The Government wants your Opinion.

You Are Invited To Comment In A Government Consultation Upon Digitising Probates And Wills And DESTROYING ORIGINALS

At present, if a person in England and Wales has made a Will, then after their death their original Will must be submitted to the Court’s (Government’s) Probate Registry.

After the Government has checked that the will was properly prepared and signed, and checked the submitted schedule of the assets of the estate and checked that all necessary tax has been paid, then it will issue a Grant of Probate to enable the terms of the Will to be carried out.

The Estate value may be held in land or Bank assets or shares. If so then the Banks and the Land Registry and the stockbroker/registrars or other asset holders will need to see the grant of probate in order to transfer the property ownership to the Executors. The Executors can then distribute funds to the intended beneficiaries mentioned in the Will.

At that stage the probate court no longer really needs to hold the Will. So the Will can be shredded, it has served its purpose. However, in England since 1858 the practice has been that the court will keep the original Will. Keep it “for ever”.

As you might imagine this means that the archives are getting crammed with original wills. Wills which nobody very often (ever) asks to see or read.

Furthermore, ever since 2021 all Wills are also held as digital scans on the Government computers, and the digitising process is continuing backwards to earlier years. This means that any executors or persons concerned – or anyone at all, researcher, or nosy-parker – can pay a small fee and receive a scanned copy of any will online.

If the request is for an older will not yet scanned, then Court will find that Will and scan it and issue the scan.

That is the system today. Now there is a consultation to which you can contribute. Link here

The Government is asking you – Do you think that all Wills (including the Wills stored since 1858) should be scanned as soon as possible and kept in digital form in “the Cloud”?

On its own this proposal is unlikely to cause too much objection, it just seems sensible that in a worst-case event, say a fire which destroys the wills archives, there should be scanned copies available as back-up. Of course.

But the government proposal goes further. The proposal indeed is that after every Will has been scanned it should be destroyed. Not immediately, but 25 years after the death. Most of the Wills held of course are much older, so most would go now.

The argument in favour of this destruction is financial. To avoid the extremely high cost of storage space and the payment of wages to archivists currently estimated at 4.5 million pounds each year and but obviously this will only increase with inflation and with huge numbers of new Wills requiring storage every year.

Hands up those who think that this is an absolutely splendid idea?

The suggestion is subject to the idea that not all original Wills would go to the flames. No, there would be exemption for those of “famous” individuals.

Presumably this means the Will of say Winston Churchill, will not be destroyed. Yes, I’ve heard of him. He is famous.

What about the Wills of famous actors? Remember your Mum saying, “Oh no Jessie Matthews has died”? Hugely famous in the 1920s. I doubt anyone under 40 would have heard of her at all. So, does “Famous” mean famous now or famous once? Maybe the criteria should be a Wiki page? But what about your late granddad? I never knew him, but he was famous, and important, to you.

And as many commentators have pointed out, fame fades but it can also swell. Folk who were not household names in their lifetimes can become recognised as truly extraordinary only long after their deaths. Mary Seacole (Wiki link) was alive two centuries ago, but not famous until very recently. Her Will would definitely have been shredded in the proposed regime.

Does it matter? Let’s assume nothing can go wrong.

Assumptions ? That the Wills are all scanned very carefully, with nobody scanning page 20 then going to page 22. (There will be mistakes. Who will be doing the scanning? Top level, job-focused perfectionists? Oh.) ? That the technology stays in use and “state of the art” for the next thousand years. (It won’t. “Please can you open this file from 1981 – you may need to consult the MS/ DOS user manual. Or is it CP/M?”) ? That the outsourced owners and operators of the cloud computers to be used stay solvent and in friendly countries. ? That the whole system stays resilient and never gets hacked. (See my recent Blog. Link Here. The British Library website is completely unusable as I write. Of course, it will get hacked – the more important it is, the more the bad actors attack.)

OK, assume we all agree nothing can go wrong with the data capture or the storage technology.

In which case, it’s all good isn’t it? Who needs to see paper? To see the original Will of William Shakespeare (currently held in The National Archives in its original manuscript). To see the signature, made from the pen which the Bard was holding in his hand. In 1616. I mean, it’s been digitised now. You can see it -here-. What’s the difference?

If we accept that for Wills, then is there any qualitative reason why this digitisation process should not extend itself to works of art. I mean we all have the Mona Lisa available on our computer screens, and perhaps on towels and tee shirts and beermats, so why does anyone bother nipping off to France to have a gawp at it.

Maybe Da Vinci gets a pass, being “famous”. But Van Gogh wasn’t famous at the time of his death. So far as we know he sold only one painting in his lifetime (￡16) let alone had one displayed in an art gallery. The Government’s digitization logic would be, take a scan, then torch the Sunflowers.

If you have in your possession a letter written by a great-great-uncle in the trenches before a battle in the Great War (many soldiers’ wills were written in these exact circumstances and not by the famous ones) is there not so sense of wonder in holding the document in your hand – the same document that he held in his hand?

Who thinks that age adds value to stuff? Real stuff. After a time, even relatively mundane documents become of interest. Letters home from anonymous Roman Soldiers (“please send me a cloak”) deeply miserable on the Scottish borders serving with Hadrian. Digitise and destroy it mate.

The other view of course is, it just doesn’t matter, – Nothing lasts forever; it’s all gone sooner or later. And if we keep all the old stuff, will there be any room for?new stuff?

Today’s song -Going, Going, Gone-

Oh Cheer up, it’s a New Year.

If you have an opinion to tell the consultation process, do it before it closes on 23rd February 2024.

Please do contact us whenever you need Notarial certification or Legalisation for your Documents– at https://www.atkinsonnotary.com – or phone on 0113 816 0116 (internationally 0044 113 8160116)

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