In Reply to: Re: Ombudsman posted by Dave Mitchell on 14 February 2006 at 17:01:46:
Dave,
You should have mentioned Alan Murphy in respect of the complaints which were joined. His was particularly pertinent because it was about the use of his AVC money.
I think your description of what the Trust was told could do with softening. I won't write about what the Trust actually was told, just so as to stay on the correct side of confidentiality, but I can talk about case law. The members have been told that the legal advice was based on case law - ie there is no piece of legislation where one can go and look to find out the relevant law, there is only a precedent or precedents.
Legal advisers can get things wrong; sometimes different advisers give conflicting advice over the same situation - they can't both be right when that happens. The ultimate arbiters of things that revolve around case law (whether a judgement in some particular case can be applicable to some other case) are the Law Lords. And as we saw in the Equitable case for example, nobody can reasonably claim to "be sure" what they will do until they do it. All that can reasonably be done is to give an opinion.
So what you say about "make sure that what we were being asked to do was legally possible and permissible" might be better as "make sure the legal opinion we were given was that what we were being asked to do was legally possible and permissible."
(Not with trustee hat on because this reasoning applies to every application of case law.)