Qualifying assurances, testamentary intention and countervailing benefits

The High Court's judgments in Vasami, Winter and Spencer

William East

In recent months there have been a number of proprietary estoppel cases which have been decided at trial in the High Court. This article considers three of them, and two features in particular, namely: (1) how the court will distinguish between qualifying assurances, which are sufficient to found an estoppel, and mere statements of testamentary intention, which are not; and (2) to what extent the court will hold that countervailing benefits received by the claimant outweigh the detriment suffered, where the detriment is itself hard to quantify and is suffered over a long period.