On 5 June 2026, the government launched a public consultation on inheritance rights for cohabiting partners. The consultation asks whether long-term unmarried couples — estimated at more than three million in the United Kingdom — should receive automatic or presumptive inheritance rights on intestacy, and whether the current legal position, which offers them no such rights, produces outcomes that are fair and proportionate. Responses close on 14 August 2026. Legislation, if any follows, is unlikely before 2028.
The consultation is a significant step. For most of English legal history, the Administration of Estates Act 1925 has governed who inherits when someone dies without a will, and cohabiting partners — however long-established the relationship — have occupied no named position in its hierarchy. Spouses and civil partners inherit first. Children inherit next. Cohabiting partners, in the current statutory framework, inherit nothing unless they are named in a will or can establish a proprietary claim through other means.
What the consultation proposes
The consultation explores a range of possible reforms, including a threshold period of cohabitation — commonly discussed as two or five years — after which a surviving partner could be treated as having a presumptive claim on intestacy.
Other options discussed include a right to apply to the court for reasonable financial provision, similar to the existing provision under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 but with a wider starting presumption. None of these proposals is yet law. The consultation is seeking evidence on which approach, if any, would be workable, fair, and administratively practicable.
A partner may gain rights later. They still need a route on the day.
What rights alone cannot solve
The consultation is, at its core, a question about rights. But the practical difficulty that faces a surviving cohabiting partner on the day of a death is rarely only a question of rights. It is a question of information, access, and route. Living together is not the same as being able to act for each other. The law may decide who inherits. It will not tell them where anything is.
A surviving partner who does not know the deceased's pension provider cannot file an expression of wishes dispute. A partner who cannot locate the will — or who does not know whether one exists — cannot begin the probate process.
A partner who has not been named as an authorised contact with the deceased's bank, or notified as a beneficiary on the life insurance policy, faces a sequence of individually resolvable but collectively exhausting administrative barriers, regardless of what the intestacy rules say about their entitlement.
- Pension providers require either a nomination or a probate grant to release information to a third party. A surviving partner named on no form faces the discretionary process alone.
- Property held in a single name requires a grant of probate or administration before it can be transferred. A surviving partner without access to the title deeds, mortgage details, and valuation cannot begin that process efficiently.
- Bank accounts in a sole name are frozen on death. A surviving partner with no joint account, and no formal authority, cannot access the account even to pay household bills while the estate is being administered.
- Life insurance policies pay to named beneficiaries. A policy with no named beneficiary — or an outdated one — passes through the estate. The route and the timeline are entirely different.
What a household record provides
If a consultation-driven reform could eventually give cohabiting partners proposed inheritance rights on intestacy, it could not give them the information infrastructure those rights require to function.
That infrastructure is the household record: a consolidated, current document of the financial and legal architecture of a shared life — the pension scheme, the provider, the expression of wishes; the insurance policies and their beneficiary nominations; the will, its date, its executor, its location; the property, its title number, its mortgage provider; the accounts, their institutions, their sort codes.
Valoren is that record. Not a legal service, not financial advice, and not a substitute for a will — but the operational layer that makes a will or a legal right actionable when it is needed. The consultation highlights the gap that legal reform may eventually close. It also highlights the gap that legal reform will never close: the missing infrastructure around the document, the unnamed contact, the unfiled nomination, the record nobody kept. Cohabitation reform is about rights. Valoren is about readiness.