It is for this reason that the safe storage of your will is of paramount importance.

We, here at Wills.org.uk, offer a whole of life storage facility to ensure that your last Will and Testament can be found in the event of your death. When you entrust your Will to us, we check it to ensure that it has been signed dated and witnessed correctly, then place it into our secure, underground safe storage vault.

You then get:

• a certificate for your own records, to be kept with your usual household files.
• a card for each of your executors telling them where your will is being stored and how they can hold of it in the event of your death.
• Access to our FREE Probate help line so your Executors can ask questions to help them administer your estate.

Our charges for whole of life secure vault storage are:

• £19 – Single Will
• £29 – Joint or Mirror Wills

These prices remain the same if you would like us to store your Will even if we didn’t write it for you.

To take advantage of this excellent offer, all you have to do is post your Will or Wills to us with a cheque made payable to Wills.org.uk and we’ll do the rest. Our postal address is:

MW Legal Services
26 Bryn Road,
Weymouth,
Dorset
DT4 0NP

Once in storage, there is no need to get yoru will back unless you have died, if you need to revoke your will you can easily do so by writing a new will with your new wishes in.

If you want your original Will returned during your lifetime, there is a charge for this. Retrieval on death is totally free.

At a meeting with UK lobby group the Institute for Family Business, exchequer secretary David Gauke said that when the Office of Tax Simplification reviewed the country’s tax reliefs recently, it didn’t recommend removing BPR
for inheritance tax.

Under BPR, the family who inherit a stake in the business do not have to pay inheritance tax. The relief is crucial to growth, IFB said, and if removed would increase sales or liquidations of family businesses.

“We are encouraged by the minister’s response that BPR is seen as a tax policy that provides encouragement to the family business sector,” Grant Gordon, IFB’s director general, said in a statement.

“BPR needs to be retained in full as its removal would have a devastating impact on growth of successful family businesses, and on investment in the sector,” he added.

A report by the London School of Economics for the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in November called for the removal of the relief, arguing this could give an incentive to family business owners to reconsider their business structure and bring in professional managers, as well as increasing government revenues.

But in a submission to the Treasury last year, the IFB said BPR “facilitates the transfer of family management and ownership of the businesses between generations” and allows “a long-term approach which focuses on stability and sustainability”.

It added: “In the absence of such relief … the inheritance tax, which any successful business would attract, would almost certainly require a sale, liquidation or substantial borrowing. The death of a major shareholder could bring a profitable business to an end.”

Ross Warburton, IFB chairman and a fifthgeneration member of family-owned bakery company Warburtons, said that without BPR, his family “would have been forced to sell the business and would not have been able to pay the inheritance tax duties after the deaths of the previous generation of owners”.

He added that its removal “could lead to the premature transfer of ownership to the next generation, before they fully understood how to be responsible owners”.

Family businesses account for two-thirds of the UK’s private companies, according to the IFB’s latest research, produced by Oxford Economics. In 2010, they contributed £81.7 billion (€92.8 billion) in tax receipts, or 14%
of total government revenue.

A Whitehall document shows that the reduction has been imposed to “raise additional revenue” and will have an “impact” on older people and their families.

It means that more will be dragged over the means-test threshold for care home charges and will have to pay full fees, typically more than £500 a week.

That will raise fears of greater numbers being forced to sell their homes to fund residential care in old age. Charities said the decision would hurt the vulnerable and cause “considerable distress”.

Around 250,000 people aged over 65 are estimated to be funded by councils in residential care homes, and the figure is forecast to grow steadily in the coming decades. Charges are based on a means test, under which anyone with savings and assets, including a house, worth more than £23,250 must pay the full fees.

A survey last year said that average care home fees were now more than £25,000 a year. In the Home Counties, they frequently exceeded £45,000.

Anyone with assets above the threshold must pay full fees until their value has been reduced below the limit, when councils pick up some of the cost. That can quickly reduce the savings of older people who have passed on houses and other assets to their children as a tax-planning precaution against death duties.

Normally, the threshold increases each year to take account of inflation and rising values of assets such as houses. Ten years ago, it was £18,500.

But the Coalition has quietly decided to freeze the limit for at least two years. The move is likely to amount to a real-terms cut in the threshold of almost 10 per cent. A lower capital limit of £14,250 – above which councils pay part of the fees – has also been frozen. The decision was disclosed in a Department of Health document.

Dated Jan 28, it makes clear that the move is to raise more money from elderly people. “In the context of the Spending Review 2010, ministers have taken the decision not to increase the capital limits,” it says.

“The intention is to help protect the level and quality of social care services by enabling local authorities to raise additional revenue to pay for these services, from residential care charges.” The capital limits will not be reviewed until the next local government finance settlement in the autumn of 2012, the document says.

In the meantime, the department will “monitor the impact of not increasing the capital limits on care home residents  and their families, and on local authority budgets”.

An estimated 100,000 people in residential care finance themselves. Up to 20,000 pensioners a year are estimated to have to sell their homes to do so.

Conservatives and Liberal Democrats fought the election promising new rules that would prevent people having to sell homes to fund care.

In the House of Commons yesterday, David Cameron was challenged over the rising costs, and insisted the Coalition was acting to help older people. “Far from cutting the money that is going into social care, we have increased by £2 billion the money going into adult social care because we know how important it is,” the Prime Minister told MPs.

The Department of Health said the freeze in the capital limit was “unfortunate” but necessary “in light of the current economic situation”.