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 Government announcement that business tenants who cannot pay their rent because of the pandemic will be protected from eviction not living up to the hype. 

 Divorcing couples may no longer have to blame one another for the breakdown of their marriage as a Bill that seeks to reduce family conflict proceeds through Parliament.

 Being a first time buyer and getting your foot on the property ladder seems like one of life's biggest goals.

Conveyancing is the legal and administrative process carried out when a house or flat is purchased or sold.

Upon instructing a solicitor to act on your behalf, there will be various anti-money laundering and identity checks to be carried out before any work can be carried out. Once these compliance checks have been carried out, the conveyancing process begins.

 Would your organisation know what to do if, and when, it receives a Data Subject Access Request (“DSAR”) and are your staff trained to recognise a DSAR when one is made?

The Information Commissioner’s Office has recently issued new guidelines on calculating the period within which data controllers must comply with a  subject access request. 

Despite its title the Deregulation Act has introduced greater regulation into the residential letting market. Typically a landlord when granting an AST to a tenant would at the same time serve on the tenant a section 21 notice enabling the landlord to take back possession at the end of the tenancy. The law now says that a valid section 21 notice cannot be served within the first 4 months of the tenancy and, once served, the landlord must act on it within 6 months or serve a fresh section 21 notice.

The most obvious problem that unmarried couples face when making Wills is that spouse exemption for Inheritance Tax (IHT) purposes will not apply on the first death in the way that it would for a married couple or civil partners.  Instead the only allowance that will be available on first death is the individual IHT Nil Rate band (currently £325,000).  The value of any assets in excess of that amount will be chargeable to IHT at the rate of 40% subject to any reliefs that might be claimed for business or agricultural assets eg shares in a trading business or agricultural land.