An Aberdeenshire woman has told of how a legal agreement her parents signed with collapsed Greenock-based solicitors, McClure, has left her with “sleepless nights, anxiety and depression” as she’s tried to claim back a house that was put into a Family Protection Trust through the firm.
In an interview with Scotland Tonight, which airs on STV and STV Player at 8:30pm on Thursday 3 April, Lesley Pike explains that when her parents died and her family were looking to sell their bungalow, “the young estate agent chappie told us that it wasn’t ours to sell”.
Lesley’s parents had placed their home in a Family Protection Trust arranged through McClure at a cost of more than £2,000. The trust was promoted to them on the basis that it could protect their house from being sold to pay for care home fees and, under the terms of the arrangement, a board of trustees made up of individual solicitors from McClure – one of whom left the firm in 2017 – were put in control of the asset and retained that power after Lesley’s parents died.
Lesley says: “We have paid just short of £40,000 to get the house to my nephew, which is where it was supposed to have been in 2014 when my parents died. It has cost us thousands – and we don’t have thousands – to get the family back on track because it has hit us all bad, financially as well as physically and mentally. It has been mind-blowing – [we’ve experienced] sleepless nights, anxiety and depression.”
Lesley is one of nearly 20,000 people across the UK who have been left dealing with the fallout from the demise of McClure – which collapsed in 2021 – and their mass selling of Family Protection Trusts. Scotland Tonight has spoken to dozens of other former clients in similar positions.
Scotland Tonight: Trapped in a Family Trust airs on STV and STV Player at 8:30pm on Thursday 3 April.
Lesley adds: “We were just trusting the people my parents were trusting, so we fell into that trap of ‘they’ll be fine’. We weren’t told what we were signing. We signed documents with the McClure name on them, but we didn’t know why they were on them and what would be happening with them.
“If someone that [my mother] trusted – I hate that word now – came in with a piece of paper, we would sign it. And now we find our signatures on documents that say we wanted a trust.”
Thursday’s edition of Scotland Tonight also features an interview with a former McClure employee – the first to talk publicly about how the firm’s Managing Director, Andrew Robertson, allegedly instructed those working for him to take on new clients.
The employee, who wishes to remain anonymous, claims: “Robertson put forward clients that still had a mortgage on their property [and said] that did not stop them from putting their house into trust.
“I faced Roberston about this and he still insisted it could be done. [He said] ‘tell the clients just to do it’. We had words and I said I’m not prepared to do it and walked out.”
The former employee goes on to claim that McClure representatives went “out to B&Q, garden centres and shopping centres” to promote the trusts to prospective clients, adding: “You might [usually] see double glazing or bathroom people or kitchen people doing that – but not solicitors.”
Responding to the claims made in Thursday’s Scotland Tonight, representatives for Andrew Robertson say: “We dispute that clients were misled to pay for a trust. It was our responsibility to advise clients but it was left to them to decide whether or not they wished to have a trust. From 2019, each meeting with one of our consultants was recorded with the client's consent so that management could monitor that no undue pressure was being brought to bear.”