Charitable purposes and the shaping effects of money

We address a curious omission from both the literature on the law of charity and socio-legal studies – the effect of apparently extraneous factors, such as politics and ideology as well as the searching for money on the charitable purposes and identities of the public which are to benefit from the charity. This is a curious omission because even the law accepts that the idea of public benefit in charity law is a sociological concept, albeit one which has developed a technical meaning. We argue that approaching charitable purposes and public benefit as sociological concepts enables us to appreciate the tensions which those external factors produce as they re-shape those purposes and re-fashion the public who are to benefit. We refer to these factors under the rubric of the shaping effects of money. We use a case study of the Canal and River Trust to develop this argument. The Trust was set up by the government as a charity to manage and control 2000 miles of inland waterways in England and Wales. We draw on interviews with households who live on boats and “continuously cruise” those boats on the canals to illustrate how their interests have been marginalised as the CRT has re-shaped itself as a wellbeing charity.