The planned 13,000% rise in probate fees is yet another dishonest wealth tax

The government is planning to increase probate fees for large estates by a massive amount. It’s just another stealth tax on the wealthy, says Merryn Somerset Webb.

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The current level of fees is already enough to fund the Probate Registry

Tax collection: around the world governments are having a go at doing more and getting more. There's FATCA; there's the CRS; there's the recent judgment on Apple's arrangements see the magazine for more on this. And there are the little tax rises they hope we don't notice.

A classic of this genre is the consultation on a rise in probate fees in England and Wales. At the moment, these aren't particularly high. Leave less than £5,000 when you die, and probate will cost nothing. Above that, and it is £155 for applications made by a solicitor and £215 for those made by individuals.

The government plans to change this so that estates worth more than £50,000 pay higher fees in some case, much, much higher fees: leave over £2m and your executors will need to come up with £20,000 just to get probate (a rise of nearly 13,000%).

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This is the kind of scale of increase that effectively turns a fee into a tax: most probate applications involve the same admin work regardless of the size of the estate, so a sliding scale of fees makes no logical sense and the current level of fees is already enough to fund the Probate Registry itself.

It is also a tax that just like inheritance tax has to be paid before the estate is released. Leave £1 over £2m and the executors will have to find over £680,000 before they can get access to the £2m itself.

It's pretty easy to see what's going on here. The state would like to raise taxes. It would particularly like to raise taxes on the well off. But that's tough to do wealth taxes are controversial and all discussion of tax rises come with publicity, push back and legislation.

It's much easier to stick with the tried and tested stealth tax route to money raising and shove up "fees" instead however dishonest that might look to those that notice.

Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.