The Commons Justice Committee is calling for a change in the law to ease the burden on the families of missing people in England and Wales.

The committee wants to make it easier for relatives to to deal with a missing person's legal and financial affairs. Similar laws are already in place in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Sir Alan Beith, chairman of the select committee, told the Today programme's Evan Davis that the families of missing people "shouldn't be held to ransom" by one or two "bad cases" of faked deaths.

The systems in place in Scotland, for example, were "clean and clear", he said.

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