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 lived in dread. When one of them died, the survivor would have no choice, so they believed, but to sell the house to pay inheritance tax.

They would be spared this worry if they were a married couple or same-sex civil partners. The rules were unfair to siblings. They wanted brothers and sisters to have the same standing as married couples and civil partners in respect of inheritance tax - and they fought long and hard to change the law along those lines.

estate consisting of .

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 the beginning

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.

Initially 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, registered civil partners - unmarried partners of the same sex - started enjoying the same privileges as spouses regarding IHT.

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. Although their plight has aroused widespread sympathy, 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.