Trust Law Update: Recommended Law Changes – Inheritance and Wills

The law commission has made a number of recommendations to parliament, the key change recommendations being:

• No ability for children to challenge how their parents leave their estate, unless the child is under the age of 25, giving absolute testamentary freedom to those with children over that age limit. Presently any child can make a claim against a parent’s will if they think they have not been treated fairly. The current law recognises a “moral duty” to provide at least a portion (in most cases 10-15%) of your estate to each child.
  
  

• The alternate recommendation is that any child, regardless of age, will be able to contest a will based on financial need.
  
  
• Stepchildren under the age of 25 will have an absolute right to contest a stepparent’s will. The current law only allows dependent stepchildren to make a claim.
  
  
• The law around what happens if you die without a will would be changed so that a surviving partner would take the whole estate (presently the estate would be divided unequally between surviving partner and children). If the children were from a previous relationship, they would share equally with the surviving partner.
  
  
• A Court may look at assets transferred to a trust or held jointly with another party when deciding what award to make to a claiming party. This means that the Court could “bust” into a trust if it thought that assets had been transferred to defeat rights under the suggested new inheritance laws.