Concurrent Interest in UK Law

Joint tenancy is a form of co-ownership, or concurrent ownership, of property. Its special feature is the right of survivorship, whereby the right to the whole of the property accrues automatically to the surviving joint tenants or joint tenant on the death of any one joint tenant. Severance is, as I understand it, the process of separating off the share of a joint tenant, so that the concurrent ownership will continue but the right of survivorship will no longer apply.

The second is that I know of no power that the Court has under section 17 to vary agreed or established titles to property.

It might in exceptional circumstances be inferred that the parties agreed to alter their beneficial interests after the house was bought; an example would be if the man bought the house in the first place and the woman years later used a legacy to build an extra floor to make more room for the children. In such circumstances the obvious inference would be that the parties agreed that the woman should acquire a share in the greatly increased value of the house produced by her money.

If afreehold is conveyed to and upon trust for themselves as joint tenants, each has the same beneficial interest in that property as the. If there be two beneficial joint tenants, severance produces a beneficial tenancy in common in two equal shares. and by declaration of the beneficial joint tenancy between and B, their respective rights and titles are no less clearly laid down and established than if there had been a declaration of a beneficial tenancy in common in equal undivided shares.

The action of giving notice to determine a periodic tenancy is in form positive; but both on authority and on the principle so aptly summed up in the pithy Scottish phrase "tacit relocation" the substance of the matter is that it is by his omission to give notice of termination that each party signifies the necessary positive assent to the extension of the term for a further period.

If any clause such as clause 27 was valid landlords might well insist upon a similar clause being introduced into every lease; and prospective tenants, having no money with which to buy the land they wanted to farm, would, in reality, have had little choice but to agree. Accordingly if clause 27 is enforceable the security of tenure which Parliament clearly intended to confer, and did confer upon tenant farmers for the public good would have become a dead letter.

It seems to me that the jurisdiction of the Court over family assets under Section 17 is entirely discretionary. Its discretion transcends all rights, legal or equitable, and enables the Court to make such order as it thinks fit. This means, as I understand it, that the Court is entitled to make such order as appears to be fair and just in all the circumstances of the case.