Editor's blog | Changing track

It is hard not to feel the LSB’s pain over estate administration. Its decision to recommend to the Lord Chancellor that will writing becomes a reserved activity, but not estate administration, was greeted with a unanimous chorus of disapproval from solicitors, from legal executives, from willwriters, from STEP, and, last but not least, from the legal services consumer panel.

The consumer panel is an interesting creature, set up and located within the LSB but independent of it. Until now, the panel has concentrated most of its fire on lawyers, for failing to respond to the needs of consumers, at times with rather predictable regularity. This is the first time it has publicly criticised a major decision by the LSB.

The panel’s chair, Elisabeth Davies, said unregulated estate administrators could cause “potentially huge” damage to beneficiaries through fraud or poor service.

“Dealing with an estate can involve life-changing amounts of money, but this decision will leave people without a safety net should things go wrong, and at a time when they are feeling at their most vulnerable.”

Back in September, the LSB proposed that both will writing and estate administration should be regulated, following a consultation. A second consultation followed, on the September proposals, generating much more comment on estate administration, but mainly from the same people.

So what explains the change of heart? Is the government’s obsession with deregulation so pervasive that regulation can only be justified in the most extreme cases?

In its final report on the regulation of estate administration, the LSB said that “in aggregate the evidence does not compellingly demonstrate systemic fraudulent or dishonest practices or other problems causing significant consumer detriment”.

The regulator went on to say that regulation was “unlikely to be effective at managing fraud”.

There were two further arguments, neither of which is particularly convincing. If the market share held by unregulated estate administrators “appears to be small”, what would be the public harm in regulating it? The regulation of will writing may reduce this market even further, but why not protect people now?

The LSB admitted that the decision was “finely balanced” and not recommending regulation “would not tackle concerns raised about confusion at the boundary of reserved activities” if will writing and probate were reserved activities and estate administration was not.

Perhaps the issue of estate administration will fade away quietly. Perhaps a particularly shocking case of fraud or theft will cause a media furore and the LSB will change its mind, or there will be another Panorama documentary, like the one on will writing. In any case, the main priority should be to get will writing regulated, which is by no means guaranteed. At least we can all agree on that.