Making a Will is crucial for anyone wanting to protect their children from the turmoil that can ensue after they die. Of course, if you don’t make a Will, it isn’t you who lives to regret it. If you have young children, should both parents die it’s left to the courts to decide who they are entrusted to. Until such time as the Court appoints a Guardian, the child can be taken into care. Making a Will appointing guardians for your children is essential so that they can be cared for and receive appropriate provision for financial support according to your wishes. If you have children under the age of 18, you should name at least one Guardian in your Will to care for them in the event of them being left without any parents. You can also name an executor to administer the Will who can also be the Guardian. This executor can be given powers to take care of your estate. A properly drafted Will can provide for all of these.

Normally - and especially where very young children are involved - you would appoint family members as Guardians. Always check with your proposed Guardians in advance to be certain they are willing to act. A Will will also enable a trust to be set-up in such a way that you can define when your children will be able to access the money within the trust fund. With discretionary trusts absolute discretion as to when assets are given out and to whom lies with the trustees.

Without a valid Will, the present rules governing your estate if you die without a Will have little regard for your wishes. Your loved ones may not receive the inheritance that you would wish and you potentially run the risk of depriving your spouse or partner of their home and increasing the inheritance tax (IHT) burden. For your relations and for anyone who is important to you, but not related, it’s substantially easier - and cheaper all round - if you have taken the important step and prepared in advance by writing a Will. Although it can be upsetting to consider what would happen to your child after your death, to make plans for his or her future security is a caring act that any parent would want to ensure.

So we finally get our Will sorted but don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet. Knowing that your Will can be easily found is equally as important as writing your Will and this means registering it. It’s a fact that two thirds of Britons haven’t made a Will and a third of those that have die and their Will can’t be found. In a recent public survey commissioned by Certainty the UK’s online Will Register, 67% of people surveyed admitted that they didn’t know where their parents’ Wills are located. Your Solicitor can keep your Will stored for you but the final step to completing the process is to have it registered with the UK’s online Will register www.Certainty.co.uk which records the details of the Solicitor’s office where your Will is held. This ensures that when the time comes your Will can be quickly and easily located.

For your own peace of mind, the best advice is to make or review your Will with your solicitor and ask them to register it with Certainty. Only the location of the Will is registered (i.e. the solicitors office where the Will is held) and this information remains private and confidential until you pass on with access granted only then to the next of kin and executors. For those with a Will already in existence, Certainty is giving away 12.8 million free Will registrations to the general public.

If there are no children then the spouse or civil partner will be awarded half the estate. Wills can also be challenged if fraud is suspected, they are not written and witnessed correctly, the person was believed not to be mentally able to have written or understood the will or it is believed that undue influence was exerted on them. These areas are much more difficult to prove however as it often becomes one person’s word against another’s. So what can you do to make sure your will is not contested?

Tim Logan, head of the private client department at Colchester based Ellisons Solicitors said: “You can’t make a will totally watertight as the courts have a lot of power to vary them under the 1975 Act. But if you do want to leave differing amounts or leave people out of a will, then you can write what is called an Inheritance Act Statement or Declaration alongside your will. This statement, typically written at the same time as your will, would set out your reasoning for writing your will as you have. It is a legally recognised document which would be taken into account if the will was contested, although it is not legally binding on the court.” He also advises that people tell their families of their actions in person to explain the reasoning before it ends in court.

As he points out the cost of court action are met by the estate reducing the amount of money available to all beneficiaries. Julie Hutchison, estate planning specialist at Standard Life says a letter of intent giving guidance on the will – for example how any children are to be raised – can also be used to explain the will. She also said: “It is vital to keep your will up-to-date as having an out-of-date will is as dangerous as dying without one.” For example you may have made your peace with someone previously excluded from the will.

This is an article taken from The Telegraph by Rosanna Spero 17/09/08

Attracting an audience from all of the UK to listen to internationally acclaimed artists, other performances at the Festival will include pianist John Lill, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and the opening concert with Armonico Consort plus trumpeter Crispian Steele-Perkins and soprano Elin Manahan Thomas. Other highlights will include include contemporary dance with the Rosie Kay Dance Company, an evening filled with Bard-inspired opera, song and musicals plus dinner at the Welcombe Hotel from Hatstand Opera, two wonderful family concerts and the now-famous lunchtime series from Monday-Friday in the beautiful setting of Stratford’s Town Hall

11. Q. If you could put in one phase why a member of the public should write a will what would those words be?

A: (Kevin) Its about the benefit of certainty and the avoidance of doubt and minimising potential conflict.

(Andrew) Yes that puts it very well, basically you can be sure your estate will go to the people you want it to, it will be administered by people you trust and will reduce to a minimum the possibility for families to fall out.  Where there’s a will there are often relations!

10. Q. Are there any additional qualifications involved?

A:  (Andrew) Yes there is an entrance exam. We have a diploma exam for people who do not have any other previous professional qualification. If you do have a previous professional qualification there is a different route called the qualified practitioner route which involves writing papers to show your level of experience. So you do need to pass quite a stiff test to become a member and show that you are a specialist. That’s what STEP is about really, promoting the specialist practitioner.

9. Q. For the public point of view if we could have an overview of STEP so that they understand STEP.

A:  (Andrew) Well I would say, going back to its origins the idea behind STEP was to provide a forum for lawyers, accountants and bank trust staff who all do basically similar types of work where they could get together and discuss. I think that at the time it was formed just over 16yrs ago there were forums where private client lawyers could talk to each other, and private client bankers and accountants all had their own associations, but we were all doing similar sorts of work but we weren’t talking to each other! So that’s where STEP started and we have developed into a body that seeks to support any specialist doing probate, trust and estate work and work with the related taxes.

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.

7.  Q. When we met, not trying to go too over the top, you mentioned it was an opportunity for STEP members in your view as Chair. What would you say to encourage STEP members, every practice has a different structure in the way the want to attract new business and respond to the national wills register, what would you say?

(Andrew) I think I would say to STEP members that you should certainly look at this because whatever level of business you are at I think searching on the internet is something that people at all levels do, certainly people at a basic level do and I think that people at higher levels as well. I’ve heard people say that at the top end of the market people are not going to be googling to look for a will writer but in fact I think using the internet to find information and suppliers is something which is classless in my view and something that happens across the board. I mean perhaps the Duke of Westminster will not necessarily be googling ‘wills’ to find a will writer but I think that up to quite a high level people will be using the internet. These days you have to market across a broad front and having a strong internet presence can only be good.

6. Q. Certainty has a big online presence for its member solicitors – is this relevant to the profession?

A: (Kevin) I think putting it in perspective they do of course make an impression. I mean your own research has shown that if you go onto the internet depending on what you put into Google you get pages of will writers and not necessarily solicitors and you are seeking to address that. But I think it needs to be emphasised that the vast majority of wills which are drawn up these days are drawn up by solicitors or members of STEP.  Will writers are competition but they actually draw up a tiny amount of wills despite the marketing advantage they seem to have got via the internet, so solicitors have actually combated them extremely well and I’m sure will continue to do so. But this product will assist them in so doing and in so far as there has been an erosion it will help to stop that and restore the kind of market balance that I think would be right, which is that by far and away the vast majority of wills should be professionally drawn up.

(Andrew) I’d like to completely endorse what Kevin was saying there and certainly one of the things that excited me about the project and excited my interest was particularly the internet connection.