In my experience, some worry too much about Inheritance Tax, others not enough. Most married couples who own their own home have a £1m allowance and even with ‘soaring house prices’, a majority fall below the limit. The allowances, however, have been frozen, and many of the extras, the £3,000 you can give away each year and £250 for gifts to as many different people as you wish, haven’t changed for nearly 40 years. Indeed, the main allowances haven’t changed since 2009, and would be 40% higher had they kept pace with inflation (yes, that’s how much 14 years-worth is even at low rates!) The IHT rules are an extremely tangled web already, and of course those whom the original ‘Death Duties’ were established to hit, the landed gentry and super-rich, have always been pretty adept at avoiding most forms of tax. And so, yes, it’s the squeezed middle who suffer. As always. And who usually don’t notice and keep voting to suffer.
“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.
