Two statutes sit in tension at the moment an executor in England and Wales is asked to administer an estate with digital components.

The first is the Administration of Estates Act 1925. Under that Act, a personal representative has a positive duty to collect, value, and administer the deceased's assets. This includes, by any sensible reading, digital assets: photographs, documents, cryptocurrency holdings, online accounts of monetary or sentimental value, and the records of those holdings stored on personal devices. The duty is not optional. An executor who fails to gather assets they reasonably knew or should have known about may be in breach of trust.^[2]

The second is the Computer Misuse Act 1990. Section 1 of that Act creates the offence of unauthorised access to computer material. The offence is committed when a person causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to a program or data, the access is unauthorised, and the person knows it is unauthorised at the time. The maximum penalty on indictment is two years' imprisonment, a fine, or both.^[1]

The Crown Prosecution Service's published guidance on the Act is explicit on what counts as unauthorised access. It includes "using another person's username or identifier (ID) and password without proper authority to access data or a program."^[1] An executor who logs into a deceased account holder's iCloud, Google, or banking application with a passphrase the deceased never explicitly delegated, however well-meaning the purpose, is performing an act the statute defines as a criminal offence.

The two duties do not contradict each other on paper. The Administration of Estates Act tells the executor what they must do. The Computer Misuse Act tells them what they cannot do without authorisation. The gap between the two is the deceased's missing authorisation. In practice, this means an executor's lawful position depends entirely on whether the deceased put something in writing.

The Bill that did not pass

This gap is well known to the profession. The Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners and Queen Mary University of London surveyed estate practitioners in 2021. Roughly a quarter reported having encountered client cases where digital access was the obstacle.^[5] In January 2022, Ian Paisley Jr, MP for North Antrim, brought the Digital Devices (Access for Next of Kin) Bill before the House of Commons under the Ten Minute Rule procedure. Its purpose was to grant next of kin an automatic right of access to a deceased or incapacitated person's digital devices and to place a corresponding duty on technology companies to assist.^[3]

Even a grant of probate may not be sufficient to enable the executors to obtain legal title to a deceased person's digital content.

From Paisley's address to the House on 18 January 2022. The Bill received its second reading on 6 May 2022. The 2021–22 Parliamentary session was prorogued before further progress could be made. The Bill made no further progress and has not been reintroduced.^[3]

The Act that did pass

On 2 December 2025, the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 received Royal Assent and entered into force the same day.^[4] The Act is brief. Its operative clause confirms that a thing, including a thing that is digital or electronic in nature, is not prevented from being the object of personal property rights merely because it falls outside the two traditional categories of English law: things in possession (physical objects) and things in action (rights enforceable through litigation). The Act establishes, in statute, a "third category" of personal property capable of including cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and similar digital holdings.^[4]

This is a meaningful clarification. Before the Act, the question of whether a Bitcoin wallet or an NFT was capable of being inherited at all rested on common law that several judgments had moved in the right direction without resolving definitively. The Act removes that uncertainty.

The Act does not address the Computer Misuse Act. It does not grant executors a right of access to a deceased person's devices. It does not impose any duty on technology platforms. It addresses the prior question of what is and is not capable of being property, which is a different question to who can lawfully access it.

For the executor in England and Wales in 2026, the practical position after the Act is the same as the practical position before the Act, in one respect that matters: holding lawful title to a digital asset is not the same as holding the credentials to reach it.

The practical reality

The platforms have, in the years since the Bush case (Holdfast Case Dossier Nº 04, 2016), developed their own legacy mechanisms. Apple's Digital Legacy programme, Google's Inactive Account Manager, Facebook's Legacy Contact, and similar tools at Microsoft and elsewhere allow an account holder to nominate, in advance, a person who can request access to defined data after the holder's death. Each programme has its own scope, its own evidentiary requirements, and its own exclusions. None of them is integrated with the others. None of them is statutorily mandated.^[6]

For the practitioner, three observations follow:

First, the safest position for an executor is one in which the deceased has, in their lifetime, given written authorisation for a named person to access specified accounts. This authorisation can be embedded in a will, in a separate letter of wishes, or in a digital estate manager that delivers credentials and instructions to a nominated recipient on a defined trigger. Where such authorisation exists, the unauthorised-access element of the Computer Misuse Act offence is absent.

Second, where no such authorisation exists, a grant of probate does not, on its own, cure the problem. The Hansard quote above captures the position precisely. Probate establishes the executor's authority over the estate. It does not, by itself, override the unauthorised-access offence under the CMA, nor does it override the contractual terms each platform imposes on account access. The executor is left to negotiate with each platform individually under each platform's own bereavement procedures.

Third, the next legislative reform on this question is not yet on the order paper. The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 has settled the property question. The access question, last meaningfully addressed by Paisley's 2022 Bill, has not been picked up. There is no announced government Bill addressing executor access to digital devices. The gap is not going to close on its own.