What do the wealthy really think as they bequeath, or inherit, their wealth? One of the UK’s leading private client advisers, Saffery Cham...

What do the wealthy really think as they bequeath, or inherit, their wealth? One of the UK’s leading private client advisers, Saffery Champness, has just revealed some fascinating insights into this great taboo. Entitled “The Succession Project” the accountant’s research outlines some of the innermost fears and hopes of the wealthy at critical life-time moments and points to a profusion of different values and practices, sometimes leading to profound tensions, against the backdrop of a changing society. The research involved NOP polling over 1,000 affluent individuals as a prelude to market researchers, Spada, conducting confidential discussions with over forty of the UK’s wealthiest individuals. The views of the closest professional advisers to thousands more wealthy families were also sought out. Aside from widespread worries about changes in fiscal regime, one of the key themes to emerge from the research is the sheer complexity, sensitivity and difficulty of the decision-making processes involved in handing on major assets such as a family business or landed estate where the future “owner” is one of a group of potential beneficiaries. With such major “assets”, specific business and management skills are required as well as a preparedness to accept weighty responsibilities in order to keep the assets viable and relevant to the modern world. One of the severest tensions that families and testators grapple with is “fairness” versus ‘equality’ - which many respondents regard as very different attributes. The report points to a liberal trend in modern testators’ decisions, yet, despite a more egalitarian society, many successors are still believed to need the majority of the family assets in order to perpetuate the life of – or maintain effective control over - the business or estate. Such decisions are increasingly offset against the need to treat siblings fairly, if not equally. For landed estate owners the preservation of the estate is usually still the top priority, despite the pressure for equality between the children: first generation entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are wary of the risk in passing on huge sums to children who lack the ability to cope with it; and many third generation family businesses tend to divide shares and assets equally. Business families increasingly recruit external management and, if family members join the company, they are expected to first prove themselves elsewhere and be subject to promotion on merit, otherwise the wealth of the wider family can be at risk. The concept of male primogeniture does survive, particularly where there is an hereditary title. Yet even here the notion of automatic succession is being challenged with some male heirs being deemed less competent or suitable than their male or female siblings or themselves being unwilling to accept a country lifestyle. With purely liquid wealth, the report reveals a much greater tendency to divide up the cash equally between older and younger, male and female heirs. All bets are off however when it comes to complex family structures with second and third marriages and several sets of children: and worries abound over the undue influence exerted by the current spouse – leading to favouritism.