Joyce and Sybil Burden

Sisters face burden of proof

“If we were lesbians we would have all the rights in the world.”

Sisters Joyce and Sybil Burden shared a house together and, even when relatively young and in good health, dreaded the day when the first of them would die. The survivor would have no choice, so they believed, but to sell the house to pay inheritance tax.

The rules, they argued, were unfair to siblings: a married couple in their position would not have to worry about selling the house, and they wanted the law to change to allow siblings to be in the same position.

In the mid-1960s, the two sisters moved back into their family home in Ogbourne St George near Marlborough, in Wiltshire. They then built a new home costing £7,000, a substantial amount at the time.

At first they shared the property with another sister, three brothers and two aunts, all of whom died.

For many years the Burden sisters were concerned about their eventual IHT dilemma: they wrote letters to the Chancellor of the Exchequer urging a change in the tax laws to allow sisters to inherit much in the way spouses inherit exempt of IHT. They sent letters every year - starting in 1976.

When change did come to the tax laws, it was not the amendment they sought. In 2004, the inheritance-tax privileges enjoyed by spouses was extended to registered civil partners - unmarried partners of the same sex. It was not extended to siblings.

They were middle-aged when they entered the fray, and by the time their case was decided by the European Court of Human Rights in April 2008, they were octogenarians (Joyce was born in 1918 and Sybil in 1926). Their assets at the time - a main house and outbuildings on 30 acres of land - came to c.£800,000

They enjoyed widespread public sympathy, primarily because of their advanced age. The European Court nevertheless voted 15-2 against them.

In her complaint about lesbians having advantages denied to siblings, Joyce was also reported as saying, “But we are sisters, and it seems we have no rights at all.”

She may have been mistaken. A number of solicitors and financial planners noted that the sisters could have solved their potential tax troubles with fairly routine tax and estate planning.