Predatory Marriage Update
Five years ago I wrote an article on the evils of ‘predatory marriage’. It’s an issue that is much more commonly heard of now, but for those who are unfamiliar with the concept, it is a pernicious form of emotional and financial abuse.
The classic situation is where an older person living alone is ‘groomed’ into a marriage, that they may or may not have capacity to enter into, usually for financial gain by the perpetrator. Marriage revokes a will, and usually gives the predatory spouse power to control the victim’s finances during their lifetime. Families can see an elderly frail parent being taken advantage of and, in some cases, badly treated physically and emotionally, but can do nothing. It is not an exaggeration to say that predatory marriages can destroy lives.
Due to a quirk in the law, even where a marriage to be annulled after death due to a lack of capacity (which of itself would be incredibly hard to prove), the marriage would still revoke any will made before marriage.
The case to change the law so that marriage no longer automatically revokes a will is compelling, but no change is on the horizon. Partly this is down to data; there are no reliable figures on the number of predatory marriages that have taken place. Why? Because no data has been collated. When we can’t ‘see’ the problem, it doesn’t exist.
A recent case that has attracted significant media attention highlights this issue; Robert Harrington, 94, married his carer, Ms Qin, 54, just 11 months before his death. Mr Harrington made a new will 9 months after the marriage, leaving his estate valued at £680,000 entirely to Ms Qin. His daughter, Jill Langley, challenged the validity of the will and at trial in February 2024. The will was set aside for lack of testamentary capacity, want of knowledge, approval and undue influence. Further litigation may follow as it appears that there was lifetime financial abuse of the deceased, in the form of the transfer of funds totalling £230,000 to Ms Qin in the months leading up to Mr Harrington’s death.
Was this a win? Surely not. As the marriage has still revoked the will, the intestacy rules apply. This means that a proven predator will still inherit £270,000 plus half of the remainder of the estate and there is nothing that can be done about this. Jill Langley has been awarded her full legal costs in relation to the will dispute, and Ms Qin will have the sting of her own legal fees to pay in addition. But the question is, will this case change anything? Will it prevent further predatory marriages? It seems unlikely. Ms Qin’s ‘mistake’ was to overreach herself by getting her victim to make a will. If she had simply been content to marry Jill’s father, she would have inherited a significant sum under the intestacy rules, and there would have been absolutely nothing that Jill Langley could have done.
Clearly there are safeguarding as well as legal issues to consider. No one has done more to campaign and raise awareness of both aspects of predatory marriage than Daphne Franks, and I will leave the last words of this piece to her:
“I have been campaigning against predatory marriage since 2016 when it happened to my mother, Joan Blass. There is a huge legal incentive for predators in that marriage revokes a Will: I have learned in my eight years of campaigning and 250 or so talks that this is not widely known by the general public. Wedding registrars were not trained in assessing mental capacity and yet were expected to do this somehow at every wedding they conducted. There was so little safeguarding at marriage that it was really easy for predators to get a marriage waved through - as was my mother's, even though she could not answer most of the questions. Our MP, Fabian Hamilton, raised the topic in Parliament in a Private Member's Bill in 2018, and again twice since then. We have made a lot of progress in the safeguarding aspect and the Law Commission had a consultation, which closed last December, into whether marriage should continue to revoke a Will. The results will be published in 2025. Meanwhile, my mother is buried in an unmarked grave and we can do nothing about it, and the predator inherited everything she owned. I have spoken to many similarly traumatised families and the effect is horrific.”