Why doesn’t everyone get a will?

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Intimations of mortality, to adapt a phrase from William Wordsworth, concentrate the mind wonderfully on the need to prepare a will.It’s always sobering to know that you could be next in line for an appointment with the Grim Reaper.

Why this maudlin state of mind? My mother died in the spring, my father seven years ago, which makes me the oldest member of the family after my big brother and sister. As if that wasn’t enough, my 60th birthday is next month – but please, no cracks about free bus passes and winter fuel allowances. (Actually, both benefits are casualties of the coalition government’s savings review.)

Whereas once I assumed I would live forever, I now see those three babies whose nappies I used to change enter their 30s, with careers and independent lives. Death and taxes, the only certain things in life…

And now for the smug bit: I already have a will because I’m a responsible parent and, even from across the great divide, won’t want to give the taxman more money than he is strictly entitled to.

The will was prepared with the help of a sole practitioner in my hometown of Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent. It cost little more than £70 because the Rayner estate is neither large nor complicated. I’ve got no children born out of wedlock, no shooting lodges in Scotland, no deposits in offshore banks. My car is six years old already, my pension is diminishing faster than a Himalayan glacier and my home is living proof that there is no such thing as an investment that is as safe as houses.

It sounds as if I have got the whole wills & probate thing sorted. Except circumstances change: my partner is about to put some capital into our shared home and I need to alter my will to reflect that. It wouldn’t be fair if, after my much-lamented demise, my kids threw her out on to the street because they wanted to sell the property. She tells me we need to tweak the will to give her a lifetime’s interest in the property. (She’s a solicitor, as it happens.)

All of which is not going to cost me much time or money. The original will, after all, cost little more than an Indian restaurant curry for two washed down with a halfway decent bottle of wine.

So why doesn’t everyone get their wills & probate act together? People whinge about ‘death taxes’ and yet often do nothing to mitigate the impact of the taxman’s depredations. Lots of people even die intestate, which is bad news for their families and friends.

Half a million or so people die every year in the UK, which means probate is big business, and that is the reason why banks and unregulated will-writers have got in on the act. They are alleged to overcharge and to make expensive blunders that lawyers eventually have to put right. Research by the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners (STEP), published last month, found that two-thirds of trust and estate practitioners had encountered ‘incompetence or dishonesty’ in the will-writing market over the last year.

The Law Society has been running a PR campaign to encourage members of the public to prepare a will with the help of solicitors. The Gazette has similarly published pieces exposing the failures of unregulated will-writers. The Legal Services Board is currently examining whether the writing of wills should become a reserved activity that may only be conducted by qualified professionals.

But perhaps the battle has already been lost. The Office of Fair Trading in June of this year gave its approval to the code of practice of the Institute of Professional Willwriters – the resultant publicity prompting 10,000 enquiries from the public in the space of a week. These were 10,000 enquires that solicitors did not receive.

Similarly, STEP has developed a Certificate in Will Preparation that will give unregulated providers a form of accreditation to reassure members of the public that they can expect a good service.

The clock is ticking for wills & probate solicitors, and if they don’t want their practices to join me in the queue for the Grim Reaper, they had better get their act together – and fast.