Electronic Wills after Modernising Wills Law

In May 2025 the Law Commission of England and Wales recommended that electronic wills be capable of formal validity on an equal basis with paper wills, and published a draft Bill to do it. The recommendation is routinely reported as "wills going digital", which invites a specific misreading: that what is proposed is permission to sign a will on a screen. It is not. Under the draft Bill an electronic will must satisfy every formality that a paper will must satisfy — writing, signature, intention, two witnesses simultaneously present, attestation — and then one more that paper wills never face. Requirement F demands a reliable system: one that links each signature to its signer at the moment of signing, that identifies the will so it can be distinguished from any copies, and that protects the will against alteration or destruction by anyone but the testator or a person the testator authorises. Those three limbs are a custody system, an identity system, and a tamper-control system, all pretending to be one will-making formality. The Commission's own analysis excludes most of what consumers currently understand by electronic signing — a typed name, a pasted image, and, on the Commission's expressed doubts, perhaps even a qualified electronic signature on its ordinary terms — and states plainly that storage on a home computer or a personal cloud account should not suffice to prove which file is the will. The distance between that standard and any tool in ordinary household use is the subject of this note. The gap is not a drafting oversight; it is the design. But it means the honest summary of the reform runs: an electronic-wills infrastructure has been specified, and does not yet exist. None of it is law. As at June 2026 there is no full Government response, no Bill before Parliament, and no commencement date to wait for: the only assured route to a valid will today remains a paper document executed under the formalities of 1837.