Civil service probate delays hold up £34m earmarked for cancer research
Civil service probate delays are stalling cancer research and holding up millions in donations to charities, MPs have been told.
Some £34m in donations left in wills to Cancer Research UK is stuck in a chronic backlog of cases at HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS).
The charity claimed this means life-saving research missed out on vital funding in 44 projects it had planned to invest in this year.
It said in January that the UK faced a £1bn funding gap in research and development for cancer treatment over the next decade, as cases of the disease are predicted to increase in real terms in the future.
Angela Morrison, Cancer Research’s chief operating officer, told MPs of the Justice Select Committee on Tuesday that the charity was in the dark about when the money would arrive.
“We’re going through our budgeting process at the moment for next year and we do not put the probate backlog into that forecast, but we don’t know when it is likely to happen,” she said.
“We cannot commit to spending that money unless we know it’s going to come. We have research this year we’ve not invested [in]. There’s 44 [projects] we could have invested in this year that we’ve not invested in,” she added.
Probate is a legal document which recognises a will is legitimate and allows an estate to be passed down to its inheritors.
Official guidelines suggest that it should take up to 16 weeks to be granted probate, but current delays, first caused by the pandemic and the implementation of new online systems, mean that some families and other beneficiaries like charities are waiting more than a year.
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They have been blamed on property deals falling through and late payment fines levied by HM Revenue & Customs being added to inheritance tax bills.
But millions of pounds left in wills, earmarked for charitable donations, is also being held up, the committee heard.
The Devon Air Ambulance Trust said its overall income had dropped by £2.9m in the last year, partly because of lengthy probate delays.
The lack of funding is preventing it from building a new base to expand its coverage in South West England and purchasing new helicopters to update its “ageing” and “increasingly costly” fleet of air ambulances, the charity said in written evidence.
The trust said one large donation, worth more than £2m, was currently on hold thanks to the HMCTS backlog.
Dave Hawes, Devon Air Ambulance’s finance director, said: “There’s one in probate at the moment which is potentially worth several million to us.”
He added that the charity’s decision-making was being hampered by probate delays on as little as “one or two transactions”.
The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) said it was also affected. It receives some £90m to from around 2,500 wills every year, the charity said in its evidence to MPs.
It said: “The RSPCA does not believe the probate service has the necessary resources or expertise to consider and process probate applications, in particularly complex probate.
“Since 2019 the issues appear to have been getting progressively worse. Despite promises to invest in the systems and staff at HMCTS, the results the RSPCA experiences do not demonstrate any improvement,” the charity added.
James Daly, deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, told the select committee: “There is evidence to say that from the pandemic onwards, and how [HMCTS] has come out of the pandemic, applications and processing has not been at the speed which it was previously.”
A HMCTS spokesman said: “We know how important donations left in wills are for charities and we are taking unprecedented steps to speed up the process. These are working and resulted in record numbers of grants being issued in the final three months of 2023.”
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