues of “X”’s claim to settle.
In 2018 the UK Government, through a ministerial answer to a written parliamentary question, stated that, according to expert evidence, "there is no realistic prospect of the Fund ever amounting to a sum sufficient to pay off the whole of the National Debt.” During a debate in the House of Lords, however, it was suggested that one possibility might be to use existing provisions in the founding articles of the National Fund to enable a donation of its assets to the Treasury on the understanding that match funding of equivalent value was then made available to support charities.
Whilst this idea was dismissed at the time, the political context has changed enormously given the imperatives of the current crisis. In light of the coronavirus pandemic, with the right political will, a way could be found to access the assets of the National Fund, and these would constitute a significant pot to be directed towards a national endeavour of similarly significant magnitude to that which the original founders had in mind.