Our practice of specialist real estate, private client and corporate lawyers dates back to 1780. We are accustomed to dealing with complex family structures, settlements and landed estates, as well as international clients from both a legal and tax perspective.

Our work for landed estates, often for successive generations, has included:

• restructuring the family trusts;
• trust administration (including appointment and retirement of trustees and advising on the trustees’ powers);
• sale and purchase of farmland and other associated assets;
• employment contracts for staff,;
• advice on the funding of the estate pension scheme;
• advising on Lordship titles and manorial rights;
• lease renewals for estate land;
• first registration of relevant estate land;
• charity law advice; and
• tax planning including inheritance tax and capital gains tax mitigation and Wills.

We administer over 200 trusts in-house at Wedlake Bell dealing with all annual compliance, such as:

• tax returns;
• trust accounts;
• the reporting regimes of FATCA, CRS and the Trust Register;
• tax repayments for beneficiaries (R185s);
• January/July tax payments on account; and
• inheritance tax ten-year anniversary and exit charges.

We are able to advise on the challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic for clients who own landed estates, such as: the relaxation of public access requirements by HMRC for conditionally exempt buildings, employee assistance schemes, redundancy situations, difficulties around landlords’ safety checks and landlords faced with requests from tenants for rent concessions.