Cancer Research UK (CRUK) has said it could be missing around £30m in legacy income due to a backlog of cases at the probate service.
Speaking in the House of Commons yesterday, CRUK chief operating officer Angela Morrison said her charity had decided not to invest in some research projects due to uncertainty about its legacy income.
She urged the probate service to share more information with charities about the delays it is experiencing so “we can plan accordingly”.
Remember A Charity vice chair Alex McDowell told the Justice Committee that there had been some improvements at the probate service but that charities needed “consistency and certainty” about the backlog.
The charity sector is currently missing an estimated £900m in legacy income contained within wills that are tied up in probate.
‘We cannot commit to spending that money’
The Justice Committee launched an inquiry into the probate registry in November last year as the latter has been experiencing “significant delays”.
Morrison of CRUK said gifts from wills make up about 40% of her charity’s overall income and 50% of its fundraising income.
“It’s a massive contribution. If we think that we commit money for a minimum of five years when we give a grant, we need to have assurance that that income is coming in over that period of time,” she said.
CRUK estimated that as of January, it was due £30m of delayed income stuck in the probate backlog.
Morrisson said CRUK is currently going through its budgeting process for next year and cannot “put the probate backlog into that forecast because we don’t know when it’s likely to happen”.
“We cannot commit to spending that money unless we know it’s going to come. We’ve gone through budgeting rounds where we had taken money out from capital investment.
“We’ve had research this year that we’ve not invested in – there are 44 projects we could have invested in.
“We’re making day-to-day decisions based on the fact that we don’t know when this money is coming or the size of it. £30m is our guess.”
‘Probate needs to trust us and give us insight’
Morrisson said that CRUK needs visibility to better forecast its income and called for the probate service to share more information with charities, similar to that which it gives to the Institute of Legacy Management (ILM).
“Trust us by giving us insight into that because then we can plan accordingly. When we don’t have insight then it’s really difficult to plan,” she said.
“When we’re left in the dark it’s really hard because suddenly, we just don’t get anything. We want to be part of the journey because we really do appreciate the work they do and recognise they need to transform. But we want to be part of that so we can plan accordingly.”
She added: “As a large charity with a clear dependency on the income, we’d like to feel that we could be trusted to get the information that the ILM gets. The fact that information shared with the ILM, they’re not allowed to pass it onto us, feels somewhat harsh.”
Charities need ‘consistency and certainty’
McDowell, who is also director of fundraising at the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, said HM Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) had been “increasingly good at sharing information with us as a consortia but we’re bound by confidentiality with some of the management information”.
“Rightly, we don’t share that so therefore there’s a wider group of people who are still not able to make fully informed decisions,” he said.
“We’d like greater transparency for that information to be made more public sooner.”
At the moment, McDowell said that everybody gets publicly available data published by the Office for National Statistics but “it’s a bit of a blunt tool”.
“It tells us how many applications have been made and how many grants have been given. What we don’t get is the nature of those and how big the current backlog is.
“HMCTS has been sharing information with Remember A Charity and the ILM but on the very strict instruction that it shouldn’t be shared. It’s just to help us understand what’s going on.
“We’re able to communicate to our members trends and can say: ‘Look, things look like they’re improving’. But we’ve not been able to share information more widely.”
McDowell said the consortia receives more of a breakdown in terms of the total number of cases processed and paper and digital applications.
“All useful information but it doesn’t necessarily tell us how many are charitable because we haven’t got that indicator,” he said.
“It doesn’t tell us why cases were stopped and what proportion of stopped cases were charitable. We extrapolate from that based on historical trends and are able to see the overall shape of it.
“It’s not that it’s ungratefully received or doesn’t have any value to us, but it doesn’t give us the granularity to make certain conclusions. It’s a bit of a help but we’d like more help and sooner.”
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