A liferent that is not available to meet the claims of creditors.

Previously the Home Office announced that in 2024 all persons with Biometric Residence Permits (BRPs) or Biometric Residence Cards (BRCs) would need to create a UKVI account to register for an eVisa, as proof of immigration status will be digitalised. On 6 August 2024 the guidance for eVisas changed to state that anyone with a BRP can create a UKVI account to access an eVisa. Previously it had encouraged people to register only when they were invited to apply. According to the guidance, it is planned that people will be able to travel on an eVisa from 2025, but at present people with a BRP will still need a BRP to travel.

Personal Injury analysis: Analysing the changes to Part 36 which will be brought in by the Civil Procedure (Amendment No 8) Rules 2014 in April, Paul Edwards, a partner and national head of costs at Hill Dickinson, advises that offers and settlement strategies need to be reviewed ahead of these changes in light of the retrospective impact of some of them.

ARCHIVED: this archived Practice Note is not maintained and is for background information purposes only. Further, some of the links may not direct you to the provisions as at the date the guidance in this Practice Note was published. Changes to appeals in 2016—what do you need to know? 2016 saw the culmination of many months of consultations and meetings focused on tackling the backlog of cases in the Court of Appeal. A number of changes were proposed to reduce the workload in the Court of Appeal including raising the threshold test for permission to appeal. Not all of the proposed changes made it through the consultation process, but many did, resulting in (among other things) a brand new CPR 52, significant changes to the Practice Directions (in particular CPR PD 52A and CPR PD 52C) and the re-routing of appeals away from the Court of Appeal. In this review of 2016 we consider: • the challenges faced by the Court of Appeal and the proposals to meet those challenges—see below

Law360, London: Damning findings in civil litigation that the directors of London Capital & Finance (LC&F) ran the bonds company as a Ponzi scheme could foreshadow the Serious Fraud Office's (SFO) parallel criminal investigation into the failed £237m investment business, lawyers say.

Private Client analysis: This case considered the meaning of 'relevant property' under the settlements regime of the Inheritance Tax Act 1984 (IHTA 1984) and, in particular, the time at which this definition is to be tested. The question arose as to whether the trustees of an offshore trust established by a non-UK domiciled settlor were subject to the UK settlements regime in respect of property added to the trust after the settlor became deemed domiciled in the UK, or whether they were exempt from such charges as the trust consisted solely of excluded property. The First-tier Tribunal (FTT) held that whether trust property is excluded property is based on the status of the trust at the time that it was established, not at the time that the property in question was added to the settlement. As a result, the trust in this case did consist solely of excluded property and no inheritance tax (IHT) charges arose as a result of either the ten-year anniversary or capital distributions. The FTT was also asked to consider whether their jurisdiction was appellate, or supervisory only. The FTT held that, while their jurisdiction was supervisory, the questions raised by the trustees were relevant in establishing whether HMRC had acted reasonably and that the outcome (ie that the paid IHT should be refunded and that no further IHT was due) would be the same in either case. Written by Katherine Willmott, senior associate solicitor at Foot Anstey LLP.

Under Police Section 8 of PACE, an application for an all premises warrant may be authorised by the justice of the peace, as opposed to a specific premises warrant. This is because it may be viewed as unnecessary to search and name all premises related to a person who commits a crime, or due to the nature of the criminal offence committed by the person.

EU Law analysis: The judgment contains a preliminary ruling by the Court of Justice on the interpretation of the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive 2005/29/EC (the EU UCPD). The Court of Justice held that a valuation service for goods (here, gold) which is provided by a trader to a consumer before the purchase of those goods from that consumer and which makes the purchase subject to acceptance of the price determined by the trader during that valuation, qualifies, together with that purchase, as a ‘product’ under the EU UCPD. Consequently, practices directly connected with the promotion of that (combined) product to consumers come within the scope of the EU UCPD. This case confirms the broad scope of application of the EU UCPD in order to achieve a high level of consumer protection and is in line with previous Court of Justice case law on the applicability of the EU UCPD to combined offers of at least two products or services. Written by Florence Danis, partner at Linklaters LLP; Gert-Jan Hendrix, managing associate at Linklaters LLP, and Harry Slachmuylders, associate at Linklaters LLP.

Law360, London: Insurers that covered aircraft lessors whose planes were stranded in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine told a London court on 3 February 2025 that other insurers that covered the lessors for war-related risks should pay out for the allegedly lost aircraft.

The court’s background, name and scope Section 41 of the Courts Reform (Scotland) Act 2014 (CR(S)A 2014) gave to Scottish Ministers the power to provide, by order and with the consent of the Lord President, ‘that the jurisdiction of a sheriff of a specified sheriffdom sitting at a specified sheriff court extends territorially throughout Scotland for the purposes of dealing with specified types of civil proceedings’. Under CR(S)A 2014 and with effect from 22 September 2015, the ordinary exclusive monetary jurisdiction of Scotland’s sheriff courts was increased from £5,000 to £100,000. The All-Scotland Sheriff Court (Sheriff Personal Injury Court) Order 2015 (2015 Order), SSI 2015/213, was the first, and to date only, order made under the section 41 power. Key parts of this order are: • Article 2(2): ‘an all-Scotland sheriff court sitting by virtue of this order is to be referred to as the Sheriff Personal Injury Court’ • Article 3: this court can deal with ‘actions of damages for, or arising from, personal injuries or death of a person

The Scottish Ministers have the power to extend the territorial jurisdiction of a Sheriff to cover the whole of Scotland for the purpose of dealing with specified types of civil proceedings.

TMT analysis: In this libel judgment, the High Court held that an article which referred to decisions made by a senior prosecutor carried the meaning that the claimant was reasonably suspected of being professionally negligent in relation to those decisions. It also held that, in order to establish defamation of a person’s professional competence, there is no requirement for the imputation to be in respect of an habitual or chronic attribute, as an allegation of ‘one-off’ incompetence has the potential to have as adverse an effect on reputation as that of a general one.