5 Succession limited to close relatives

8.16 The policy underlying the succession provisions is to allow succession by only close relatives of the deceased tenant who have worked on the holding, and who have no other substantial agricultural concerns on which to rely.

This is reflected in the eligibility rules that an applicant has to satisfy before he can be considered eligible for the grant of a tenancy under the Act (see below). In all cases, however, it is a fundamental prerequisite that the applicant be a ‘close relative’ of the deceased tenant.³⁸ The 1986 Act (as amended) provides that the applicant must be either the wife husband or civil partner³⁹ of the deceased tenant, his brother or sister, his child, or ‘a child of the family’, viz. ‘any person who, in the case of any marriage or civil partnership to which the deceased was at any time a party, was treated by the deceased as a child of the family in relation to that marriage or civil partnership’. This definition is somewhat restrictive in scope. There is no relaxation in favour of divorce, and succession rights will cease to apply for a spouse or civil partner on the grant of a decree absolute. More problematically, the restrictive definition of a ‘child of the family’ could lead to hardship in some cases. An unmarried tenant, for instance, could not pass on his tenancy to an adoptive child. Semble, neither could a grandparent to a grandchild whose parents have predeceased. A person contracting a civil partnership with the tenant will, however, be treated as a close relative for these purposes and a child can be treated as a child of the family in relation to a civil partnership.

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Source: Rodgers Christopher. Agricultural Law. Bloomsbury Publishing,2016. — 914 p.. 2016

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