Lawyers for Declaration of Trust

The basics of English and Welsh trust law is that ‘trustees’ hold something (e.g. land) for the benefit of someone else, called the “Beneficiaries” of the trust.

In English & Welsh law, land is always held by more than one person as joint legal tenants.

The rule of “Survivorship” applies to joint legal ownership – that is, the legal interest of each joint tenant is extinguished on their death, leaving the surviving joint tenants in charge of the whole of the remainder.

Because of the survivorship principle of legal ownership, whenever land is owned by more than one person who does not intend their co-owners to take their interest on their death (for a married couple, for example, survivorship is often precisely the mutual intention), then that land should always be held subject to a trust noted on the official title – be that trust to protect the owner’s individual interests as tenants in common in equal shares, tenants in common in unequal shares, or for more complicated trust interests such as arising in a trading partnership or similar ownership arrangements.

The interests of ownership of the land can have various implications, e.g. tax. This product is often procured by couples wishing to re-allocate rental income between them toward the member who pays the relatively lower rate of tax, i.e. to save tax, overall.

The product comprises drafting the simple terms of the property trust on which the property is held, and registering a note of that at HM Land Registry, to protect the beneficial interest.

‘Simple’, in this case, means that the Trustees and Beneficiaries are the same, and that the trust contains fixed shares that do not have any mathematical variations in time. We have a different (more costly) product for more sophisticated trusts, including any:

• under which the relevant shares of Trustees / Beneficiaries may vary in time; or
• where there may be differences between the class of trustees and the class of beneficiaries [and which trusts are therefore registrable with HMRC]

We don’t generally do anything for new clients until our process of client retention has concluded – this involves agreeing the scope of what we are doing for the price (our terms are below), setting-up our client record, and producing the bill (payment in advance is required for all new clients).

After that, the production of the trust is a job that we can undertake in hours, once we can schedule it in our workflow, that can depend on how busy we are at any particular time. We would not usually take-on a job for which we could not engage within about a working week.

A completed trust will then need to be submitted to HM Land Registry for registration. The time HM Land Registry take to process such a registration varies greatly, depending on how busy they are. Some applications are processed very quickly, up to “next day”; however, most applications appear to languish awaiting HM Land Registry attention; in 2021 many applications were taking about 6 months to be registered – and some types of application can take even longer than that, unfortunately. However, once submitted HM Land Registry process applications on any title in order of submission – so their delay ought not to affect the priority of your application relative to other matters on that title.

Your supplier is SRA-regulated Mounteney Solicitors, that charges VAT some customers may be able to reclaim

We charge £350 + VAT = £420 + HMLR Fee (£20) = £440

There is more about our fees on our website here

If you have any questions, require any further information, or would like to engage us on the T&Cs linked Our Terms in the footer below, please don’t hesitate to Contact Us.