Urgent help please. Eldery parent kicked out family home.

My friend is in her late 70s and she and her husband have lived in a family home with her son, his wife and 2 kids for 15 years. They have their own lounge, bathroom and bedroom but share a kitchen. During a family argument in the garden my friend was suddenly kicked out the house with zero notice. In otherwords, they locked her out and managed to get her house keys. The son told her to leave there and then and she was not welcome. There is no formal.agreement in place regarding renting, my friend and her husband used to own the house and they sold it to the son, then paid upfront a very large amount of money to him, (inheritence in advance) with the verbal agreement that they could live there for the rest of their lives. My friend contributes her share of the household bills and half of all maintenence and repairs. She is now sleeping in her car. Can anybody advise where she stands legally? All her worldly possessions are in the house and the family have told her to tell them what she wants and they will put it outside for her to collect.

This seems very similar to a new thread elsewhere, but the details are subtly different, in that in that thread, the parent contributes to bills and maintenance.
https://forums.landlordzone.co.uk/forum/residential-letting-questions/1204311-evicting-elderly-parent-from-family-home

Why not just sign the ownership over to the son to avoid inheritance tax and have a written agreement re.rights to remain living there? I would think that the solicitor would have been obliged to warn of the pitfalls involved.

The whole arrangement makes no sense, because as it's been done, there's no way of avoiding inheritance tax anyway.

You can't gift something to someone and stay living there without paying market rent - it simply stays in the mother's estate for IHT (if IHT is an issue).
The sensible move would probably have been to become joint owners (mother and son) and then there wouldn't have been this problem and the IHT is probably reduced as well.

If the mother occupied a specific part of the property and paid for maintenance and utilities, it's probable she's an excluded occupier and possible that she's a tenant. It helps her position quite a lot.

My friend's Dad had to go into a care home.He signed his house over to her,on the understanding that his long-term partner stayed there until her death.This was the case for several years.She paid her own bills,but no rent.Was this also breaking the law then,or did the fact that they were not married make it ok?
 It seems like a grey area,I think it is allowed in some countries like France.

It's not breaking the law, it's a matter of what inheritance tax is due.

If you give something away, after seven years it's no longer part of your estate for inheritance tax purposes.
But if you don't really give it away (technically if you do it with some kind of reservation) it stays as part of your estate (even if you don't own it - which can be very awkward if there's some tax for the estate to pay and there's not enough in the estate any more).
When someone gives their home away, but carries on living there rent free, they haven't really given it away, so it remains in their estate for tax purposes.

The situation you describe is clearly a reservation, but it shouldn't be an issue for tax - the beneficiary isn't the person making the gift (unless there's a lot of other complicating factors).

Problems tend to arise when the "understanding" (which tends to be unwritten because people are scared of tax issues) breaks down.

Again, an alternative approach might have been to gift the property to both the daughter and the partner as joint owners, but that does introduce an issue if the daughter dies before the daughter and has a will that could divert the property away from the family.