Straughn: Family disputes over inherited property holding back development

Disputes among relatives over inherited homes and land are holding back the development of families, the minister of finance, Ryan Straughn, has told Parliament, urging older people to make wills and settle succession plans before they die.

As the House of Assembly debated the Older Persons (Care and Protection) Bill on Tuesday, he said one of the challenges in society was that financial matters were not discussed within families, creating confusion when a relative died.

He said: “We don’t like to talk about these things in families. And I think one of the very things that bedevils families is the difficulty that some of us may have with making the decision as to who to leave the property to and these are things that create some angst.”

Noting that the government had introduced the deed of gift mechanism to help families with the transition of ownership, and was finalising arrangements for reverse mortgages, Straughn called for more aggressive education about these and other financial opportunities so that older people could take advantage of them.

“We do not want to see the hard work of older persons, whether it is the family home, whether it is the acre of land that is available to come into production, that they end up in a non-productive state, such that they become potentially public nuisances at worst, but perhaps worse than that, is brothers and sisters fighting over what to do with the property, because that type of dysfunction is really not healthy for a society. 

“And therefore we really must encourage our elderly population that either through the process of making a will and those types of things, to actually make a decision as to who will take on the responsibility for these assets such that there’s an orderly process with respect to how these things are discharged because the one thing I would say that has held back the development of a number of families in this country is the failure of us creating an ecosystem that allows for some of these things to happen in a much seamless way.”

The finance minister also stressed that, in the context of providing care for elderly people, the use of some of their assets would help in their standard of care while they were still alive.

(JB)