Marriage in England and Wales has an unexpected legal consequence that many people never discover until it is too late. Under the Wills Act 1837, getting married or entering a civil partnership automatically revokes any existing Will, unless that Will was made specifically in contemplation of the marriage. Unless a new Will follows, years of careful estate planning can be undone by a single ceremony, often without the person ever realising that marriage carried this consequence.
This rule has stood, largely unchanged, since the Victorian era. The Law Commission has been considering reform of Wills law for almost a decade. In its final report, published in May 2025, it concluded that this rule should be scrapped. Its driving concern is that the rule can facilitate the financial exploitation of vulnerable older people through what has become known as “predatory marriage”. More than a year on, the government has still not said whether, or when, it will act, and pressure is building.
The current law, and why it exists
Section 18 of the Wills Act 1837 provides that marriage revokes a Will, and section 18B extends the same rule to civil partnerships. The exception is a Will made “in contemplation of” that specific marriage or civil partnership, which must be clearly drafted to say so and the parties must be considering the marriage at the time the Will is created. Section 19 confirms that no other change in circumstances, such as divorce from a previous spouse or the birth of a child, has this automatic revoking effect.
The rule dates from a Victorian assumption that marriage represented such a fundamental change in a person’s life and responsibilities that any earlier Will should no longer be treated as reflecting their wishes, and that a new spouse deserved automatic protection through the intestacy rules if nothing else was done. Those assumptions no longer sit comfortably with modern family life. Later-life relationships, blended families and complex estate planning are now commonplace, making the automatic revocation rule far more likely to frustrate than reflect a person’s genuine intentions. It is this gap between Victorian assumptions and modern family life that has created the opportunity for abuse.
What is a predatory marriage?
A predatory marriage is one entered into by a person who befriends, and then marries, someone who is elderly or otherwise vulnerable, with the primary aim of gaining financially from that relationship. Because marriage automatically revokes a Will, and because a person who dies without a valid Will has their estate distributed under the intestacy rules, a spouse is often left as the main or sole beneficiary. A single ceremony can override decades of careful estate planning and redirect an entire inheritance away from the family the deceased intended to provide for.
One anomaly sits at the centre of the problem. How can someone be considered capable of marrying, and thereby of automatically revoking their existing Will, while lacking the capacity to make a new one? In law, that is exactly the position. The threshold for capacity to marry is set considerably lower than the threshold for capacity to make a Will, so a person can pass one test and fail the other, with the marriage still taking full legal effect regardless. No independent record is routinely kept of what happens at a register office ceremony, and registrars are not always trained to recognise the signs of dementia or coercion. Once a marriage certificate has been issued, the legal consequences for any existing Will follow automatically, and by the time a family becomes aware of what has happened, it is usually too late.
The best-known example is the case of Joan Blass. Diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2011, she married Colman Folan, a man 24 years her junior, in a register office ceremony in October 2015, without the knowledge of her family. She died five months later, aged 91. By then, the marriage had already revoked the Will she had made in 2004, leaving the estate to pass under the intestacy rules rather than in accordance with the wishes she had previously recorded. Her daughter, Daphne Franks, has campaigned for reform ever since through Predatory Marriage UK. Her campaigning, together with other high-profile cases, helped bring the issue before Parliament and the Law Commission.
The Law Commission’s proposals
The Law Commission first raised concerns about the revocation rule through its 2017 consultation on Wills, then paused the project for several years while it completed separate work on the law governing weddings. It returned to the issue in a supplementary consultation published in October 2023, looking specifically at revocation by marriage alongside electronic Wills. On 16 May 2025, the Commission published its final report, Modernising Wills Law, together with a draft Bill intended to replace the Wills Act 1837 entirely.
Among its 31 recommendations, the one most relevant here is that marriage and civil partnership should no longer automatically revoke a Will. Under the proposed change, an existing Will would simply remain valid after marriage unless the testator chose to update it. Importantly, this would not leave surviving spouses or civil partners without protection. They would retain the right to bring a claim for reasonable financial provision under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 if a Will did not provide for them.
Where reform stands today
Under the protocol governing how government responds to Law Commission reports, a full response was due within a year of publication, meaning by mid-May 2026. That deadline has passed without a response. Reform campaigners, including a cross-party group of MPs and peers, wrote to the government as recently as July 2026 pressing for a timetable. There still isn’t one.
A carefully developed reform, backed by a ready-made draft Bill, has sat unanswered well past the government’s own deadline. That is what has turned this from a technical point of Wills law into a live political question, and it is why the debate is resurfacing now rather than fading with the report itself.
Whether or not ministers ultimately accept the Law Commission’s recommendations, the debate has exposed an uncomfortable reality. A little-known Victorian rule can fundamentally alter a person’s estate planning at a moment they may be at their most vulnerable. Until Parliament decides otherwise, that remains the law in England and Wales.
For now, however, the law remains unchanged. Marriage still revokes an existing Will, and anyone intending to marry or enter into a civil partnership should review their estate planning as part of that process. Likewise, families concerned that a vulnerable relative may be at risk of financial exploitation should seek legal advice promptly, rather than wait for legislation that has no confirmed timetable. Above all, the debate serves as a reminder that one of the most significant consequences of marriage is also one of its least well understood.
The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.
[View Source]