At the end of 2023 the Ministry of Justice commenced a 10-week consultation to gather views on proposals to reduce costs and increase efficiency by only retaining digitised versions of original wills. Under the proposals, paper wills would be retained for a limited time before being destroyed.
Currently, all wills submitted to the probate registry when applying for a grant of probate are preserved indefinitely in their original paper form (at an annual cost to the taxpayer of £4.5mn).
In addition to the proposals on the storage of wills, the government is also seeking views on whether the current law permitting the public inspection of wills should be preserved or reformed.
The consultation proposals provoked a surprisingly fierce backlash from some quarters, and have already attracted a petition on the UK parliament website to stop the proposed digitisation of all wills.
On the face of it, the government’s proposal to digitise its collection of more than 100mn wills seems sensible, given the technology now available to do so and the cost reduction resulting from no longer having to store millions of paper wills in warehouses.
As well as costs savings, digitisation would also make it much simpler (in theory) for members of the public to access any wills they seek to retrieve and examine (assuming that the technology works correctly).
The proposed changes to the current wills storage system would see physical documents retained for a period of 25 years in recognition of their sentimental value, after which period the records would be held only in digital form (and the paper originals destroyed).
Some historians disparaged the planned digitisation drive, calling the destruction of physical wills “sheer vandalism” and “obviously insane”.
However, the plans are, in essence, merely a shift from one form of physical storage to another.
Exceptional cases
The government is open to developing an exception to digitisation in cases where there is a national interest in preserving permanently an original will in paper form for posterity or future historical or academic enquiry (essentially, for famous individuals).
A further consultation may be held in the future on what would constitute the qualifying criteria for such an exception.
Attention was focused on the MoJ’s proposal to make exceptions to digitisation in the case of “wills belong[ing] to notable individuals or [that] have significant historical interest”.
The MoJ noted that the wills of Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens and Diana, Princess of Wales, will continue to be held at its facility in Birmingham, suggesting that the wills of similarly important cultural figures would also meet the threshold for retention in physical form.
There are obvious problems with the government deciding whose wills should and should not be preserved by virtue of being important to the nation; not least because, for those who achieve renown long after their death, their wills are likely to be destroyed long before their latter-day fame should have resulted in their will being preserved in paper form.
