Blog
Keeping the peace at Christmas – top tips for shared parenting over the festive season
Lauren Evans
9 February 2016
The ‘secretive’ Court of Protection opens up to media under transparency pilot
Did I hear you say ‘Secret Court’? Not any more as the Court of Protection will now be ‘Open Court’, or at least it is between 29 January and 31 July 2016 for the duration of a transparency pilot. Over recent years, particularly from certain sections of the media, the Court has received regular criticism over its lack of transparency and the making of important decisions behind closed doors. This is why it has been referred to as a ‘Secret Court’.
4 February 2016
Severing a joint tenancy may be easier than you think
A joint tenancy is a fragile thing. That appears to be the upshot of a case in First Tier Tax Tribunal where the judge was very easily persuaded that a joint tenancy had been severed by notice – even though the notice itself had been lost.
3 February 2016
Lord Lucan’s legacy and the Presumption of Death Act 2013
Growing up in the 1980s, I remember a favourite book titled something like The World’s Greatest Unsolved Mysteries. It covered about 30 or so cold cases, gloried in pictures and was of course full of question marks. This was the first place I read about the Lord Lucan case. Nearly 30 years have passed since I was a ten year old first reading about this, but only today, on 3 February 2016, over 41 years after the peer vanished, has the law permitted Lord Lucan's son George Bingham to obtain a ‘death’ certificate for him.
29 January 2016
International investors - five tax tales for 2016
One of the themes of recent Governments has been a tightening of the rules for the taxation of individuals with international interests. We are likely to see this theme continue in 2016. In this blog, we set out five of the key developments on this topic.
14 January 2016
Protecting a same-sex survivor’s right to pension funds
Over the past decade, the UK government has legalised same-sex civil partnerships and most recently same-sex marriages. Legislation provides that same-sex couples who are married or in civil partnerships shall be treated the same as married heterosexual couples. For example, they are entitled to receive the same inheritance tax benefits, such as the spousal exemption, which exists between a married heterosexual couple.
