With Rishi Sunak on his feet for almost 50 minutes, I must confess to a great level of surprise that the amount of time spent on personal taxation was negligible. I'm going to be honest, with the challenges faced by most private client practitioners in relation to increased demands due to the pandemic, I had expected the worst! However, at 1.35pm as I write this, I find myself breathing a little sigh of relief that, at least in headline terms and speech content, the Budget has not made any changes to personal capital taxes of Capital Gains Tax and Inheritance Tax.

As with all things, the devil is (or at least may be!) in the detail so I won't fully relax until the full text has been considered, but bearing in mind some of the potential changes that could have been brought in to both Capital Gains and Inheritance Taxes, the fact the Chancellor did not see fit to afford even two minutes of time to either of these taxes feels like a 'win'.

So for this afternoon at least, I'm facing my workload with a great big smile that in a year that has brought so many challenges to Private Client Practitioners - especially in terms of probate applications - we have, for now at least - been given an apparent (and very welcome!) reprieve.