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This chapter highlights both the obvious limitations and marked successes of the SD’s strategy of influencing Labour policy as Harold Wilson became prime minister. Taking the ‘surcharge crisis’ as its starting point, it explains in greater detail why the SD responded negatively to the European policy of the new Wilson government and how throughout the winter and spring of 1964–65 SD leader Jens Otto Krag set about not only reducing the surcharge but also transforming the issue into a much more fundamental debate about the future of British and Danish ties with the EEC. It then explores the oft-discussed bridge-building initiative that emerged in early 1965 in part precisely because of this effort, before exploring what meetings between Krag and Wilson at the end of 1965 can tell us about the exact timing of Labour’s warming to the idea of a second EEC bid. The final part of the chapter addresses relations between the two parties in the first half of 1966, a period which for the SD at least began with high hopes of an imminent British bid but ended with disappointment over a lack of clarity about the nature of Britain’s future relationship with the EEC.

This chapter deals with financial accountability. It includes a look at the treatment of the local contribution to local government finance; rates, community charge, and council tax; the interaction of financial and democratic accountability; the common law trustee concept; and statutory accountability processes. It first considers the accountability issues raised by local taxation and central government grant funding of local government. It then deals with the place of audit as an accountability mechanism, the role of the Audit Commission, and with the judicially created fiduciary duty owed by a council to its taxpayers. The discussion of fiduciary duty underlines a persistent theme of this chapter: the tension between considerations of financial accountability and representative democracy.

The challenges to colonize non-branch locations by banks were first touched on Chapter 5. This discussion continues in Chapter 7 (‘Independent ATM Deployers’) on how populating those locations comes about by the combination of an economic incentive (surcharging), the development of the so-called ‘low end’ ATM, and the diversification into the payments space of second-party processors. This chapter starts to bring the discussion to contemporary themes as IADs are increasingly recipients of outsourcing banks’ strategies to the extent that some of the biggest IADs control networks across continents and ten times the size of the ATMs owned by even the largest banks.

This Chapter deals with two ancillary financial matters which are of relevance to criminal proceedings: public funding and costs. Public funding is now governed principally by the relevant provisions of the Legal Aid Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) and the statutory instruments made under it, in particular the Criminal Legal Aid (Remuneration) Regulations 2013/435, although reference will be made to earlier enactments. Costs in criminal proceedings are governed by the Practice Direction: Costs in Criminal Proceedings [2015] EWCA Crim 1568.

Since its establishment in 1945, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has played a key role in ‘giv[ing] confidence to members by making the general resources of the Fund temporarily available to them under adequate safeguards, thus providing them with opportunity to correct maladjustments in their balance of payments without resorting to measures destructive of national or international prosperity’ through its crisis prevention and resolution role. In exercising its mandate, the IMF has had to adapt over time to significant developments in the global monetary and financial systems. Since the Second Amendment of the IMF’s Articles in 1978, subject to certain obligations under the IMF’s Articles, members may freely decide on their exchange rate arrangements merely notifying the IMF of any changes to their own exchange arrangements, which is a departure from the par value system prevalent when the IMF was established.

With the euro crisis behind us, it is hard to picture the currency union without a rescue mechanism. Almost eight years have passed since the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) was created in September 2012. All states that once benefitted from its financial support have successfully exited their programs. A new round of institutional reform is now in the offing, with the ESM possibly getting ‘beefed up’ to a European Monetary Fund. But the currency union’s set-up has not always had assistance instruments like these at its disposal. At the start of 2010, when the crisis threatened the survival of the euro and the Union as a whole, its toolbox was empty. Or almost empty.

Lord Walker’s analysis in Pitt v Holt in the Supreme Court accords in all essential respects with the reasons put forward in Chapter 3 to prefer a duty (‘weak’) rather than results-oriented (‘strong’) account of the Re Hastings-Bass rule, as does the approach adopted by Lloyd LJ in the Court of Appeal, which Lord Walker expressly endorses. Yet Lord Walker’s judgment does not yet provide a wholly comprehensive basis for the future development of the law. There remain a number of loose ends, arising predominantly from issues not specifically before the court in Pitt, but which have been matters of concern in earlier Re Hastings-Bass cases, including: how a ‘relevant consideration’ is defined; the significance of establishing that the trustees ‘would’ or ‘might’ have acted differently, in view of Lord Walker’s refusal to choose between these two alternatives; the specific problems arising from the use of professional advisers, and in cases concerning tax liability and pension trusts. These matters are addressed in detail in chapters 5 to 8. But in order to do this it is first necessary to clarify the juridical nature of the ‘duty of consideration’ upon which Lord Walker’s analysis depends.

The analysis and discussion of the Re Hastings-Bass rule set out in the previous chapters has primarily addressed the situation in which the rule has typically been applied: the exercise of a dispositive power or discretion by a trustee. But stating the paradigmatic Re Hastings-Bass situation in that way makes clear the possibility of extending the rule’s application beyond those boundaries. First, a trustee may exercise a power which is of an administrative rather than dispositive character. Secondly, a power may be vested in a person as an individual, rather than in an office-holder such as a trustee. Thirdly, powers may be vested in fiduciaries other than trustees, and indeed Pitt v Holt itself was concerned with the actions of a receiver appointed under the Mental Health Act 1983. This chapter addresses in turn each of these three possibilities.