Who can be a charity trustee?

The answer

This page is for anyone recruiting a board. It is also for anyone asked to become a charity trustee who wants to know if they are eligible. How many seats there are to fill is a separate question: how many trustees a charity needs.

It covers England and Wales, where the Charity Commission grants waivers, then Scotland and Northern Ireland. If you are already a trustee, the check is not a one-off. Disqualification can arise part-way through a term.

How old do you have to be to be a charity trustee?

In England and Wales the minimum age has no single answer. It depends on the legal structure the charity chose. The rule lives in a different piece of legislation for each one:

• Charitable company: 16 years. Companies Act 2006 s.157(1), word for word: “A person may not be appointed a director of a company unless he has attained the age of 16 years”. In a charitable company the directors are the charity trustees. So company law supplies the age rule, not the Charities Act.
• CIO: 16 years. Regulation 31(1) of the CIO (General) Regulations 2012. This rule sits in the regulations, not in the Act. Someone searching Part 11 of the Charities Act 2011 will find nothing. They may conclude there is no rule.
• Charitable trust, or unincorporated association: 18 years. Law of Property Act 1925 s.20 — “The appointment of an infant to be a trustee in relation to any settlement or trust shall be void, but without prejudice to the power to appoint a new trustee to fill the vacancy”.

So the age rule is a structure decision, not a governance footnote. A youth charity that wants trustees below the age of majority must be a CIO or a company. Choosing an unincorporated association rules it out. If that matters to you, it belongs in choosing your legal structure, before anything is signed.

In every case a governing document may set a higher age. None of them can set a lower one. An appointment made in breach is void. But being under age does not save the person from liability if they purport to act anyway. The office disappears. The exposure does not.

The automatic disqualification grounds, and how far they reach

In England and Wales the grounds are set out as Cases A to K in Charities Act 2011 s.178. They are automatic. Nobody decides to apply them to you.

Anyone screening a candidate against a mental list of “bankruptcy and serious dishonesty” will miss most of this. The list also catches:

• sex-offender notification requirements under Part 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003
• designation under counter-terrorism sanctions regulations
• contempt of court for a false statement of truth
• debt relief orders

Ask the question properly, in writing, and keep the answer.

Two things widen the check further:

It is not only trustees. s.178(3): “While a person is disqualified under this section in relation to a charity, the person is also disqualified from holding an office or employment in the charity with senior management functions.”

s.178(4) defines that in two limbs:

• a management function where the person reports to no other officer or employee
• a function involving control over money where the only person they report to is themselves a senior manager without money control

In a small charity that is usually the chief executive and whoever handles the money. Screening only the board is not enough.

It is not only at appointment. Bankruptcy, a conviction and a sanctions designation can all arrive mid-term. A trustee can become disqualified and carry on acting without anyone noticing. That is how this becomes a criminal matter rather than an administrative one.

One caution on scope. Case A depends on a separate section listing specified offences. The research did not read that section. If a candidate’s position turns on Case A, read that section rather than relying on a summary.

The offence of acting while disqualified, and its exemption

In England and Wales, acting while disqualified is a criminal offence, except for some insolvency-route disqualifications in companies and CIOs. Charities Act 2011 s.183 is headed “Criminal consequences of acting while disqualified”.

s.183(1), word for word: “it is an offence for any person to act as a charity trustee or trustee for a charity or to hold an office or employment while disqualified from being such a trustee or from holding that office or employment by virtue of section 178 or an order under section 181A.” The liability is the individual’s — “any person” who acts — not the charity’s and not the board’s collectively.

The penalties are set out in s.183(3). On summary conviction, the penalty is imprisonment or a fine. On conviction on indictment, it is imprisonment or a fine or both.

[no fact — not established] — the maximum terms and the summary limit are recorded in the 19 August verification. They have no fact record on this site, so the figures are not printed here.

The exemption matters more than the offence for most readers. s.183(2): the offence does not apply where both of these are true:

• (a) the charity is a company or a CIO
• (b) the person is disqualified by virtue only of one of these Cases:
  • Case B (bankruptcy)
  • Case F (director disqualification, or an order under s.429(2) of the Insolvency Act 1986)
  • Case G (debt relief order or restrictions order)

For the two commonest incorporated charity forms, insolvency-route disqualification is not criminalised, because company law already covers it. Anything that tells you flatly “acting while disqualified is a crime” is wrong for a large share of charities.

The waiver route in England and Wales

A disqualified person can apply to the Charity Commission for a waiver. Disqualification is not always the end of it. The statutory route in England and Wales is Charities Act 2011 s.181. Its shape is established:

• The disqualified person applies, not the charity. s.181(2).
• The Commission may waive generally, or for a particular charity or class of charities. It may also waive only the senior-management leg under s.178(3). For that leg it may waive only a particular office or description of office (s.181(2A)).
• Any waiver must be notified to the person in writing (s.181(4)).
• For Cases D, E and I, a fixed period runs from the date the disqualification took effect. An application made after that period must be granted unless the Commission is satisfied that special circumstances mean it should be refused (s.181(3)). [no fact — not established] — that period has no fact record, so it is not printed here.
• No waiver at all for a charitable company or CIO while a Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 prohibition subsists without leave (s.181(5)).

What is not established is the administrative side — the form, the evidence the Commission wants, and how long it takes. That remains an open gap. Do not promise a candidate a timescale.

Where this page applies, and where it does not

England and Wales: this page sets out the position in full. Ages, grounds, offence and waiver route are all established from the legislation.

Scotland: covered, and materially different from England and Wales. The grounds are in s.69 of the 2005 Act. Scotland has 13 grounds, not the same set and not the same number. They roughly doubled in 2025. So any content describing “the five grounds” is describing a superseded regime.

Disqualification now also reaches senior managers under s.69B. OSCR grants the waivers.

On age, Scotland is the odd one out. There is no statutory minimum outside company law. OSCR’s position is an expectation, word for word: “There is no minimum age for charity trustees stated in the 2005 Act; however, we would expect charity trustees to be over the age of 16.” See 16 years.

Publishing “16 across the UK” is wrong twice over. It is wrong about English unincorporated charities. It is also wrong about the legal status of the Scottish figure.

Northern Ireland: covered on disqualification, the offence and the waiver route. An earlier version treated Northern Ireland as unaddressed. That framing is now out of date. Northern Ireland has its own 8-ground disqualification regime under s.86 of the 2008 Act. It is structurally close to England and Wales’ Cases A–K but not identical in content.

One clear difference sets it apart from England and Wales and Scotland. Northern Ireland’s disqualification does not extend to senior managers or any office or employment. It reaches only a charity trustee.

Acting while disqualified is a strict-liability offence under s.87. It has the same insolvency-route carve-out England and Wales has. But on a plain reading, the carve-out may not extend to a CIO trustee in the same way. This point is flagged for solicitor review, not resolved here.

The waiver route sits with CCNI. Only the disqualified person may apply, generally or for a particular charity. A grant is mandatory after five years on the removal-based grounds, unless there are special circumstances.

On age, the position stays thinner than the rest of this page. CCNI states the ages: 18 for an unincorporated charity and 16 for a charitable company director.

But CCNI cites no provision for the first of those. And the Northern Irish equivalent of Law of Property Act 1925 s.20 was not traced. Treat that one figure as reported, not verified to source.

Northern Ireland has no CIO, because Part 11 of the Charities Act (Northern Ireland) 2008 was never brought into force.

What to do about it

The eligibility question is only answered when it is written down. A verbal “no, nothing like that” is worth nothing to a regulator. In at least one published inquiry, the Commission could not establish who a charity’s trustees even were, because no declarations, appointment letters or minutes existed.

Check trustee eligibility (new charities). This produces a wet-signed declaration from every trustee and a recorded eligibility check. Do it before the application, not during it.

If the charity already exists, the equivalent is check every trustee’s eligibility. That step sets the check up as something that repeats, not something that happened once.