Will Writing Across the North West of England

From the Mersey to the Solway Firth

The North West is enormous. From Liverpool's Pier Head down to the Cheshire plain, across to the Pennine mill towns, north through the Lake District and on to the Scottish border at Gretna, there are nearly seven and a half million people living in our region — more than any other outside London. Will Guard's North West team is built to match that geography. We have consultants based in Manchester, Liverpool, Preston and Carlisle, with regular home visits running out from each into the surrounding towns and villages.

We chose those four hubs because they reflect the four very different North Wests we work in. Manchester is dense, urban and busy — the work is often blended families, young professionals buying their first flat in Ancoats, and second-home owners in the Peak District. Liverpool brings us a high concentration of Victorian terraces with shared ownership histories that need careful unpicking, and a strong tradition of family wills passed down through generations. Preston and the Lancashire belt are mill-town and market-town — tight-knit communities where reputation and word-of-mouth still mean more than any Google ad. And Cumbria is a world unto itself: working farms, holiday lets, second properties and the particular complications that come with land that has been in a family for centuries.

Whichever of those North Wests you live in, the same promise applies: a fixed fee agreed in writing, a free first consultation in your own home, evening and weekend appointments at no extra cost, and a real human being you can phone whenever you need to.

What North West clients ask us most

Property is what brings most North West clients to our door. House prices in Greater Manchester and Cheshire have risen sharply over the past decade, and many people who never imagined they would have an inheritance tax problem are now within reach of the threshold once their pension and life cover are added in. We spend a lot of our time explaining the residence nil-rate band, the rules around gifting, and the practical use of trusts to keep the family home out of the wrong hands.

The other big topic is unmarried partners. Cohabiting couples have no automatic right to inherit from one another in England and Wales, regardless of how long they have lived together — there is no such thing as a "common-law spouse" in law. We see this catch families out time and again across the region, particularly with older couples who never quite got around to marrying. A properly drafted mirror will resolves the problem in an afternoon.