Stephen Pollard

It is clear that she intended to push ahead whatever. The consequences of this huge increase could be appalling for anyone without large amounts of cash to hand.

Take a modest estate of £600,000 – modest given modern house prices. That could mean a family home worth £500,000 with £100,000 of savings and investments. The fee to grant probate would be £4,000, which is a 1,760 per cent increase. If you don’t have £4,000 available – not many of us have that sort of cash lying around – then probate will not be granted.

And even if you can raise it, it often takes months for the money from an estate to come through.

Here’s the rub. Probate is a simple and easy process to grant. It doesn’t get more complicated the larger the estate. Which is why this is so obviously a rip-off. You might say that it seems fair for the betteroff to pay more but we already have inheritance tax, which hands a large proportion of an estate over to the state.

Probate has always been a fee for a service, not a tax. You don’t pay a different rate for your car to be repaired depending on your salary. And that’s where Ms Truss has made a mistake. Yesterday the JCSI ruled that the increase is almost

NOW the JCSI has told the Ministry of Justice that the fee should simply cover the cost of granting probate. If the Government wants to use it as a tax to raise revenue then it needs to let MPs have a say.

In a way none of this is surprising. Justice Secretary Liz Truss appears to be out of her depth. Her record in her previous job as environment secretary was very poor. She became infamous for a cringe-making speech to the 2014 Conservative Party conference in which she came out with the bizarre line: “We import two-thirds of our cheese. That. Is. A. Disgrace.” One wag remarked on her appointment as Justice Secretary that it disproved the idea that Theresa May did not have a sense of humour.

So dire has she been that rumours were circulating yesterday that Ms Truss’s fellow Cabinet ministers are urging Theresa May to split the Ministry of Justice and the roles of Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary.

Last month, for example, she was embarrassingly contradicted by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas, after she announced plans to allow prerecorded cross-examinations to be used in sex offence cases.

Lord Thomas had to point out that the new rules apply only to children and other vulnerable witnesses. Damningly, he said she had been “misleading” and had “misunderstood the thing completely”. Ouch.

This shameful move over probate is not just a form of deception, attempting to smuggle in a tax rise, it is also monumental incompetence. Ms Truss needs to be replaced, pronto.

‘Need support of MPs to bring in tax hike’