Choosing trustees and guardians for a disabled child

A trust is only as good as the people running it.

Everything else follows from that one line. In practice it is the structures that get the attention: the mechanics of a disabled person’s trust, the wording of the will, the order in which things are signed. The people get added at the end, in the last ten minutes, in the boxes at the bottom of the form.

That is backwards. The structures are instruments and nothing more. The people you choose to operate them are what actually decides whether your child is well looked after once you are not there to do it yourself. These choices deserve the most thought.

Quite often they get the least.

Two jobs, routinely muddled

Start by separating the roles, because families run them together constantly.

A guardian is concerned with care. Who looks after your child day to day. A trustee is concerned with money: who manages the funds held for your child’s benefit, and who decides how those funds are used. Different jobs, different qualities, and, crucially, they do not have to be the same person.

Sometimes the best carer for your child is not the best person to manage money. Sometimes it is the other way round, and the relative with the spreadsheet habit is not the one you would want doing bedtime. Recognising that early frees you to choose the right person for each role rather than forcing one individual to do both, which happens mostly because nobody mentioned that splitting them was an option.

Choosing well, then keeping the choice current

A trustee appointment is a long term decision, because the trust may run for decades. You are not picking somebody to do a task next year. You are picking people to act in your child’s interest across a span of time that may stretch well beyond your own life.

What matters is a real understanding of your child, a reliable commitment to acting in their interest, and the ability to work constructively with others, since trustees often have to act together. Financial sophistication is useful and can be bought in through professional advisers. Care for your particular child cannot be bought in anywhere.

Think about succession among the trustees too. People age, move away, fall out, or simply do not outlast the trust’s purpose. A trust resting entirely on one person is fragile.

The guardian question is harder, and it carries more family weight than any other decision here. The temptation is to default to the obvious candidate: a sibling, a grandparent, a close friend. Sometimes the obvious candidate is exactly right. It is still worth pausing to ask whether they genuinely understand your child’s needs, whether they have the capacity in their own life to take this on, and whether they would actually want to, because a guardian who agreed out of love and then cannot cope helps nobody, least of all your child.

Have the conversation. Do not assume. The person you quietly nominated in your head may have no idea, and may have a very different view once asked.

Then there is the letter of wishes, which is the bridge between the people and the knowledge. A trustee who did not raise your child, and a guardian stepping into an unfamiliar role, both need the understanding that currently lives only in your head. The routines. The triggers. The preferences and the small things that make your child’s days work.

The legal documents appoint the people. The letter of wishes equips them. Without it you have handed somebody responsibility without the manual.

Finally, make the names sit consistently across everything: the will, the trust, your life insurance nominations, your pension. When those documents contradict one another, money and responsibility can end up somewhere you never intended.

And none of it is permanent. Revisit after any significant change, however minor it looks at the time. A death, a falling out, a house move, a shift in somebody’s health or work. The right trustee at forty may not be the right trustee at sixty.

So go back to the form. Those boxes at the bottom, the ones filled in last, are the part of the plan that will be doing the work long after the wording has stopped mattering. Give them the afternoon they deserve.

Want to talk it through?

A short, no-obligation conversation by phone or video, about your own situation.

More articles

Wills and trusts are not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. The writing of a Will involves the referral to a service that is separate and distinct from the services offered by St. James's Place.

This article is general information rather than legal or financial advice. Appointing trustees, guardians and deputies carries real legal consequences, so take specialist advice suited to your own family.

Legacy Capital Management is an Appointed Representative of and represents only St. James’s Place Wealth Management plc (which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority) for the purpose of advising solely on the Group’s wealth management products and services, more details of which are set out on the Group’s website at www.sjp.co.uk/products.

The ‘St. James’s Place Partnership’ and the titles ‘Partner’ and ‘Partner Practice’ are marketing terms used to describe St. James’s Place representatives.

Legacy Capital Management, Rosewood House, Duffield Park, Stoke Poges, SL2 4HY

SJP Approved 30/07/2026