Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of designating will writing as a reserved legal activity.

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 then Lord Chancellor, however, 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. This remains the Government position.

We will consider any recommendations from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) when they publish their Legal Services Market Study.