INTRODUCTION
It is striking to see the medieval phrase ‘livery of seisin’ in the text of a Court of Appeal judgment from 2021, as happened recently in Procter v Procter – one skirmish in a long-running war of attrition between siblings as to their inheritance in a large agricultural property. Geoffrey Procter devised a set of family trusts, a partnership, and company lease arrangements of impressive complexity, to avoid capital transfer tax. As day-to-day arrangements disregarded these legal structures, it is unsurprising that when Geoffrey died his children were unable peaceably to resolve who was entitled to what in relation to ‘the farm inheritance’. The question for the court was whether A, B and C as trustees could grant a legally enforceable lease to A, B, C, D and E as beneficiaries, which, on the facts, might entitle that tenancy to protection (with significant financial consequences) under the Agricultural Holdings Act (AHA) 1986, in a scenario where one of the three Procter siblings wanted to separate and sell her share of the farm inheritance. The first instance judge held the purported lease impossible both under the Law of Property Act (LPA) 1925, because of the lack of a written instrument, and at common law, because of the overlap between landlords and tenants. The Court of Appeal was left to consider the impact of multiple legal personalities vested in one person, and leases to oneself …
€ (Westlaw)
Lorren Eldridge, ‘Leases, rocks and hard places: estates without contracts and contracts without estates’ (2023) 139 Law Quarterly Review (Apr) 290-310.
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