If you die without a valid will in England and Wales, you do not die without a plan. You die with the state's plan — a fixed distribution scheme under section 46 of the Administration of Estates Act 1925, applied without modification to every household that has not opted out of it by making a will. The scheme is often described as a safety net. It is better described as a specific set of rules, drafted around a specific kind of household, and applied to yours whether it fits or not.
This article summarises a Standard Index Group paper, 'Intestacy and the Modern Household' (SIG-WP-2026-09). The full paper — with the statutory detail, the case history, and the reform context — is linked at the end.
What the rules actually say
The scheme knows exactly what to do with one household: married or in a civil partnership, with children, property-simple. There, the surviving spouse or civil partner takes the personal belongings, a fixed net sum of £322,000, and half of anything beyond it — with the other half held for the children under statutory trusts. There is also a condition most people have never heard of: the survivor must outlive the deceased by 28 days to inherit at all.
If there is no spouse and no children, the estate moves down a fixed order of relatives — parents, then siblings, and onward through a list that reaches half-blood uncles and aunts before it arrives, last of all, at the Crown. Nobody on that list is chosen. They are simply next.
Who the rules leave out
The scheme is equally precise, in the way silence is precise, about everyone else. A cohabiting partner takes nothing under the intestacy rules — at any duration of the relationship. Thirty years changes nothing. A stepchild who was never formally adopted takes nothing. And a spouse you separated from twenty years ago, but never finally divorced, remains a spouse throughout: entitled to the full spousal share, and to the whole estate if you leave no children.
The survivor of a thirty-year partnership can rank behind a first cousin.
The Office for National Statistics counts 3.5 million cohabiting-couple families in the UK. For every one of them, the default rules describe a household they do not live in. A surviving partner's only route is a claim under the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975 — which means litigation rather than entitlement, and a maintenance standard rather than a share. That is a court case, in grief, to receive part of what a will could have given outright.
Reform is proposed — and nothing has changed yet
A Ministry of Justice consultation, open as the paper was written, proposes — for the second time in fifteen years — to change the position, with the Government stating it is minded to give qualifying cohabitants the same intestacy rights as spouses. It is a consultation, not a law. Nothing has changed yet, and any change is years away. The paper also records how the fixed sum itself has been managed: a House of Lords committee found the 2023 increase to £322,000 was made months later than the statute required — at an identifiable cost to the families who fell in between.
What this means in practice
The intestacy scheme is the default you are opted into today. The only instrument that overrides it is a valid will — the single document that lets you name the partner the statute cannot see, the stepchild it does not recognise, and exclude the separated spouse it still counts. Making a will through Valoren starts from your actual household — who you are, what you own, who needs protecting — and the will follows from that.
This article summarises SIG-WP-2026-09, 'Intestacy and the Modern Household' (Joel Patterson, July 2026), DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21219295 — linked below. Applies to England and Wales. This article is for information only.