In November last year the House of Commons justice select committee began a review of the service provided by the Probate Registry.  The dissolution of Parliament on 30th May 2024 cut short the review and in place of a full report, committee chair Sir Robert Neill KC MP wrote to Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice, Mike Freer MP to reporting their findings to date.  The dominating reason cited for the current difficulties was an over eagerness to digitise the service as quickly as possible and the resulting affect on and ultimate loss of experienced staff.  Whilst in evidence given to the committee it was stated that much progress has been made, with the number of Grants being issued now consistently surpassing the number of Grants received, as a professional working in this area, I remain sceptical.  

In January this year there was a significant  further change to the application process whereby:- 

• would be applicants must now first obtain a code from HMRC before Grant applications can be prepared and submitted.  
• HMRC also now issue the figures for the gross and net values of an estate.

Initially the turnaround time for HMRC to issue codes and values was cited to be the familiar 20 working days but this soon rose to 25 working days. In practice the profession is finding that wait times can be much longer with some taking in excess of three months to arrive.  It seems that common to many of these delayed cases is the presence of lifetime gifts where IHT400s are being referred to the lifetime gifts section of HMRC for review before being referred back for codes and values to be issued.  

It is understood that this is due to the lack of experience and/or training of the staff at HMRC.   This is further evidenced by the issue of incorrect gross and net values.  The process of deducing these follows a simple formula set out in the now defunct IHT421.  Whilst it seems that historically some applicants struggled to ascertain correct figures, hence the change, it is clear that HMRC staff are also having difficultly extracting the correct figures from IHT400s which requires yet more time to correct. 

All together, whilst delays with the Probate Registry may be shortening, these increased delays with HMRC see no net improvement for clients and a continued lack of any certainty on the timing of Grant issues.