Probate woes

I think I've managed my transition from being a 👑subject to being a citizen without nationality-affirming surgery. It only took six years; six months on me getting my paper ducks in a row; 12 months on the Foreign Birth Registry FBR processing that stack; 54 months where my change in status failed to filter through to the other departments of state. My mother died during the journey which will simplify the journey for my sibs: I needed to bring her and her passport to a Notary Public to sware whom she was; the sibs can just send her Death Cert. 

Did I say my mother died, in the fullness of her years, . . . 52 months ago? I did. Because she was born in 1920, she did really well on property lottery. In 1967, my parents bought (as their first, late, step on the property ladder) a quaint 300 y.o. cottage [see R] 50km NE of Charing Cross for £13,000 and sold it in 1983 for £110,000. They had just retired, and parlayed their windfall into a larger, new, home 210 km WSW of Charing Cross. I think they paid £65,000 but I know that house was sold 38 years later for £500,000! That's a 7% ROI year-in-year-out for half a century. Without gaming the system, or even trying, my Mum had almost become a millionaire. It's impossible for her granddaughters to repeat that 🎩↪🐇prestidigitation. Life isn't fair when a majority go f⊗ll-metal capitalism and f⊗ck the future.

You may wonder why, given my mother couldn't take it with her, I haven't been standing rounds dahn the local to celebrate the Lotto-adjacent windfall. The answer is dahn the local not British no more and . . . Probate. The parental estate is still tied up in the clutches of HM Courts and Tribunals Service. which is responsible for the administration of criminal, civil and family courts, tribunals, and the probate registry in England and Wales. The Internet allows that there are extraordinary delays in the process "it is now taking anything from 8 weeks to 8 months to obtain a Grant of Probate". . . . or in our case more than halfway through eight years.

In 2008, there were 30 full time Probate Registrars scattered across the nation, each office with a staff of ~10. Then the crash, performative austerity and slashing cuts to services across the government. In 2017, there were only 3 Registrars and 150 people left to process the finances of death. The number of effectives have been creeping up but so has the UK population: 2008 = 62 million; 2023 = 68 million = 10% more people. Even ignoring what any excess deaths from Covid did to the backlog. "excess deaths"? depends whom you ask More or Less has one credible answer. The death rate in Western Democracies is about 1%/year. That's 680,000 wills to process. Apparently, like in a pharmacy, while Phram Techs do the grunt work, The Pharmacist has to sign off each script; so in Probate one of the Registrars has to approve each grant of probate = that's a frankly incredible ~600 a day every day for each of the Probate Top Guns.

In April 2024, the Justice Committee of the UK Parliament held an enquiry into the Probate slow down which is mildly entertaining and fairly informative but isn't going to light a fire-cracker under HMCTS let alone revisit the disastrous decisions made by Tory rich-boys Cameron and Osborne in 2008. But one point made by the witnesses is that counting probate employees is not good enough. The Effectives are few, the Noobs are many and the former must take time out from processing probates to training less experienced workers - institutional knowledge has been gutted. It's always fun to see who in the room [eg L] is bored-and-distracted while their boss is helping the enquiry. The camera is ON, your phone is OFF, do not pick your nose as displacement activity.

But I love being down in the weeds as a fly on the wall when experts thrash out the details of their magisteria. See my obsessive hangin' out with the UKSC. If you want to cross-check which Justice Committee members have the least kind attitudes to the bereaved, here is the members list -  Kieran Mullan looking at you. 

Current legislation w.r.t. wills in UK is still working off 19thC law. Will's now aren't written on parchment and witnessed by The Doctor and The Laird: an unsent txt msg has been granted probate elsewhere, as have video wills and paperless office wills with a digital signature, Far from being down with the digital present, the HMCTS can't even process a simple "I leave it all to my kids equally per stirpes" in a timely and predictable fashion.

Foot note: "A new online system, with new software was being trialled with a limited number of law firms before lockdown. Since lockdown the online system has become compulsory for anyone applying for a Grant to administer an Estate, however the online system does not deal with all situations, including many common ones, so paper applications still have had to be made in a number of instances." A new online system! This will cause a sinking feeling in anyone who has been following the Horizon Post Office story.