Wills and Administration of Estates: Intestacy, IHT and Grants for FLK2

Here is the uncomfortable truth about Wills and the Administration of Estates: the law itself is not conceptually hard, but the SQE1 questions are ruthless about detail. You either know the intestacy order and the exact statutory legacy figure, or you don't. There is no partial credit for "roughly the spouse gets most of it". This is a subject where a candidate who has revised properly answers a question in forty seconds, and a candidate who half-revised sits there constructing a family tree in the margin and burning three minutes they didn't have.

So let's treat it the way the assessment does — as a set of mechanical rules you apply cleanly under time pressure. This sits in FLK2, alongside Property Practice, Wills, Solicitors Accounts, Land Law, Trusts and Criminal Law and Practice. And of those thirteen SQE1 subjects across FLK1 and FLK2, Wills is one of the highest-yield to nail early, because the marks are so gettable if you're disciplined.

Intestacy: the order that must be automatic

Intestacy applies where someone dies without a valid will, or where a will fails to dispose of the whole estate (a partial intestacy). The rules are statutory, they are fixed, and the examiner loves them precisely because they reward candidates who have memorised the ladder rather than reasoned towards a fair outcome. Fairness is irrelevant. The statute decides.

Start with the single most important distinction: is there a surviving spouse or civil partner, and are there issue (children, grandchildren, and so on down the line)? Everything flows from that.

Spouse plus issue

Where the deceased leaves a spouse or civil partner and issue, the estate is carved up. The spouse takes the personal chattels absolutely. The spouse then takes a fixed statutory legacy — a set cash sum — plus interest on it from death until payment. Whatever residue remains after that is split in two: half to the spouse absolutely, and half held on the statutory trusts for the issue.

The statutory legacy figure is periodically uprated by the government, so commit the mechanism to memory rather than betting your marks on a number that may have moved. If a question turns on the precise sum, the sensible revision habit is to confirm the current figure against an authoritative source rather than trusting a half-remembered total from an old textbook. The concept — chattels, then fixed legacy, then a 50/50 split of the residue — is what you must be able to reproduce instantly.

Spouse, no issue

Where there is a spouse or civil partner but no issue, the spouse takes the entire estate absolutely. Simple. This changed some years ago — under the older regime other relatives could claim a slice — and a poorly-prepared candidate who half-remembers the old position will get this wrong. Under the current rules: no issue, spouse scoops the lot.

No surviving spouse

If there is no surviving spouse or civil partner, you work down the statutory order, and the estate passes to the first category that contains a living member, held on the statutory trusts:

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, as bona vacantia, if nobody above survives.

Two traps hide in that list. First, the "statutory trusts" mean a beneficiary must reach 18 (or marry earlier) to take a vested interest — until then their share is contingent. Second, the per stirpes principle: if a member of a class has died before the deceased but left issue, those issue step into their parent's shoes and share what the parent would have taken. That's how a predeceased child's own children inherit.

The survivorship and cohabitation traps

A surviving spouse must survive the deceased by 28 days to inherit on intestacy. Miss that and the estate is distributed as though the spouse had not survived at all — which can completely redraw who inherits.

And the one that catches people with a pulse of common sense: an unmarried partner has no entitlement under the intestacy rules, however long the relationship. None. Their only route is a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 — a separate mechanism, not part of the distribution ladder. If a fact pattern lovingly describes a devoted partner of twenty years and no marriage, the intestacy answer gives them nothing.

The intestacy rules do not reward affection, cohabitation or moral desert. They reward legal status and the correct order of classes. Answer them like a machine, not like a family friend.

Inheritance tax: the moving parts you actually need

Inheritance tax (IHT) frightens candidates more than it should, because it looks like accountancy. For FLK2 you are not preparing a full IHT computation to HMRC standard — you are demonstrating that you understand the structure: what is taxed, at what rate, and which reliefs and exemptions reduce the bill.

IHT bites in three situations: on death (the death estate), on certain lifetime transfers made within seven years of death, and on transfers into and out of relevant property trusts. Most SQE questions live in the first two.

The nil rate band and residence nil rate band

Every estate has a nil rate band (NRB) — a threshold below which IHT is charged at 0%. Above it, the standard death rate applies. There is also an additional residence nil rate band (RNRB), available where a qualifying residential interest is left to direct descendants, though it tapers away for larger estates. The precise NRB and RNRB figures, the taper threshold and the death rate are the kind of numbers that get uprated or frozen by government policy, so verify the current values rather than reciting them from memory. What you must understand cold is the order of operations: exemptions and reliefs first, then apply the nil rate bands, then tax the balance.

Transferable nil rate band between spouses

Transfers between spouses and civil partners are generally exempt. And where the first spouse to die does not use all of their NRB, the unused proportion can be transferred to the survivor's estate — potentially doubling the available band on the second death. That transferable NRB is a favourite examiner device: a widow dies, and the question quietly tells you her late husband left everything to her years earlier, meaning his NRB went entirely unused and is available to her estate as a percentage uplift.

Exemptions and reliefs worth memorising

• Spouse/civil partner exemption — transfers between them are exempt (subject to a limit where the recipient is non-UK domiciled).
• Charity exemption — gifts to qualifying charities are exempt, and a large enough charitable gift can reduce the death rate on the rest of the estate.
• Annual exemption — a modest yearly allowance for lifetime gifts, with one year's unused allowance capable of being carried forward one year.
• Small gifts, gifts on marriage, normal expenditure out of income — smaller lifetime exemptions that pop up in lifetime-transfer questions.
• Business Property Relief and Agricultural Property Relief — relieve qualifying business and agricultural assets, sometimes at 100%, sometimes at 50%.

PETs, LCTs and the seven-year shadow

A gift to another individual is a potentially exempt transfer (PET): no IHT if the donor survives seven years, but it drops back into charge if they die within that window. A gift into most trusts is a lifetime chargeable transfer (LCT), potentially taxed at the point it is made. Where death occurs between three and seven years after a failed PET, taper relief reduces the tax due — note carefully, it reduces the tax, not the value of the transfer. Candidates routinely apply taper to the wrong figure and lose the mark.

A worked example

Take Priya. She dies leaving an estate of £600,000. Four years before death she gave her son £50,000 in cash. She left £20,000 to a registered charity in her will, and the rest to her son. Her late husband, who died several years earlier, left his entire estate to her.

Working it through in the right order: the £50,000 cash gift was a PET, and because Priya died within seven years it becomes chargeable — but it is set against her nil rate band first (after any annual exemptions). The £20,000 charitable gift is exempt and comes straight out. Her husband's unused NRB is available to transfer to her estate as a percentage uplift, because his estate passed spouse-exempt and used none of his own band. You would then apply the combined nil rate bands to the taxable estate and tax only the excess at the death rate. You don't need me to plug in figures that shift with each Budget — but you absolutely need to be able to sequence those steps without hesitation. That sequencing is exactly what a strong FLK2 question tests.

Grant of representation: the authority to act

Once someone has died, someone has to actually gather in the assets, pay the debts and tax, and distribute what's left. The grant of representation is the court document confirming that authority. Which grant you need depends on whether there is a valid will, and whether the named executors are willing and able to act.

Distinguish clearly between an executor (named in the will, deriving authority from the will itself, with the grant merely confirming it) and an administrator (deriving authority only from the grant). It matters: an executor's power runs from death, whereas an administrator can do very little until the grant issues. Questions test this by asking what a person may lawfully do before the grant is obtained.

Who is entitled to apply

Where there is a will but no executor, entitlement to a grant of letters of administration with will annexed follows a defined order of priority — broadly starting with any residuary beneficiary. On a full intestacy, entitlement tracks the intestacy beneficiaries themselves: the surviving spouse or civil partner first, then children, and so on down a list that mirrors the distribution order. The logic is intuitive once you see it — the people who stand to inherit are the people trusted to administer.

The IHT account and the payment problem

Before a grant issues, the personal representatives (PRs) generally have to deal with HMRC — reporting the estate and, where tax is due, paying it. There is a genuine chicken-and-egg problem baked into the system: IHT is often payable before the grant issues, yet the PRs cannot readily access the deceased's funds to pay it without the grant. Candidates should know the practical routes around this — for instance, certain instalment options for assets like land, and mechanisms allowing tax to be paid directly from the deceased's bank accounts. You won't be asked to draft the account, but you may well be asked which assets qualify for payment by instalments, or the consequence of PRs distributing before liabilities are settled.

PRs' duties and personal liability

PRs must collect the assets, pay the debts and tax, and distribute to the correct beneficiaries. Get that last part wrong and the liability is personal. A PR who distributes to the wrong person, or before ascertaining all liabilities, can be personally on the hook — which is why the protective steps (statutory advertisements for creditors, searches, and in tricky cases a court application) exist. If a question describes a PR paying out to residuary beneficiaries while a possible creditor or a 1975 Act claimant lurks in the facts, the examiner is steering you towards personal liability and the protections that guard against it.

How to revise this so it actually sticks

Wills rewards a specific study rhythm, and it is not "read the chapter twice and hope". The rules are interlocking but discrete, which makes them perfect for active recall and spaced repetition rather than passive re-reading.

A few habits that pay off:

• Draw the intestacy ladder from memory, cold, once a day for a week. If you can reproduce the eight-tier order and the spouse-plus-issue split without looking, you've banked a cluster of near-guaranteed marks.
• Practise the IHT order of operations, not just the reliefs in isolation. Exemptions, then nil rate bands, then tax the balance. Most errors are sequencing errors, not knowledge gaps.
• Build a one-page grid matching each factual scenario (will/no will, executor willing/unwilling) to the correct grant. Then test yourself against short fact patterns until the mapping is automatic.
• Interleave Wills with Trusts and Solicitors Accounts. The statutory trusts on intestacy, and the accounting for estate money, cross over — revising them near each other builds the connections the exam probes.

This is exactly the kind of topic where a well-tagged question bank earns its keep. Reading about the transferable NRB is one thing; being fed twenty single-best-answer questions that each twist one variable — an unused band here, a failed PET there, a cohabiting partner as a decoy — is what converts recognition into reliable recall. The Ant Law SQE Question Bank tags questions down to sub-topic level, so you can drill "intestacy distribution" or "grant of representation" specifically rather than wading through a mixed set, and its wrong-answer book quietly builds a personalised list of the exact traps you keep falling for. For a subject this detail-heavy, that targeting matters more than raw volume.

Where this fits in the bigger picture

Wills and the Administration of Estates is one subject within FLK2, and FLK2 is one of the two SQE1 assessments — each 180 single-best-answer questions, each sat in two sessions of 2 hours 33 minutes. Passing SQE1 is one milestone on the road to qualifying as a solicitor in England and Wales. Beyond it sit SQE2's five practical skills, a qualifying degree or equivalent, two years of Qualifying Work Experience (QWE), and the SRA's character and suitability requirements. It is a long path, and the candidates who cope best are the ones who break it into subjects they can genuinely master rather than a single terrifying mountain.

Pass rates for SQE1 tend to hover around the half-way mark, though the published figure moves between sittings — read the current SRA assessment reports for the exact position rather than trusting any number you saw quoted last year. What those reports consistently show is that candidates who practise under realistic timing outperform those who only read. Wills is a subject where that gap is stark: it is fast marks for the prepared and slow agony for everyone else.

For the authoritative position on fees, sitting dates, booking windows and the assessment specification, always go to sqe.sra.org.uk — that is the single source of truth, and it is where you should confirm anything time-sensitive before you rely on it.

Your practical next step: pick one strand from this article — the intestacy ladder is the obvious candidate — and drill it to the point of boredom this week, then move to IHT sequencing and grants. When you're ready to test whether it has actually stuck under exam timing, run a set of tagged FLK2 questions on the Ant Law SQE Question Bank at antlaw.ai, and let the wrong-answer book show you where the real gaps are. That feedback loop, repeated, is how this subject turns from a worry into a reliable source of marks.