The stark reality is, if your client has not made a will, even after cohabiting for many years, a distant family member could inherit their home.
And in the land of the living, the financially weaker party in a relationship that has broken down has no rights.
This is a no longer a marginal issue for academics in ivory towers. One in five couples are cohabitees, and the lack of a legal framework to deal with the financial fallout on break-ups affects everyday life in almost every street in the UK.
Unmarried couples are cruelly exposed. English law gives few protections to cohabitees who live together. Indeed, they have inferior rights when it comes to finance, property, and over their children, than those who choose matrimony.
The Law Commission has advocated change as long ago as 2007 (17 years ago), shockingly to no avail. This injustice has gone on for far too long.
For now, even on simple possessions of everyday living, where both partners share the use of assets such as bank accounts, properties and cars, ensure your clients hold them in joint names. Both parties will then have a legal interest in the assets, should the relationship break down.
Clare Moffat, pensions expert at Royal London, adds that it’s also worth checking that your clients “have named any cohabitee on life insurance and pension policies”. The importance of wills can't be stressed enough for cohabitees, she adds.
The worst thing of all to face in life is the death of a loved one, let alone with the sometimes needless additional stress of being left with a financial nightmare.
This possibility is more common than you might think. As many as 3.6mn couples cohabit – one in five of all couples – and 31mn Britons have not made wills, according to Canada Life. Eight out of 10 people are blissfully ignorant of the financial fallout if their partner dies without making a will.
According to recent Royal London research, only 12 per cent of people could identify what happens on intestacy. And what if the relationship breaks down? Divorce is messy enough but there is no statutory framework and no protection for the financially vulnerable weaker party at all.
Law lags behind societal changes
The law has lagged behind societal changes. One of the biggest transformations in my lifetime is surprisingly not even the awe-inspiring digital revolution, but the rise of informality.
'Smart casual' is the usual buzzword in daily life, virtually everywhere from the races to the workplace and even at church. The end of the bowler hat in the city in the 1960s, the end of the tie in the 2000s, but more seriously a preference for cohabitation (sometimes for decades) over marriage, and the rise of blended families with multiple step or ‘bonus’ children comes with consequences.
