Wills and Estates for FLK2: Intestacy, IHT and Grants Explained

If you have ever sat down with a past FLK2 paper and felt your eyes glaze over halfway through a question about a widow, three children, a half-built loft conversion and a £450,000 estate, you are not alone. Wills and the Administration of Estates is one of the densest subjects on the SQE syllabus — not because the law is exotic, but because three interlocking systems (the intestacy rules, inheritance tax and the grant of representation regime) all show up in the same fact pattern and you are expected to navigate them in roughly 100 seconds.

This piece breaks down the three pillars the examiners lean on hardest, with the kinds of worked examples you will actually see in the question bank. The aim is not to reproduce a textbook — it is to give you a working mental model that holds up under exam pressure.

Intestacy: the rules you really need at your fingertips

Intestacy questions on FLK2 almost always test section 46 of the Administration of Estates Act 1925 (as amended). Candidates lose marks not because they have forgotten the rules, but because they apply them out of order. Get the order right and the rest falls into place.

The two variables that drive everything are: (i) does the deceased leave a surviving spouse or civil partner, and (ii) does the deceased leave issue (children, grandchildren and so on down the bloodline). Cohabitees, however long they were together, get nothing under the intestacy rules — they have to bring a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975. Examiners love this trap.

Spouse survives, no issue

The surviving spouse takes the entire estate absolutely. Parents and siblings of the deceased get nothing. Simple — but watch for the survivorship requirement: the spouse must survive the deceased by 28 days under section 46(2A). If they die within that window, the estate is distributed as if the spouse had predeceased.

Spouse survives, with issue

This is where questions get spicy. The surviving spouse takes:

• all personal chattels (defined in section 55(1)(x) AEA 1925 — broadly, tangible movable property, but not business assets or pure investment items);
• a statutory legacy (a fixed cash sum — the figure is reviewed periodically, so confirm the current amount on sqe.sra.org.uk or sra.org.uk rather than relying on a number you half-remember from a 2023 handout); and
• half of the residue absolutely.

The other half of residue goes to the issue on the statutory trusts (section 47). Issue take per stirpes — so if a child predeceased leaving grandchildren, those grandchildren step into the parent's share equally between them.

No spouse

You work down a hierarchy: issue first; failing that, parents; then siblings of the whole blood on statutory trusts; siblings of the half blood; grandparents; aunts and uncles of the whole blood; aunts and uncles of the half blood; and finally bona vacantia to the Crown. Each tier only inherits if the one above is entirely empty. Adopted children count; stepchildren do not unless adopted.

Inheritance tax: the calculation candidates fluff under pressure

IHT questions on FLK2 are almost always arithmetic dressed up as a story. You are given an estate, a few lifetime gifts and a marital status, and asked either to identify the IHT bill or to spot which exemption applies. The maths is not hard. The structure is.

Hold the framework in your head in this order:

1. Identify what is in the taxable estate (free estate plus the deceased's share of joint property, plus relevant trust interests, plus failed PETs and chargeable lifetime transfers within seven years).
2. Apply exemptions and reliefs (spouse exemption, charity exemption, business property relief, agricultural property relief).
3. Apply the available nil rate band (NRB) and, if the conditions are met, the residence nil rate band (RNRB).
4. Charge the balance at the death rate (40%, reduced to 36% if at least 10% of the net estate passes to charity).
5. Apply taper relief to tax on failed PETs made between three and seven years before death — taper relief reduces the tax, not the value of the gift.

Two points that consistently catch candidates out. First, the NRB is applied against lifetime transfers in chronological order before death — meaning lifetime gifts can eat up the NRB and leave nothing for the death estate. Second, the transferable NRB and transferable RNRB from a predeceased spouse are not automatic — the personal representatives must claim them, and they are claimed as a percentage of the unused band, not a fixed sum.

Examiners are not testing whether you can recite the Finance Act. They are testing whether, under time pressure, you can reach for the spouse exemption before you reach for the calculator.

A worked example

Asha died last month leaving a free estate of £900,000, including her half-share of the family home worth £300,000 (her half being £150,000). Three years before her death she gave £200,000 to her son. Her husband Raj predeceased her two years ago, leaving everything to Asha and using none of his own NRB or RNRB. She leaves the residue equally to her two children.

Working through the framework:

• The lifetime gift to her son is a failed PET of £200,000. Annual exemptions reduce it slightly (current year and one carried back, subject to the order rules — verify the current annual exemption figure on the SRA materials rather than guessing).
• Asha's death estate is £900,000. The spouse exemption does not apply because Raj predeceased her.
• The failed PET is taxed first against Asha's NRB. Whatever remains of the NRB is then available against the death estate. Raj's unused NRB transfers at 100%, doubling the NRB available for Asha's estate.
• Because the family home (or her share in it) passes to her direct descendants, the RNRB is in play — plus Raj's unused RNRB, again transferred at 100%. The RNRB tapers away for estates over £2 million, so check the estate value against that threshold.
• The balance is taxed at 40%. Taper relief on the failed PET does not bite here because the gift was within three years of death.

If you can run that sequence in under three minutes, you are ready for the FLK2 IHT questions. If you can't, drill the framework on practice MCQs until the order becomes muscle memory.

Grants of representation: the procedural backbone

A grant of representation is the court order that authorises someone to deal with a deceased person's estate. FLK2 examiners want you to know three things: which grant is appropriate, who is entitled to apply, and when a grant is needed at all.

The three main grants

The order under Non-Contentious Probate Rules 20 and 22 is not the same as the intestacy order, but it broadly tracks the people who stand to benefit. Memorise the top of each list — surviving spouse, then children, then parents — and you will handle most exam questions.

When you do not need a grant

This trips up candidates who assume every estate needs probate. You generally do not need a grant where:

• assets pass by survivorship (jointly held property held as beneficial joint tenants, joint bank accounts);
• the estate consists only of small amounts that institutions will release under the Administration of Estates (Small Payments) Act 1965 (limits vary by institution); or
• nominated assets pass directly to a named beneficiary, such as a pension death benefit paid under trustee discretion.

So a fact pattern that opens with "Joan and her husband owned their flat as beneficial joint tenants" is signalling that the flat falls outside the succession estate entirely. Spot that early and the rest of the question becomes much easier.

Caveats, citations and renunciation

Three procedural devices crop up regularly in MCQs:

• Caveat — prevents a grant from being issued; useful where the will's validity is in dispute. Lasts six months, renewable.
• Citation — used to force someone with a prior right to either take the grant or step aside. Three flavours: to accept or refuse, to take probate, and to propound a will.
• Renunciation — an executor or administrator can renounce their right, but an executor who has "intermeddled" in the estate cannot renounce.

"Intermeddling" is one of those examiner-bait words. Paying a small bill of the deceased is fine; collecting rents, selling shares or writing to debtors is not. A fact pattern where the named executor has been quietly running the deceased's buy-to-let portfolio for three months is telling you she has lost the right to renounce.

How FLK2 actually tests this material

The single-best-answer format means that two or three of the five options will be plausible. Wills and Administration questions tend to lean on four recurring traps:

1. The cohabitee who gets nothing. A fact pattern about a 22-year unmarried partner is almost always testing whether you remember intestacy excludes cohabitees, and pushing you toward the 1975 Act as the alternative route.
2. The statutory legacy as a red herring. Where the estate is smaller than the statutory legacy, the spouse takes everything and the children get nothing under intestacy — even though the children "should" inherit something on a common-sense reading.
3. The failed PET that eats the NRB. Candidates who calculate IHT on the death estate first, and only then turn to the lifetime gift, get the wrong answer. Lifetime transfers come first chronologically against the NRB.
4. The joint tenancy bypass. Property held as beneficial joint tenants passes by survivorship and does not form part of the succession estate, although its value is still included in the IHT calculation. Two different questions hiding in one fact.

If you can recognise those four patterns on sight, you will pick up easy marks while less-prepared candidates burn time second-guessing.

A practical revision approach

Wills and Administration rewards drilling far more than reading. The rules are finite; the permutations the examiners can build from them are not. You need volume.

A workable approach for the last six to eight weeks before your sitting:

• Spend the first week building one-page summaries of the intestacy hierarchy, the IHT framework and the NCPR 20/22 orders. Handwrite them. The act of writing forces you to commit the order to memory in a way that highlighting a textbook never will.
• Then move into mixed practice. Do 30–40 MCQs a day across Wills, Trusts, Property and Solicitors Accounts — the FLK2 subjects sit close together in the syllabus and you want your brain switching between them the way it will have to on exam day.
• Track your wrong answers ruthlessly. The Ant Law SQE Question Bank has a wrong-answer book function precisely because the same handful of traps catch the same candidates over and over again — the only cure is to revisit them weekly until the trap stops working on you.
• In the final fortnight, sit at least two full 90-question timed practice papers under exam conditions. The point is not the score — it is to learn what 100 seconds per question actually feels like.

One observation from talking to candidates who have come through FLK2 well: the people who scored highest were not the ones who knew the most law. They were the ones who had drilled enough questions to recognise the question type within the first sentence of the stem. That kind of pattern recognition only comes from volume — there is no shortcut.

A few words on the bigger picture

It is easy to get tunnel-vision on FLK2 and forget that becoming a solicitor in England and Wales is a longer journey. SQE exam preparation is one component; the SRA also requires a qualifying degree or equivalent, two years of Qualifying Work Experience (QWE) signed off by a solicitor, and a clean character and suitability assessment. Pass rates for FLK1 and FLK2 fluctuate from sitting to sitting — check the latest published SRA report for the current figures rather than relying on percentages you saw on a forum, because the headline numbers move and the breakdown by subject moves with them.

If you are still deciding how to become a solicitor in the UK, the SQE route is more flexible than the old LPC pathway but considerably less hand-held. The reading list is yours to manage. Your question-bank discipline will, in practice, matter more than any single textbook you choose.

Ready to put the theory to work? Open the Ant Law SQE Question Bank at antlaw.ai, filter to the Wills and Administration of Estates module, and try a 30-question set focused on intestacy and IHT calculations. If a particular question stings, use the AI Legal Tutor to talk through why the wrong answer felt right — that conversation is where the real learning happens. Questions or feedback: [email protected].