Justin Tomlinson – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Justice

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Justin Tomlinson on 2016-07-20.

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment her Department has made of the adequacy of the existing regulatory regime relating to the will writing industry.

Sir Oliver Heald

In 2013 the Legal Services Board (LSB) recommended that will writing be made a reserved legal activity, so that only authorised persons under the Legal Services Act 2007 could provide this service. The Government at that time considered that the evidence provided in the LSB report did not adequately demonstrate that reservation was the best solution to the identified problems in the will writing market, or that other measures had been sufficiently exhausted in seeking to address these problems.

We will consider any recommendations from the Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) when they publish their Legal Services Market Study. The CMA’s interim report published on 8 July made reference to a need to consider possible changes to the current regulatory framework.