The form is called PA8A. It runs to a couple of pages, asks for a fee of a few pounds, and — once it lands — holds a grant of probate still for six months. That is the whole of its power. Six months of stillness, bought with a short form, while somewhere a family works out what it actually thinks.
You didn’t plan to be the person filling it in.
Someone has died — a parent, say. There is a will. There is also a version of events you can’t make fit: a document signed in the last weeks, when the phone had stopped being answered; a “she was very clear about it” from a quarter that had never shown much interest before. You aren’t certain of anything. That’s rather the point. You just know that once probate is granted, the executor can gather the estate, close the accounts, sell the house, and distribute what’s left — and that money, once distributed, does not come back easily. The grant is the starting gun. A caveat is a hand on the starter’s arm.
A caveat decides nothing. It doesn’t say you’re right. It stops a grant of probate being issued to anyone, on that estate, until the question has been looked at — a pause, not a verdict. GOV.UK is blunt about the etiquette here: try to reach an agreement with the person applying first, because entering a caveat can lead to legal action and to costs. Read that twice. This is a brake, not a weapon, and the fee being small does nothing to make the consequences small.
So, before the form, the free routes. Citizens Advice will talk you through what dealing with an estate actually involves and where a disagreement tends to lead. GOV.UK’s own probate guidance sets out who is entitled to apply, and in what order. If the real dispute is about whether the will is valid at all — capacity, pressure applied, a later will nobody has produced — that is what’s called contentious probate, and it is worth understanding the shape of it before you reach for anything. A caveat buys the time to get that understanding. It is not the understanding itself.
When you do come to PA8A, the form is quietly exacting in the way these things always are. It wants the deceased’s full name, and then it wants any other names they were ever known by — the maiden name, the name on the older accounts, the spelling on the death certificate that differs from the spelling on everything else. It wants the exact date of death as recorded on that certificate: not the date you remember, not the date of the funeral, the one on the paper. It wants their last address, and it wants yours, in England or Wales. You can apply online or by post. Get a single field wrong and the pause you were relying on may not attach cleanly to the right estate. The smallest clerical slip; the largest possible consequence. That is the particular cruelty of official forms — they are set out as though nothing much rests on them.
Six months, then. If the matter still isn’t resolved and the concern still stands, you extend the caveat with a second form, PA8B, for a further six months. The person applying for probate can also formally challenge the caveat, and if they do, you’ll need to respond to keep it in place. None of this arrives with any drama. It is a correspondence, conducted in form numbers and fee cheques, over a thing that could hardly matter more.
This is usually where people stall — not on the principle, which is simple enough, but on the wording. On whether “also known as” is meant to catch the maiden name. On copying a date across from a certificate without transposing two digits under a kitchen light at eleven at night. On the fear of getting the one field wrong that makes the whole thing not count.
Chris works through PA8A with you a field at a time — asking the plain questions the form asks in its stiff way, and turning your answers into the completed caveat application. The actual document, filled in, ready for you to read back and submit, with the deceased’s details sitting in the boxes the registry expects to find them in.
Not a decision about your family. Just the form that holds the door for six months while you make it.
Come back when you’re ready — the next step will still be here.