Role of the trustee

Trustees operate within two sets of formal rules, the governing document which may be called rules or a constitution or the trust deed. In a charitable company, the governing document will be called the Memorandum and Articles of Association or the Articles. 

The second set of rules are those in the law, particularly the acts which govern their type of organisation, for example, the Trustee Act 2000 (for unincorporated charities), Insolvency Acts, Companies Acts and Charity Acts.

Trustees work collectively as a trustee board and take decisions at formal board meetings. 

In practice, many trustee boards delegate day to day or operational matters to individual trustees, volunteers, staff or agents. In large charities the trustee board might delegate the day to day running of the organisation along with some decision making powers to a staff team via a chief executive.

Regardless of how much day to day work is delegated from them, the trustee board retain overall legal responsibility and may only delegate as far as their governing document or the relevant legislation allows.