Farra is a death administration assistant for UK families. Get step-by-step guidance for registering a death, applying for probate, notifying banks, and managing bereavement admin. From essential documents to practical checklists, Farra simplifies estate paperwork and funeral-related tasks so you can focus on what matters.
If the other executor has never taken out the grant, the probate registry has procedures for moving on without them, including a citation that can end their rights as executor. If you took out the grant together and they are now obstructing the administration, have lost capacity or cannot act, a personal representative or a beneficiary can ask the High Court to remove or replace them under section 50 of the Administration of Justice Act 1985. The court decides by asking what the proper administration of the estate needs, not who is at fault in a falling-out. This page describes England and Wales.
This page is for someone who is one of two or more executors named in a will, where another executor is not playing their part — they will not reply, they have lost capacity, or the two of you can no longer work together. It describes the law of England and Wales.
The first question is whether a grant of probate has been issued yet, because the answer decides which set of rules applies.
If nobody has taken out probate yet, the probate rules give you ways to move on without the other executor. These are covered in detail in our guide to an executor who is refusing to act; in outline:
A claim to remove an executor can also be brought in the High Court before any grant has issued. Practice Direction 57 provides for this: the claim is then started with the will rather than the grant (para 13.1), and any order is sent to the Principal Registry of the Family Division to be recorded until someone applies for a grant (para 14.3).
Once probate has been granted to both or all of you, the power to take one executor off the grant belongs to the court, under section 50 of the Administration of Justice Act 1985. The Court of Appeal has noted that the power "to remove and replace a personal representative" was conferred for the first time by that section (Green v Gaul [2006] EWCA Civ 1124, para 22).
On an application by or on behalf of a personal representative or a beneficiary, the High Court "may in its discretion":
Two practical points follow from the wording. First, a co-executor can make the application; you do not need a beneficiary to bring it. Second, the court cannot simply end everybody's appointment and leave the estate with no one in charge: to replace the only remaining executor, it appoints a substitute.
A substitute appointed to act alongside a remaining executor becomes an executor from the date of the appointment; in any other case the substitute becomes an administrator (s.50(2)). The court can authorise a substitute to charge for their services on terms it sets (s.50(3)), and it can treat the application as one to appoint a judicial trustee under the Judicial Trustees Act 1896 if it thinks fit (s.50(4)).
For the full picture of section 50 — including who can and cannot apply, and how it differs from the separate power to pass someone over before a grant — see our main guide to removing an executor through the court.
Section 50 contains no list of grounds. The judgments fill that gap by applying to executors the principles the courts use when removing trustees, which come from the Privy Council's decision in Letterstedt v Broers (1884). In Kershaw v Micklethwaite [2010] EWHC 506 (Ch), Newey J set those principles out for a section 50 claim:
In Kershaw itself the claim failed: the relationship between the family members had plainly broken down, but the judge found that it "need not and should not either prevent or impede substantially the administration of the estate".
So the question the court asks is not "who is to blame for the falling-out?" but "can this estate be properly administered with this person in office?". Where a co-executor has lost mental capacity, the question tends to answer itself; our guide to an executor who loses mental capacity covers that situation. Where the problem is a conflict between the co-executor's own interests and the estate's, see our guide to executor and beneficiary conflicts of interest.
The procedure is in Section IV of Part 57 of the Civil Procedure Rules and Section III of its practice direction.
The court fee. Starting proceedings for a remedy other than money is fee 1.5 in Schedule 1 to the Civil Proceedings Fees Order 2008: £663 in the High Court. It is a flat fee and does not depend on the size of the estate.
Solicitors' and barristers' fees. No official body publishes what a section 50 claim costs in legal fees, and the courts do not publish how long such claims take. Any figure quoted elsewhere is an estimate.
Time limits. In Green v Gaul the Court of Appeal held that the twelve-year limit in section 22(a) of the Limitation Act 1980 has no application to a claim to remove an administrator (para 30).
Costs are in the court's discretion. The general rule in CPR 44.2(2) is that the unsuccessful party pays the successful party's costs, but the court can make a different order, and it looks at the parties' conduct — which expressly includes whether a party "unreasonably failed to engage in alternative dispute resolution" (r.44.2(5)(e)).
A personal representative who is a party in that capacity is, as a general rule, entitled to their costs out of the estate so far as they are not paid by someone else (CPR 46.3). That entitlement covers costs "properly incurred", and Practice Direction 46 lists what the court considers: whether the personal representative obtained the court's directions first, whether they acted in the interests of the estate or for some other benefit "including the trustee's own", and whether they acted unreasonably. Paragraph 1.2 adds that a personal representative is not treated as acting for their own benefit merely because they defended a claim seeking relief against them personally.
A section 50 claim is litigation in the High Court, and the rules above mean the costs risk is real on both sides. Other routes sometimes resolve the underlying problem:
If your concern is not how the estate is being run but whether the will itself is valid, that is a different kind of claim — see our guide to contesting a will.
If the court ends a co-executor's appointment, the remaining executors carry on with the administration; if it appoints a substitute, the substitute steps in alongside them or in their place. A removed executor's duty to account for what they did while in office does not end with removal — see our guide to executor accounting to beneficiaries.
Sources
Related guides