Andrew East & Kevin Martin speak with Certainty Pt 8
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Certainty regularly meet senior legal professionals to discuss the ongoing developments of the register . Kevin Martin, Chairman of Certainty and Andrew East, Chairman STEP UK Probate & Estates Committee recently expressed the following views…
8. Q. Do you think that we should wait for the government to make a register?
A: (Kevin) I think you are looking at a model which would be an ideal but in reality it is not going to happen. What has happened in other European countries, and we are going back decades, is that the government has persuaded the bar associations to set up registers and they have been happy to do that and to fund it with the quite small amounts of seed corn money which was required in those days, it wasn’t a huge investment, and we are talking in many cases about very small jurisdictions. If that was to happen today first of all you would be starting from square one with a clean sheet of paper, the government would have to be persuaded about the case and certainly wouldn’t want to fund it. It would probably go to the professional organisations in the time honoured fashion and its been established by the costs of the research and development of Certainty.co.uk that this is not a modest investment. I don’t believe that the professional institutions would be willing or able to achieve this in the short to medium term. This is a problem that needs to be addressed now and the only way to do this is through the Certainty model.
(Andrew) I think I would only add that what people tend to forget when they compare us with the continental model is that the civil law system actually lends itself very easily to compulsory will registers. Taking for example the position in France where to be valid the will either has to be prepared and registered by a notary or written out in your own handwriting, the so called holograph will. As the notary has to record the will and store it for it to be valid it is just a small step for him to submit those details to a national wills register. It’s simple because the whole system mitigates to it, whereas the system of testamentary freedom in this country works completely against a compulsory wills register in the sense that it is not a part of the automatic process of your solicitor preparing a will that it should then be registered, although we are hoping Certainty will change that. But at the moment it has not been part of the natural process, so that’s always been the traditional difficulty which Certainty has sought to overcome in a very imaginative way.
(Nigel) To add to that most surveys we have done have requested a voluntary register. What you are saying there is that a voluntary register is the only way it can be done in the UK currently.
(Andrew) I think that’s right, yes. In many ways it would make life a bit easier if the government were to make it compulsory for wills to be registered, but I think that as Kevin said the likelihood of that happening is really fairly remote at the moment.
