Intestacy, IHT and Grants of Representation: An FLK2 Survival Guide

Ask any FLK2 sitter which subject quietly drains their marks, and a surprising number will point to Wills and the Administration of Estates. Not because the law is impossibly hard — it isn't — but because three separate machines are running at once. The intestacy rules decide who inherits. Inheritance tax decides how much the Revenue takes first. And the grant of representation decides who has legal authority to deal with any of it. Confuse those three jobs, and a perfectly answerable question turns into a guessing game.

So let's slow it down and treat each machine separately, then bolt them back together with a worked example. By the end you should be able to read a death-and-estate fact pattern and instantly know which question is actually being asked.

Intestacy: who inherits when there's no valid will

Intestacy applies where a person dies without a valid will, or where a will fails to dispose of the whole estate (a partial intestacy). The distribution follows a fixed statutory order — there's no discretion, no fairness override, no "but they were estranged". The rules don't care about feelings. They care about categories.

The single fact that drives everything is whether there's a surviving spouse or civil partner. Note the precision there: cohabitees, however devoted and however long-standing, take nothing on intestacy. This is a favourite trap. The fact pattern gives you a loving partner of fifteen years and no marriage certificate, and the tempting wrong answer hands them the house.

Surviving spouse plus issue

Where the deceased leaves a spouse or civil partner and issue (children, grandchildren and so on), the estate is carved up like this:

• The spouse takes the personal chattels absolutely.
• The spouse takes a statutory legacy — a fixed sum, free of tax and costs, plus interest from the date of death. This figure is periodically uprated, so confirm the current amount rather than trusting a number you half-remember.
• The remaining residue is split in two: the spouse takes one half absolutely, and the issue take the other half on the statutory trusts.

"Statutory trusts" simply means the children take in equal shares contingent on reaching 18 (or marrying earlier), and if a child has already died leaving children of their own, those grandchildren step into the deceased child's shoes and share that slice between them. That substitution principle — per stirpes — gets tested constantly.

Surviving spouse, no issue

This is the one people get wrong because they over-complicate it. If there's a spouse and no issue, the spouse takes the entire estate absolutely. There used to be a more elaborate rule sharing the estate with the deceased's parents or siblings; that's gone. Spouse, no children, the lot goes to the spouse. Don't invent a split that no longer exists.

No surviving spouse at all

Where there is no spouse or civil partner, the estate passes down a strict order of priority. Each category only inherits if there is nobody in the category above. The headline order:

1. Issue (on the statutory trusts)
2. Parents
3. Brothers and sisters of the whole blood (and their issue)
4. Brothers and sisters of the half blood (and their issue)
5. Grandparents
6. Uncles and aunts of the whole blood (and their issue)
7. Uncles and aunts of the half blood (and their issue)
8. The Crown (bona vacantia) if nobody above survives

The examiner's trick here is to populate the family tree with one living parent and three devoted siblings, then ask who inherits. The siblings get nothing — the surviving parent sits higher in the queue and scoops the whole estate. Read the hierarchy as gates: you only reach the next gate if the one before is empty.

Inheritance tax: just enough to answer the question

FLK2 doesn't expect you to be a private-client tax partner. It expects you to know the architecture: what's in the estate, what's exempt, which reliefs and allowances apply, and roughly how the charge is calculated. Get the structure right and the maths usually follows.

IHT bites on the value transferred on death, but you don't tax the whole thing at the headline rate from pound one. Two ideas do most of the heavy lifting.

The nil rate band and the residence nil rate band

Every estate has a nil rate band — a slice taxed at 0%. Anything above it is, broadly, taxed at the death rate. On top of that sits the residence nil rate band, an additional allowance available where a home (or its value) is left to direct descendants such as children or grandchildren. The residence allowance also tapers away once an estate exceeds a high threshold, which is exactly the sort of detail an examiner loves to slip into a question about a wealthy testator.

Because these thresholds and taper figures are set by statute and can change, treat any number in your memory as provisional and check the current position before you rely on it. The exam tests the mechanism — when each band applies and to whom — far more often than it tests an arithmetic result to the nearest pound.

Transferable allowances and the key exemptions

Two reliefs come up again and again:

• The transferable nil rate band. When the first spouse or civil partner dies and doesn't use all of their nil rate band, the unused percentage can be claimed by the estate of the survivor. So a widow's estate may have access to more than one band's worth of relief. Spotting this depends on noticing that the first death left everything to the spouse — which itself was exempt.
• The spouse/civil partner exemption. Transfers between spouses and civil partners are generally exempt without limit. This is why a straightforward "everything to my husband" will often produces no IHT on the first death at all.

Add the charity exemption (gifts to qualifying charities are exempt, and leaving a large enough slice to charity can reduce the rate on the rest of the estate), plus the rules on potentially exempt transfers made in the seven years before death, and you have most of what FLK2 throws at you. The seven-year clock is a classic: a generous lifetime gift made well before death may fall out of charge entirely, while one made shortly before death drags back into the calculation.

The exam rarely asks "what is the tax bill?" It asks "which allowance applies, to whom, and why" — and rewards the candidate who can see the structure before reaching for a calculator.

Grants of representation: who gets the authority

A grant of representation is the court's confirmation of the person entitled to administer the estate. Without it, banks won't release funds, land can't be transferred, and the personal representatives can't safely do their job. The type of grant depends on one thing: is there a valid will, and does it appoint someone willing and able to act?

The three grants you must distinguish

The distinction between an executor and an administrator matters more than candidates expect. An executor derives authority from the will itself and, in principle, from the moment of death — the grant of probate confirms what already exists. An administrator's authority, by contrast, only arises when the grant is issued. That difference can be the entire point of a question about acts taken before the grant.

The order of priority for administrators

Where letters of administration (with or without a will) are needed, the people entitled to apply follow a set order, broadly mirroring who benefits. On a total intestacy, the surviving spouse or civil partner ranks first, then children, and so on down a line that closely tracks the intestacy entitlement itself. The neat logical link to hold onto: the person with the biggest interest in the estate is usually first in line to administer it.

Putting it together: a worked example

Let's run a single fact pattern through all three machines, because that's exactly how FLK2 tends to present it.

The facts. Priya dies suddenly. She never made a will. She is survived by her husband, Sam; their two adult children, Aisha and Reuben; and her elderly mother. Priya's estate, after debts, is worth substantially more than the statutory legacy. There is a family home in her sole name and a portfolio of investments. Sam is alive, capable, and willing to deal with the estate.

Step one — who inherits? Priya died intestate with a surviving spouse and issue. So Sam takes the personal chattels, the statutory legacy with interest, and half the residue absolutely. Aisha and Reuben share the other half of the residue on the statutory trusts — and as they're both adults, the contingency is already satisfied. Priya's mother, despite being alive, takes nothing: she sits below the spouse and issue in the order, and those categories are occupied. The estranged-relative trap, in reverse.

Step two — what about IHT? The portion passing to Sam is covered by the spouse exemption, so that slice escapes charge on this death. The children's half is potentially chargeable, but the nil rate band applies, and because the home passes in a way connected to direct descendants you'd consider whether the residence nil rate band is in play. Note also what's been banked for the future: if Priya's nil rate band isn't fully used because so much passed exempt to Sam, the unused percentage may later be claimed by Sam's estate. A well-drafted question often rewards you for flagging that downstream benefit.

Step three — who administers it? No will, so this is a full intestacy: the grant required is letters of administration. Sam, as surviving spouse and the person with the primary beneficial interest, ranks first in the order of priority to apply as administrator. His authority crystallises on the grant, not at the moment of death — a point worth remembering if the examiner asks whether he could validly sell an asset the week after Priya died.

Three machines, one fact pattern. Once you train yourself to ask "inheritance, tax, or authority?" at the start of every question, the noise drops away.

How this is actually tested — and how to revise it

FLK2 is one of the two SQE1 assessments alongside FLK1, and like its sibling it's a single-best-answer paper. Across the two FLK papers you're examined on thirteen functioning legal knowledge subjects, and Wills and the Administration of Estates is one of FLK2's six. The questions here are rarely about reciting a rule in the abstract. They drop you into a family with messy facts and ask you to apply the right rule to the right person — which is precisely why passive reading fails so many candidates.

A few habits that tend to move the needle:

• Draw the family tree. Every time. Even a scrappy one. The number of marks lost to misreading "half-sibling" as "sibling" is genuinely depressing.
• Separate the three questions before answering. Decide whether the stem is testing entitlement, tax or grant. They feel similar; they reward different knowledge.
• Drill exemptions, not just rates. The spouse exemption, charity exemption and transferable nil rate band appear far more often than precise arithmetic.
• Practise under timing. The discipline of single-best-answer questions is unforgiving — you commit to one option and move on. Build that reflex now, not in the exam hall.

This is the kind of topic where doing hundreds of varied questions beats re-reading your notes a fourth time. Working through subject-tagged single-best-answer questions in the Ant Law SQE Question Bank lets you isolate intestacy and grants until the family-tree reflex is automatic, and the wrong-answer book quietly surfaces the distinctions you keep tripping over — usually the cohabitee, the half-blood sibling, or the administrator's authority timing. When a particular IHT calculation refuses to click, the in-app tutor can talk you through the steps rather than leaving you stuck on a single explanation.

One last word on accuracy. Tax thresholds, statutory legacy sums and the like get uprated from time to time, and SQE logistics — sitting windows, fees, the format details — are exactly the sort of thing that drifts out of date. For the current position on the assessment itself, the authoritative source is always sqe.sra.org.uk; for tax figures, confirm against current guidance rather than a number you've memorised. The mechanism is what earns the marks. The exact figure is what you look up.

Ready to put this into practice? Build a short FLK2 session on intestacy and grants, force yourself to draw the tree for every question, and review your misses the same day. You can run that workflow on real, syllabus-aligned questions at antlaw.ai — the fastest way to turn "I sort of know the order of priority" into "I can answer this in under ninety seconds."