- What about the responsibility of committee members?

Responsibility is limited to obeying the constitution and the will of the members. If you do what the rules state and obey the members, and end up in strife, it's the Trust that gets sued, not you individually as committee members. If however committee members break the rules and things go wrong, they can be personally liable for any damages - the claim comes from the members who will say 'we're not covering your back when you broke the rules in the first place'. In terms of responsibility, they are merely to observe the constitution and run a well ordered ship - which we can't see as any different from what any well-run organisation should be doing. The 'statutory responsibility' is to get the rule changes approved by the Registrar of Friendly Societies and doing annual accounts and elections - again, something we'd hope every good organisation would be doing.