Inheritance Tax used to be something I’d deal with now and again and usually from a planning perspective. Over at AccountingWEB, Simon Sweetman has started a discussion around IHT that is attracting some pretty heated debate. I’m not sure about this one. It’s a complex debate hinging as it does around UK property values which have risen at a rate that leaves many people with genuine difficulty in getting on the UKs housing ladder. The same is true in Spain and when I was living in France there were rumblings among the locals that UK ex-pats were artificially inflating property prices.
Without diving down that particular road the fact remains that IHT is a now a tax due for serious reform. The total annual take on IHT has always been peripheral but it is easy to see how it might become an important component in the overall tax take stakes. And with the family home increasingly representing the largest single value asset in many person’s portfolio of total investments, it is understandable that people express concern.
Maybe Chancellor Gordon Brown could take an innovative step and simply exempt the family home from IHT. Defining ‘family home’ might take some doing but it shouldn’t be that difficult, should it?
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