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Finance (No. 2) Bill

Certainly. I will come to that in a moment. Flexibility is built into modern trusts to help people deal with the complexity of family life in modern Britain and provide responsibly for the future of their families. The Law Society survey to which I referred earlier reported one of its members as saying:"““I prepare at least one will every week of my working life—the majority of my clients who have set up life interest trusts in their will do so to protect children from a first marriage whilst looking after the second spouse or as protection for the children of the same marriage—all this talk of tax evasion is nonsense. The traditional family set-up is no more—trusts have evolved in line with this—it is a shame that the Government has sought to undermine this.””" Typical everyday instances where people set up flexible trusts include, as the quote suggests, the need to provide both for a spouse from a second marriage and for the children of a first marriage. A trust can be an invaluable aid in achieving the difficult task of mediating between the interests of step-parents and stepchildren. Trusts are also used to provide for children when a surviving spouse is young and likely to remarry and possibly have children from a subsequent marriage, or to enable trustees to continue to look after the interests of a spouse when old age may mean that mental capacity is affected, or when people are not confident enough that they can foretell all the family circumstances that will apply in a few years. One must remember that wills may be made well in advance of death and in the expectation that they will hold good and provide the right answer for many years to come.