No surprises here. It’s the ‘squeezed middle’ who always have the biggest tax bills, alive or dead. There’s always help for ‘hard working families’ at the bottom; and those at the top end can afford the best advice and so always pay, proportionately, less. I can attest that most of my clients are in the ‘squeezed middle’, get the best advice I can give but there’s not much they can do to avoid being squeezed. And most of those being chased by HMRC over various ‘avoidance’ schemes, losing houses, marriages and often lives, are not the super rich but those who were doing OK and trying to do a bit more OK; with not-such-good advice.
“HMRC scraps plans to tax pensions after death”
A couple of other Statement Highlights (in my world, anyway). A welcome ‘nothing happened’ on the treatment of pensions on death. They were never going to be liable to IHT (too complicated with trusts and trust law) but there was talk of making them income-taxable on the recipients at whatever age you die.
