In our weekly series, readers can email any questions about their finances to be answered by our expert, Rosie Hooper. Rosie is a chartered financial planner at Quilter Cheviot and has worked in financial services for 25 years. If you have a question for her, email us at money@inews.co.uk.
Question: My wife and I both have property trust wills. This effectively sets up a property trust, meaning when one person dies, the trust protects 50 per cent share value of the home property for our children and means the other 50 per cent cannot be used by the council, in the event the remaining partner then has to be admitted to a care home.
But our understanding is that even without this, if the remaining partner still lives in the property, the value of the property cannot be included by the council in its financial assessment of the care home application? If this is true, then do we actually need the wills to be property trust wills?
Answer: This is a really common area of confusion, and it’s understandable. Care funding rules are complex, and there is a lot of information around property trusts too making it very hard to get definitive answers. Let’s start with the key point you are right about.
If one partner moves permanently into a care home while the other continues to live in the family home, the value of the property is normally ignored in the local authority’s financial assessment. This is a mandatory disregard under the Care Act, and it applies regardless of whether the home is owned outright, jointly, or via a will arrangement. In other words, as long as a spouse or civil partner remains living there, the council cannot force a sale or count the property’s value when assessing care fees. That protection exists with or without a property trust will.
Where things get more complicated is what happens after the first partner dies and the survivor later needs care themselves.
This is where property trust wills, more formally known as life interest trusts or immediate post-death interest trusts, can play a role. Under this structure, each partner leaves their share of the home into a trust on first death. The surviving partner has the right to live there for life, but they do not own that half outright.
In practice, that can mean that if the surviving partner later moves into care, only the half of the property they personally own is potentially assessable, not the half held in trust. However, this is not a guarantee of protection from care fees, and this is the part that is often misunderstood.
Local authorities are entitled to look at why arrangements were put in place. If a trust or other asset arrangement is judged to have been created primarily to avoid care costs, the council can apply the deprivation of assets rules and treat the person as if they still owned the asset anyway. There is no fixed time limit, no “seven-year rule”, and councils can look back as far as they consider relevant.
That does not mean property trust wills are automatically a problem. Far from it. Where these wills are used as part of normal estate planning, for example to ensure children ultimately inherit, to protect against remarriage, or to provide clarity between families, they are widely accepted and commonly drafted by solicitors. The key issue is intention, timing, and overall context.
So to your direct question: if the survivor remains living in the home, you do not need property trust wills to benefit from the property disregard. That protection already exists.
The value of property trust wills is more about what happens later, and about control rather than certainty. They can help ring-fence part of the estate, but they do not override care funding rules, and they do not provide absolute protection from assessment if care is needed in the future.
Given you already have professionally drafted wills, it would be sensible to revisit them with your solicitor, not because they are wrong, but to make sure they still reflect your priorities and that you fully understand what they can and cannot achieve. A good solicitor should be very open about the limits around care fees and deprivation of assets and help you see the trust as part of a broader estate plan rather than a guaranteed shield.
The most important takeaway is this: property trust wills can be useful and appropriate, but anyone promising certainty around care fees is oversimplifying a system that simply does not work that way. Thoughtful planning is worthwhile, but caution and clarity are just as important.
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