By Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS) | Private Wealth, Legal & Risk Insights
In my experience, whether through professional work or conversations with everyday people, family, friends and friends of friends, two subjects have an extraordinary ability to make people uncomfortable:
death and taxes.
They are also two of life’s great certainties.
We do not have an exact end date. We cannot predict precisely when death will occur, what legislation will be in force when it does, what an estate will be worth at that point, or what circumstances our families will find themselves navigating.
Yet death, taxation and the transfer of assets between generations are sufficiently certain that failing to prepare for them can have consequences extending far beyond the individual whose estate is eventually administered.
For me, this is more than an academic observation.
It is part of the reason I entered law.
Where My Interest in Succession Began
My own interest in estates, succession and stewardship can be traced through generations of my family.
My great-grandfather understood the importance of documentation. Gifts intended for his children were recorded. Approximately 100 acres of family land were evidenced through an original 1942 conveyance, and he recorded his testamentary wishes in a will.
On paper, there was structure.
But legal documents do not operate in isolation.
Their drafting, interpretation, registration and administration — and the actions subsequently taken by those dealing with the estate — can determine whether the original intention survives.
In the generation that followed, an assent involving Land Registry form AS1, combined with ambiguity surrounding the testamentary arrangements, altered the position of family property.
The consequences did not end with one transaction.
They travelled through generations.
What followed was uncertainty surrounding ownership, competing understandings of what had originally been intended, and financial and tax consequences capable of being inherited alongside the assets themselves.
It taught me something I have never forgotten:
"One generation’s unresolved succession can become the next generation’s legal problem." - Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
That experience became part of the foundation of my legal journey.
More than seventeen years later, after years of legal study, research and working with private individuals, I remain fascinated by essentially the same question:
How do we transfer not merely wealth, but clarity, control and intention from one generation to the next?
That, to me, is stewardship.
My experience became research. Research became knowledge. And knowledge, when shared responsibly, can become something useful to somebody else.
Pain can become purpose.
That is part of the purpose of these Insights: to take what I have lived, learned, researched and observed and make it useful to a wider audience.
"Live it. Learn from it. Apply it. Then leave the next generation something better organised than you found it." - Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
A Changing Inheritance Tax Landscape
A recent Financial Times article examining the widening impact of UK inheritance tax prompted me to revisit these questions.
The backdrop is significant.
The ordinary inheritance-tax nil-rate band is currently £325,000, where it has remained since 6 April 2009, and the government has legislated for it to remain at that level through the 2030–31 tax year. The residence nil-rate band remains £175,000, subject to its statutory conditions, with tapering beginning for estates above £2 million.
That alone illustrates an important point about long-term estate planning: tax thresholds can remain fixed while property values, investment values, family circumstances and the wider legal environment continue to move around them.
The pension position is also changing materially.
Finance Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 18 March 2026. From 6 April 2027, most unused pension funds and pension death benefits will be brought within the value of a deceased person’s estate for inheritance-tax purposes. HMRC expressly describes the reform as applying to deaths on or after that date.
HMRC published a second technical note on the new regime on 27 August 2026, confirming that further implementation detail is still being developed ahead of April 2027.
That deserves careful attention.
But there is a danger that the conversation becomes:
"How do I reduce my inheritance-tax bill?"
when the more important question may be:
"What succession structure best protects me during my lifetime, gives effect to my intentions afterwards and creates a sound foundation for the people who follow me, and what are the tax consequences of doing so?" - Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
Those questions may sound similar.
They are not.
The Tax Tail Should Not Wag the Succession Dog
Inheritance tax is an important component of estate planning.
But minimising inheritance tax is not synonymous with successful succession planning.
Consider lifetime gifting.
A parent may own substantial assets and understandably wish to reduce the eventual exposure of their estate to inheritance tax. Lifetime giving can legitimately form part of estate planning.
HMRC currently provides a number of gifting exemptions. For example, the annual exemption is £3,000, and qualifying regular gifts may fall within the “normal expenditure out of income” exemption where they are made from income and the donor can maintain their usual standard of living after making them.
But the existence of a tax exemption should never be the end of the analysis.
Before beginning with the tax calculation, I would want a family to consider a much wider set of questions.
"What does the person need to maintain their own standard of living?"
"Could they require residential or nursing care later in life?"
"How much liquidity should remain available?"
"Does transferring an asset mean relinquishing control?"
"Is the recipient ready to manage what is being transferred?"
"What could happen to that asset following the recipient’s divorce, insolvency or death?"
"Are children being treated equally, or equitably?"
"Are there vulnerable beneficiaries?"
"And has anybody actually spoken openly about what everyone believes is supposed to happen?"
A transaction can potentially be tax-efficient and strategically poor at the same time.
That distinction matters.
Pensions Change the Conversation
The new pension regime provides an unusually clear example of why long-term estate planning should not be engineered around one favourable tax treatment as though that treatment were permanent.
HMRC states that the 2027 reform is intended, among other things, to address the increased use of pension schemes as vehicles for transferring wealth rather than solely for providing retirement income.
A strategy that appeared rational under one legislative framework may therefore require substantial reconsideration when Parliament changes that framework.
But reacting to an inheritance-tax change by simply withdrawing pension wealth can create other consequences.
The income-tax treatment of pension death benefits is itself nuanced. HMRC guidance confirms that the treatment can depend on factors including the age of the member at death, the nature of the benefit, the recipient and, for some lump sums, the timing of payment. Benefits associated with death at age 75 or above will commonly have different income-tax consequences from qualifying benefits where death occurs below 75.
That is precisely why inheritance-tax planning should not be conducted in isolation from retirement, income-tax, investment and succession planning.
The objective should not simply be to reduce one tax number.
The objective should be to understand the whole structure.
Gifting Means Relinquishing Something
There is another word that deserves more attention in conversations about lifetime gifting:
control.
Families understandably focus on exemptions, potentially exempt transfers and gifts made from surplus income.
But the human question can be considerably harder:
"Can you genuinely afford to give the asset away?"
And equally:
"Are you psychologically prepared for the fact that, once genuinely transferred, it may no longer be yours to control?"
For substantial estates, this distinction becomes especially important.
A family company, investment portfolio, property or other significant asset can simultaneously represent wealth, income, security, identity and influence to the person who created or accumulated it.
Succession planning therefore has to reconcile two legitimate objectives:
the next generation’s future and the current generation’s security.
Neither should automatically consume the other.
An Estate Is More Than a Collection of Assets
This is where I believe some inheritance-tax conversations begin at the wrong end.
Before deciding how to reduce an estate, establish what the estate actually contains.
That means more than houses and bank balances.
It may include property and the precise nature of its ownership; pensions; investments; company interests; shareholder arrangements; trusts; insurance policies; loans between family members; valuable personal property; digital assets; overseas assets and accounts; guarantees and liabilities; historic lifetime gifts; wills; letters of wishes; and, critically, the documents capable of proving all of them.
For internationally connected families, another layer appears.
Residence, long-term residence status, the location and legal character of assets and the governing law of particular structures can bring more than one legal or tax system into a succession.
The larger or more complex the picture becomes, the less sensible it is to consider each component in isolation.
That is where coordination between legal, tax, financial, investment and fiduciary professionals becomes particularly important.
Plan for the Law and Life You Cannot Yet Know
There is another fundamental difficulty with designing an estate primarily around today’s tax rules:
today’s tax rules will not necessarily be tomorrow’s tax rules.
Someone establishing an estate plan today may live for another twenty, thirty or forty years.
Governments will change.
Legislation will change.
Tax thresholds may rise or fall.
Reliefs may be altered or removed.
New forms of assets may emerge.
The tax treatment of existing assets may fundamentally change.
And families themselves will change.
Marriage, divorce, births, deaths, new relationships, changing beneficiaries, new businesses, property acquisitions and disposals, relocation between jurisdictions, retirement and evolving personal intentions can all mean that an estate plan which accurately represented somebody’s life five years ago no longer represents it today.
The pension reforms themselves demonstrate this point.
The law enacted in Finance Act 2026 changes the treatment of pension property for deaths occurring from April 2027. A retirement or succession strategy created years earlier could not simply assume that the historic inheritance-tax treatment of pensions would remain unchanged indefinitely.
This creates an important distinction between tax optimisation and resilient estate planning.
An estate structure should not merely be tested against today’s legislation.
It should also be asked:
"Will this structure remain capable of achieving my intentions if the legal, tax, financial and family circumstances surrounding it materially change?" -Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
No lawyer can predict legislation that does not yet exist.
A will cannot override future legislation, and no private arrangement can contract out of whatever tax law ultimately applies.
What careful legal drafting can sometimes achieve, however, is appropriate flexibility.
Rather than attempting to predict every future event, suitable testamentary or trust structures can contain carefully defined powers and discretions which, subject to the governing law and fiduciary obligations, enable those responsible for administering wealth to respond to the circumstances that actually exist when decisions need to be made.
The objective is not to predict the future perfectly.
It is to avoid constructing an estate so rigidly around the present that the next generation inherits a structure incapable of responding to the future.
The strongest estate plan is therefore not necessarily the one most perfectly optimised for today’s tax code.
It may be the one sufficiently well constructed to remain legally coherent when today’s tax code no longer exists.
Draft for Flexibility
The principle can be illustrated through drafting.
A professionally prepared testamentary arrangement might, depending upon the circumstances and governing law, give trustees sufficiently broad but properly controlled discretion to consider the environment existing at the time they exercise their powers.
For example:
"In exercising the powers conferred upon them under this Will, my Trustees may, so far as permitted by law and consistently with their fiduciary duties, have regard to the tax, financial and personal circumstances prevailing at the relevant time, including material changes occurring after the date of this Will, and may exercise the discretions and administrative powers conferred upon them in such manner as they reasonably consider appropriate for the proper administration of my estate and the interests of the beneficiaries." - Illustrative Drafting Principle — Not a Precedent
This wording is deliberately illustrative.
It is not a clause that should simply be copied into a will.
The appropriate powers and discretions depend upon the governing law, the nature of the estate, family circumstances, the objectives of the testator and appropriate professional advice.
Nor can a general discretionary provision guarantee a particular tax result or circumvent legislation enacted by Parliament.
The principle is what matters:
"We cannot know what the tax code will look like in forty years, but we can avoid unnecessarily imprisoning tomorrow’s family within today’s assumptions." - Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
The Annual Estate Review: My Gold Standard for Stewardship
Legal flexibility alone is not enough.
This brings me to one of my own principles of excellent stewardship:
review the estate plan routinely.
For many families, I regard an annual estate review as a gold-standard governance habit.
That does not mean rewriting a will every twelve months.
It means creating a deliberate opportunity each year to ask whether the estate plan continues to reflect the person, family, assets and legal environment it was designed to serve.
A review might consider changes to marital or relationship status; births and deaths; children and other beneficiaries; executors and trustees; property and asset ownership; business interests; pensions and beneficiary nominations; residence and international connections; tax and succession legislation; liabilities; lifetime gifts; and the individual’s current wishes and intentions.
Sometimes the answer will simply be:
Nothing needs changing.
That remains a valuable conclusion because the structure has been consciously reviewed rather than passively forgotten.
And where a significant life event or legislative change occurs between annual reviews, the plan should of course be reconsidered sooner.
I therefore do not view estate planning as a transaction which ends when a will is signed and placed into storage.
A will is a formal legal instrument rather than literally a living document.
But the estate-planning process should be living and responsive.
It needs to travel through life with the person whose intentions it exists to protect.
Stewardship Requires Maintenance
There is a useful analogy with the assets themselves.
A substantial property is maintained.
An investment portfolio is reviewed.
A company has accounts, governance and reporting.
Trustees periodically consider the assets entrusted to them.
Yet families can execute the documents governing the eventual destination of everything they have accumulated and then leave those arrangements untouched for decades.
For me, that is difficult to reconcile with excellent stewardship.
"An estate plan forms part of the legal foundation upon which the next generation may ultimately have to build." - Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
And foundations need to be engineered to remain solid.
That does not mean rebuilding them every year.
It means inspecting them.
Routine review allows us to look for the estate-planning equivalent of gaps, cracks and leaks before they develop into structural problems.
Perhaps an executor appointed fifteen years ago is no longer appropriate.
A beneficiary may have died.
Someone may have married or divorced.
A child or grandchild may have been born.
An overseas property may have been acquired.
A family company may now be worth substantially more than when the will was executed.
A lifetime gift may never have been properly recorded.
A pension nomination may be outdated.
Tax legislation may have changed.
Or the person’s wishes may simply have evolved.
Individually, some of these changes may appear relatively minor.
Left unattended for ten, twenty or thirty years, however, several small weaknesses can interact.
What began as a perfectly sensible estate plan can eventually bear little resemblance to the family, wealth or legal environment in which it must ultimately operate.
Annual review is preventative maintenance.
We are not looking for reasons to interfere with a sound structure.
We are checking that the foundations remain sound; that gaps have not developed; that new pressures have not created vulnerabilities; and that the structure remains capable of carrying the weight eventually placed upon it.
Because ultimately, if foundations are allowed to weaken for long enough, the whole house can fall.
In estate and succession planning, that house can represent decades or generations of accumulated property, businesses, savings, relationships, sacrifice and intention.
The failure may not begin with one dramatic event.
It can begin with small vulnerabilities nobody revisited.
And the next generation should not have to begin its inheritance by repairing the foundation it receives.
It should be able to build upon it.
That, to me, is stewardship: constructing today’s legal foundations carefully enough, and maintaining them diligently enough, that children and grandchildren inherit something from which they can build — not something they must first untangle.
"Draft for flexibility. Review for alignment. Maintain for generations." - Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
Leave a Map, Not a Mystery
My great-grandfather’s documents survived him.
But documents alone could not guarantee that subsequent generations would interpret, administer or preserve his intentions exactly as he may have envisaged.
That distinction has stayed with me.
A good succession plan should therefore leave the next generation more than assets.
It should leave a map.
A properly considered will.
Accurate ownership records.
An organised asset inventory.
Records of material lifetime gifts.
Appropriate nominations and instructions.
An understanding of liabilities.
Accessible information about professional advisers.
And, where appropriate, conversations with the people who may eventually have responsibility for administering or receiving the wealth.
For complex families and substantial estates, that map may also require governance arrangements capable of surviving the individual who originally created or controlled the wealth.
Because ultimately, the success of succession planning is not measured solely by the inheritance-tax bill.
It is measured by what happens afterwards.
Stewardship Is Not Reserved for the Wealthy
There is one final distinction I believe is important.
Stewardship is not determined by the size of an estate.
The principles discussed here apply to families across every level of wealth and asset ownership.
For one family, succession may involve international investment portfolios, trusts, companies and property across several jurisdictions.
For another, it may involve one family home, a pension, modest savings and possessions carrying enormous sentimental value.
The numbers may be different.
The responsibility is not.
A family does not need to be wealthy for unclear ownership, an outdated will, an undocumented gift, a change in marital circumstances or an unexpected death to have profound consequences for those left behind.
Indeed, where an estate is more modest, the consequences of poor planning may sometimes be felt particularly acutely because there is less liquidity available to absorb professional costs, tax liabilities, administrative errors or disputes.
To me, stewardship is therefore not synonymous with wealth management.
"It is the responsible management of whatever we have been entrusted with, so that what eventually passes from our hands into the next generation arrives with as much clarity, protection and intention as reasonably possible." -Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
Whether an estate is worth £100,000 or £100 million, the fundamental questions remain remarkably similar:
"What do I have?"
"Who do I want to protect?"
"What do I intend to happen?"
"Are my legal arrangements capable of achieving it?"
"And have I left the people who follow me clarity rather than confusion?"
That is why I believe good succession planning belongs to every family.
We may not all leave the same amount behind.
But we can all aspire to leave our affairs in better order than we found them.
From Inheritance to Stewardship
Death and taxation may be certainties.
Disorder does not have to be.
The objective of estate planning should not necessarily be to die with the smallest possible taxable estate.
Nor should families make irreversible financial decisions simply because today’s tax rules encourage them to do so.
The objective should be to use wealth intelligently during life, retain appropriate security, understand the tax consequences of decisions, document intentions properly and establish arrangements capable of transferring assets with as much clarity and resilience as circumstances permit.
For me, that is the difference between inheritance and stewardship.
Inheritance asks:
"What will I leave?"
Stewardship asks:
"What condition will I leave it in, and what will my decisions mean for the generations who follow?"
We cannot determine exactly what our children and grandchildren will choose to build upon the foundations we leave them.
But we can take responsibility for the quality of the foundation we hand over.
"Pain can become purpose. Experience can become knowledge. And knowledge, properly applied, can protect generations we may never live to meet." - Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
How I Can Assist
Estate and succession planning rarely sits neatly within one professional discipline.
Legal structure, taxation, investments, pensions, property, businesses, family governance and individual intentions frequently intersect.
Through Sian Gissing Strategic Legal Consultancy, I provide independent legal research, strategic analysis and succession support to private individuals and families, as well as professionals advising them.
For private clients and families, I can assist with reviewing existing estate arrangements, identifying potential gaps and areas requiring specialist advice, organising the legal and documentary architecture surrounding an estate, and helping develop a clearer succession strategy before coordinating with appropriate legal, tax, financial or fiduciary professionals where required.
For portfolio managers, wealth advisers, family offices, accountants, trustees, lawyers and other professional advisers, I am available as an independent strategic resource where a client’s circumstances reveal wider estate, succession, governance or cross-border considerations requiring research, coordination or further analysis.
I am particularly interested in matters involving intergenerational wealth, trusts and estates, family governance, complex asset ownership, cross-border succession and internationally connected families.
My role is not to replace a client’s existing professional advisers.
It is often to help connect the pieces by identifying questions that need answering, potential risks sitting between professional disciplines and the specialists who may need to be brought together.
"If an estate is the foundation upon which the next generation will build, good stewardship means ensuring that foundation is inspected, maintained and structurally sound before they inherit it." - Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
Private client enquiries and professional collaborations are welcome.
Arrange a Strategic Legal Consultation
Sian Gissing LL.B (HONS)
Strategic Legal Consultant
Private Wealth | Trusts & Estates | Succession | Governance & Risk
Primary Sources & Further Reading
The pension reform discussed above is contained in Finance Act 2026, including provisions applying the new regime to deaths occurring on or after 6 April 2027.
HMRC’s Inheritance Tax on pensions: technical note, published in May 2026, explains the scope and intended operation of the reform.
HMRC’s Inheritance Tax on Pensions: Technical Note 2, published on 27 August 2026, contains the latest implementation information available at the time of writing.
HMRC’s published inheritance-tax thresholds confirm the £325,000 nil-rate band, the £175,000 residence nil-rate band and the £2 million residence nil-rate band taper threshold, with the principal thresholds fixed through 2030–31.
HMRC’s guidance on lifetime gifts explains the annual exemption and the normal-expenditure-out-of-income exemption.
HMRC’s Pensions Tax and PAYE manuals provide further detail on the income-tax treatment of pension death benefits, including distinctions connected to the age of the member at death, the recipient, timing and the type of benefit.
Important Information
This article is provided for general information, education and commentary only. It does not constitute legal, tax, financial or investment advice and should not be relied upon as a substitute for advice based upon individual circumstances.
Tax and succession rules are subject to change. The pension reforms discussed above take effect for deaths on or after 6 April 2027, but HMRC has stated that further secondary legislation, guidance and supporting materials will continue to be published ahead of implementation.
Cross-border estates may engage the laws and tax regimes of multiple jurisdictions. Appropriate advice should be obtained from suitably qualified and, where required, authorised professionals.
The illustrative drafting language contained within this article is included solely to demonstrate a drafting principle. It is not a testamentary precedent and should not be adopted without advice tailored to the individual estate and governing law.