Advice in the time of tax change
Is your advice good enough?
I’ll be honest. I’m frustrated.
I want brilliant people who are currently lawyers, accountants and financial advisers to have meaningful, valuable work in the future. But I am not convinced we are focusing on the right things. And if we get it wrong now, we risk becoming irrelevant.
The inheritance tax changes coming into force today – 6 April 2026 - taxing family businesses at higher rates, have triggered a huge amount of commentary across the advisory world.
On one level, it is exactly what you would expect.
Clear explanations of the rules.
Technical analysis.
Planning ideas - suggestions around restructuring, earlier transfers, using corporate vehicles instead of trusts, different share classes, etc.
That has its place, of course, but I fear it is not enough. And, increasingly, clients are telling me the same thing.
They are hearing solutions… but are they solutions to their problems?
And… if we give away solutions, how do we get the client to back up so we can help them find out the real problem?
We are starting in the wrong place
Much of the conversation begins with:
What is the tax impact?
What can we do about it?
What structure should we use?
And so we respond.
We explain.
We model.
We suggest solutions.
But when we lead with solutions, clients latch onto them. They start to believe that the answer lies in the structure. That if we can just “get this right”, the problem is solved.
And of course it isn’t. Because tax is not the real issue here. It may be the topic that brings clients through the door. But if we stay there, we are only dealing with the surface.
And in a world where clients can increasingly access information, draft documents and explore structures themselves, simply explaining options is not a long-term differentiator.
If what we are offering is technical explanation and standard solutions, we are already competing with tools that are faster, cheaper and, in many cases, good enough.
So the real question becomes:
What is really going on for the client and how do we provide solutions which are right for now, and which give options in the future as life happens and the family evolves.
The statistics should make us stop
We have known for a long time that family business succession has a poor success rate.
Around 70% of family businesses do not make it to the second generation.
Only 10–15% make it to the third.
Very few survive beyond that.
These are not new figures. They have been consistent over time. And importantly, they include periods where the tax regime was more generous than it is now.
So let’s be clear. A more favourable tax environment does not make for good succession to a family business.
And, in my experience, focusing on tax as the primary issue can leave clients feeling that they have “done the right thing”… only to find that the real challenges emerge later.
I believe that advisers in the future will only succeed if they can communicate the following:
Tax shapes the planning. It does not determine whether succession works.
What is really going on for the client?
Clients rarely arrive saying:
“Help me think through the long-term reality of my business and my family.”
They come with:
“I’ve read about the tax changes and I want to put in place a Trust.”
Brilliant, the adviser thinks, we’ll chat about this for a bit – because that’s me doing my job. We’ll agree that the tax tail doesn’t wag the dog. And then we’ll get a lovely legal structure up and running – could be a Trust or a company (tbc), which will serve the purpose for, oh, let’s say, the next 10 years at least…
NOOOOOOO!!!
Doing that makes us feel like we’ve done our job, but I’d guess that in 90% of cases, we have moved to structure and solution before we fully understand context.
Better advice starts earlier.
What is actually going on for this client?
Where are they in the life of the business?
What is their family situation? And by that I mean, what are the family really like?
What is working well? What is not?
What are they hoping will happen?
What are they worried about, but not yet saying out loud?
Only once that is understood do the more detailed questions start to make sense.
Otherwise, we are building answers on assumptions. I have often heard advisers say that they were too nervous to ask a question about what was really going on in a family. It felt intrusive. It is private to the family.
How can we give advice without knowing what is really going on for a family?
Tax is one driver. Control and protection are others
And of course tax is not the only force shaping these decisions. Control is often just as powerful.
Clients may want to retain control for as long as possible, limit the involvement of certain family members or protect against perceived future risks.
Advisers who know the technical then jump into solution mode and we hear of trusts, corporate structures, layered ownership arrangements. All designed to add layers of control.
Sometimes those are entirely appropriate, for example if there is a genuinely vulnerable beneficiary. But sometimes they are driven less by necessity and more by a fear which sits with the client which may nor may not be real.
A desire to hold on.
A concern about what might happen.
A lack of confidence in the next generation.
My experience is that professional advisers find this sort of conversation even harder to deal with than tax concerns. It’s a bit touchy feely isn’t it – for us to explore what is really going on in the family? That’s not really our job is it? We don’t really have the training for it?
And so we reach for a structural solution before we have fully explored the underlying issue.
And that matters. Because structures built around untested assumptions can create exactly the problems they were meant to avoid. That is exactly where advisers fall short and at the same time is where we have the opportunity to create real value for the client.
The irony here is that we may have helped to create, or perpetuate, a problem for the longer term family dynamic. I have rarely seen advisers admit that, but I am 100% confident that has happened for too many clients.
Why family businesses actually fail
Shall we pause here for a moment. Does a family business actually fail over generations? Failure is a strong word. Alternatively, might we see a business as a construct which serves a family well for a period of time but needs to evolve as the family evolves. Life moves on and changes in different ways for different people.
The next generation may not share the same drive.
They may not have the same capability.
They may not want the responsibility at all.
Advising families about ownership, without understanding what the family dynamic may result in ownership becoming spread across people who are not equally engaged. At best, that creates passive participants. At worst, it creates tension, conflict, and decisions that damage the business and the family.
These are not unusual cases. They are what typically happens over time.
And if we have not built that reality into the advice from the outset, no structure will fix it later.
You can have a technically perfect plan. And still end up in the wrong place.
Am I just making this up?
In my old lawyer life, I had a client who came to see me to talk about a family business which had been run for more than 3 generations. Ownership of the business was spread across umpteen Trusts, and the set of Trustees were different for each. The law firm’s corporate Trustee was often a Trustee, but not always.
It was unclear who was the client – was it the “head of the family”, was it the main beneficiary of the Trusts, was it his children who are now adult? Or was it the faceless business itself? Of course the business wasn’t faceless, it was run by the various family members. I say run, because it had become impossible to run because no one had a clear view of who had control.
And of course legal control is different to actual control. And so we come full circle – it is the family dynamics which are most important here. The legal structures are at best supporting a dynamic which is not working for anyone, and at worst are causing a family discord and real unhappiness.
Why were the various Trusts set up? Tax. And control.
But nothing worked. The company couldn’t function. The family was really struggling. As an adviser who believes that people and relationships are at the heart of everything, it was really upsetting to see.
The role of the adviser
As advisers we are kidding ourselves if we believe the main reason succession fails is tax.
If we truly want to succeed in our role as client adviser, and properly service our clients, need to ask questions and we need to ask different types of questions. The ones which might take us out of our comfort zone.
We are not just there to answer the question being asked. We are there to understand what sits behind it. To understand what the client actually wants. To test whether that is realistic. And to help them stay in a position where their plans can evolve as life unfolds.
That means stepping beyond pure technical advice.
It means being willing to ask better questions.
To spend time with clients and gain their trust.
To challenge, carefully.
To bring business, family and personal considerations into the same conversation.
Because today’s solution should not become tomorrow’s constraint.
Where are we now?
Of course the inheritance tax changes matter.
Clients need clear, confident advice on what they mean and what can be done.
But if that is where we start, let alone stop, we are not solving the problem that really determines success.
The advisers who will add most value are not the ones who tell clients about tax changes, or who provide stock answers, products, to problems which need bespoke solutions.
They are the ones who use those moments as an entry point into a deeper conversation. About what the client actually wants. About what might get in the way. And about how to build something that will still work as circumstances change.
Because tax may shape the route. But it is not what determines whether the journey succeeds.
Where I see my role
This is the space I now work in.
Having come out of private practice, I now work on a consultancy basis directly with private clients. The feedback I receive from them, and from their wider professional adviser team, is that I help them make sense of what they actually need — ensuring the advice they take is grounded in the reality of their business, their family and their lives.
I am not trying to replace lawyers, tax advisers or financial planners. There will always be a need for regulated advice.
But I do see a clear opportunity to strengthen how that advice is shaped.
So alongside my work with clients, I also work as a consultant with advisers, their teams and their firms, helping them develop the skills to be better advisers.
The focus is simple: moving beyond purely technical advice, and developing the judgement, confidence and perspective needed to handle the human and commercial realities that sit behind the legal, tax and financial rules.
This work is about asking better questions and bringing the full context into the conversation. It is about making sure advice is not only technically correct, but relevant and meaningful.
I am certain this is where real differentiation now sits, because it is not something we are trained to do. And it doesn’t always come naturally.
The firms and advisers who recognise this don’t see this as a “nice to have”, but an essential shift. They are the ones investing in their people. And they will be the ones who continue to stay relevant.
6 April 2026