The Ministry of Justice is proposing to digitise millions of wills and associated documents, the oldest of which have been stored in boxes since 1858.
Before carrying out the instructions of a person who has left a will, personal representatives of a deceased person in England and Wales may need to “prove” the will’s validity: the word “probate” comes from the same Latin root. To obtain a grant of probate, you need to produce the original will. That’s then kept by the High Court in case the will is subsequently challenged. It can also be inspected: wills, once proved, are public documents.
It turns out that the Ministry of Justice is storing 110 million wills and related documents at a warehouse somewhere in Birmingham. Here’s Ilona Procajlo to give us a quick guided tour:
The ministry now wants to digitise these documents, both to make access easier and to save money: storage is said to cost £4.5 million per year. Under the government’s proposals, hard copies would still be kept for about 25 years and wills of significant historical interest would be preserved indefinitely.
The sealed wills of around 30 members of the royal family — and a few members of the nobility — are held by the president of the High Court family division. The will made by Diana, Princess of Wales is not one of them — but an image of it, offered by the Ministry of Justice, turned out just to show the grant of probate:
As a consolation prize, we are offered the will of Charles Darwin:
Digital copies have been made of wills and supporting documents in all probate applications submitted since 2021. Already, more than half a million wills have been digitised. Under the government’s proposals, staff will begin digitising all older documents — starting with most recent.
Views on the digitisation project are sought by 23 February but a formal consultation document has not yet been issued. The Law Commission has recently concluded a consultation on whether the law should allow a will to be made electronically — one that would be digital from the outset. Proposals will be developed next year.
Update 1000: details of the consultation have now been published.
Thank you for letting us know how we will be losing a treasure of information. The absolute authority of the "digital process" will contain these precious documents! Except any digital document can only be accessed if the underlying service is maintained. To my cost, I have already discovered that these documents can be lost when they upgrade or change the server, or especially if they decide to simply delete the entire underlying process. This is not addressing any difficulty if intervening pages were not copied or were done so that the "page" is left blank!
So older wills will be digitized and destroyed if this goes through? I was wondering if it would be viable for families to "buy back" their relative's will for a small consideration to cover costs. But then of course there might be so many potential purchasers it could result in as many disputes as to who get the physical will of the ancestor as wills themselves do.