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WILLS · ARTICLE
By Mira, Content Lead · Reviewed by Sean F Godson, Estate Planner · 6 min read
Most people in the UK assume that if anything happened to them, the law would do roughly what they would have wanted. The spouse inherits. The children inherit. The partner is looked after. The family home stays in the family.
It is one of the most widespread, and most damaging, assumptions in British estate planning.
Here is what UK law actually does if you die without a Will.
If you die without a valid Will, the Intestacy Rules apply. They are a fixed legal formula, written in the 1925 Administration of Estates Act and updated since. They do not ask what you would have wanted. They follow a strict hierarchy.
In England and Wales:
If you are married or in a civil partnership and have children — your spouse or civil partner inherits your personal possessions, the first £322,000 of your estate, and then half of anything above that. The other half is divided equally between your children.
If you are married or in a civil partnership and have no children — your spouse or civil partner inherits everything.
If you are unmarried and not in a civil partnership — your partner inherits nothing. Regardless of how long you have been together. Regardless of children. Regardless of shared homes, shared finances, or shared lives. The Intestacy Rules do not recognise unmarried partners at all.
If you have stepchildren, foster children, or chosen family — they inherit nothing automatically. Only biological and legally adopted children count.
If you have no surviving spouse, civil partner, or children — your estate passes to your parents. If none, your siblings. If none, your grandparents. If none, your aunts and uncles. And if none of those — your entire estate passes to the Crown.
Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own intestacy regimes, which differ from the rules above in important ways.
A specific note for unmarried couples, because this myth is one of the most persistent in British life. There is no such thing as a common law marriage in English or Welsh law. No matter how long you have lived together. No matter how many children you have. No matter how much you have built jointly.
If you are unmarried and your partner dies without a Will, you have no automatic right to anything they owned. You may be able to apply under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 — a slow, expensive, court-based process with no guaranteed outcome. That is the only route.
For parents of children under 18, the gap that matters most has nothing to do with money. It is the guardianship gap.
A Will is the only place you can legally name who would look after your children if something happened to both parents. Without it, the family court decides. The court will consider your wishes if they can be evidenced, but the formal authority to choose belongs to a judge, not to you.
If you have specific people in mind — siblings, friends, family members who genuinely understand your children — and you have not named them in a Will, you have no legal authority over that decision.
Without a Will, your family cannot apply for probate. They have to apply for Letters of Administration instead — a more cumbersome process. The administrators are determined by the same Intestacy Rules — they may not be the people you would have chosen.
While the application is being processed, bank accounts in your sole name are frozen. The family home may be subject to delays before any sale or transfer can happen. Pension nominations that were never made or were left out of date may default to your estate and trigger Inheritance Tax that could have been avoided.
The cruelty of intestacy is not the cost or the time. It is the complete preventability of all of it.
In plain English, a Will does four things. It names who inherits what. It chooses who looks after your children if you cannot. It appoints the people you trust to administer your estate when the moment comes. And it puts your specific wishes on the record so they actually get followed.
It is, on its own, the foundation of any UK estate plan. It is not the whole plan — for many UK families a Will sits alongside a Trust, a Lasting Power of Attorney, life insurance written in Trust, and a clear pension nomination. But it is the first document. The starting point. The most basic act of love that the majority of UK adults have never put in place.
We do not just draft Wills. We have the conversations the Intestacy Rules cannot. Who you trust. Who depends on you. What you would want for the people who love you most. The structure follows from the relationships, not the other way around.
This is what Trust First means on a Will. The legal kind of trust — the document properly drafted, witnessed, and stored. And the relational kind — the conversations that mean your family knows what you wanted and why.
We do both. Every time.
WHAT TO DO NEXT
If you do not currently have a Will in place, the Free Legacy Review is the simplest place to begin. A few minutes of your time. We look at where you stand, identify what your family actually needs, and tell you the cost in plain English before you sign anything.
FREQUENTLY ASKED
No. The two LPAs are entirely separate legal authorities under UK law. A Property and Financial Affairs LPA only authorises money and property decisions. It gives your attorneys no authority over your medical treatment, your care arrangements, or where you live. If you want anyone to have legal authority over those decisions, you need a Health and Welfare LPA as a separate document.
Yes, in most cases. Being married does not give your spouse automatic legal authority to make decisions for you if you lose capacity. This is one of the biggest misconceptions about UK law. Without LPAs, your spouse would have to apply to the Court of Protection — a process that takes months and costs £1,500 to £2,500 in court and legal fees. Joint accounts can be frozen as soon as the bank realises one signatory has lost capacity. Two LPAs are the only way to ensure your spouse can keep your financial and care life running smoothly.
In our experience, families regret missing the Property and Financial Affairs LPA most often, because the financial freeze hits within days of capacity loss and the Court of Protection process is long and expensive. But families who lose someone after a long medical decline often regret missing the Health and Welfare LPA more deeply — because they could not advocate for the care their loved one would have wanted. Both regrets are common. Both are avoidable.
Yes. The two LPAs are entirely separate documents, and you can name different attorneys, different replacements, and different decision-making arrangements on each. A common setup is a spouse plus an adult child on the Property and Financial Affairs LPA, with a spouse plus a different relative who shares your care views on the Health and Welfare LPA. You can also choose different activation timing rules (Property and Financial LPAs can be set to activate immediately on registration or only on capacity loss; Health and Welfare LPAs can only ever activate on capacity loss).
If you discover after registration that you have only one LPA and need both, you simply register the second one. It is a separate application with its own £92 OPG fee. There is no penalty or correction process — they are independent documents. The cost of "getting the wrong one" is mostly the time and money you spend on the second registration, plus the fact that during the eight to twelve weeks the second LPA is being processed, you remain exposed in the half of your life that LPA covers.
Yes. The Property and Financial Affairs LPA can be set to activate either when registered (with your consent, while you have capacity) or only when capacity is lost — you choose at the time of signing. The Health and Welfare LPA can only ever activate when capacity is lost; UK law does not allow it to be used while you can still make decisions for yourself. So in practice your Property and Financial Affairs LPA can be operating actively for many years while the Health and Welfare LPA sits dormant until needed.
KEEP READING
OPG registration fee, professional fees, fee reductions, and what cheap LPAs really cost.
Lasting Power of AttorneyCourt of Protection process, costs, timeline.
Lasting Power of AttorneyOPG timelines and what slows things down.
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