Tories plan to scrap inheritance tax for estates up to £1m is to cost £3.3bn!!!

[PSCMUM]

please tell me, fellow mumsnetters, that you see how awful this would be for public services???! PLease tell me you are less self preservationist than the 2 (pinstriped) aresholes on the tube with me today saying how great it would be as they would get so much more of the value of their parents houses when they died!
I bloody can't stand tories, but this policy is worrying me as it is so appealing as long as you don't consider how they are affording to make such a humungous tax cut - ie, cutting public services. Doctors pay, nurses pay, schools, hospitals, fire engines, lolly pop people, income support, legal aid, free wine for deranged left wingers on mumsnet (ooops, maybe last one just wishful thinking)

[edam]

Pah! I sneer at the 25k a year. Those non-doms are FILTHY rich - one admitted to a committee of MPs he paid less tax than his office cleaners. The exemption is outrageous (and is incidentally skewing the property market in London hence the South East, making life much more expensive for everyone else.

If they don't want to pay their fair share, they can eff off and live somewhere else.

[PSCMUM]

yes bt jodie G1 - have you never benefitted from anything tax is spent on??

How about any of these:

• police
  
• pavements
  
• roads
  
• road signs
  
• rubbish collection
  
• traffic lights
  
• police
  
• fire service
  
• ambulance
  -state school
  -zebra crossings (with lollipop person!)
  
  Unless you live in your own empire, fully staffed by people on your private pay roll, then you have had the benefit of taxes. Tax is not just money you never see again. IT is money that is put together with other people's money so that it can buy really expensive things that are much better purchased together than all purchasing individually,. Tho I take the point that our own individual firemen could be quite good.
  
  Plus.... the countless people paid by the state to provide (sometimes life saving) free services, plus the education of the vast majority of your fellow citizens who can function within the same world is you, being able to read and write etc, becasue they had a free state education.
  
  
  
  
  just imagine if, your nanny couldn't read, or your fellow rouad users couldn't read road signs, or god forbid your hairdresser couldn't read

[SenoraPostrophe]

it's not the fecking "ordinary people" who pay inheritance tax. that is offensive. yes, some of the top 5% pay accountants to screw the system. some of the following 10% (or less I think, but let's say 10%) don't pay the accountants and pay the tax, but they are rich.

[SenoraPostrophe]

ah - now the non dom thing is another issue entirely. If the tories said they would abolish the pointless and dmaging rules that are the non-domicile rules then I might even vote for them.

[23balloons]

They will get my vote. dh pays a fortune in tax and I do begrudge my children having to pay another huge sum of tax to the government if our house is over the threshold when we die (if we have paid off the huge mortgage we have by then).

[JodieG1]

Yes I do benefit from things taxes are spent on and I agree with taxes but there is a line that has to be drawn somewhere and I think it's here. Far too much tax all the time on everything.

I don't have a nanny either, I look after my own children.

[TheQueenOfQuotes]

thing is though some people's only inheritance over £350k is a house.......which in many areas of the UK isn't even a particularly large house/flat. So it's not like someone that's inheriting a house is getting a huge wad of cash.......and chances are for some people that it's the only way they'll ever own a house of their own - yet they get taxed on it.

However - one point a lot of you seem to be missing is this - that £350k is the amount above which you get taxed IHT. So if you are given a house worth 350k - you pay no IHT. If you get given a house worth 400k you pay IHT on 50k of it.


We have an elderly family friend who nearly 20yrs (when her DH died) transferred the ownership of their bungalow over to her (only) son. He lived with her in the bungalow. Now 2yrs ago he died suddenly, the bungalow (which had been bought very cheaply) about 40yrs ago was valued at over £350k - so his mother (who also still lives in the house) had to pay IHT on it! - how is that fair???

[PSCMUM]

Whoever wrote all that stuff abour Person A ./ person B - nonsense.

Person B, who put all their money into their house, is having to pay tax again, because they have something left to leave to their heirs! Person A, with all their make up etc, has nothing left to leave 0 that is why they don't ahev to pay taX!

[SenoraPostrophe]

oh ffs.

where should the money for the nhs come from then, 23balloons?

[MilkMonitor]

What exactly does council tax pay for exactly?

Rubbish collection, lighting, street cleaning, local education? Not sure. Please someone inform me?

[PSCMUM]

yes but queen of quote - it actually IS fair, becasue the only reason she had to pay tax on it was becasue she tried to dodge out of payng tax by trasnferring it into her son's name in the first place as they both thought he'd die first! poetic justice. Not the death obviously, the IHT.

[TheQueenOfQuotes]

and did you know it's estimated that the War in Iraq (which most people in the UK did NOT want) has cost £7billion.........

[SpacePuppy]

define rich, by means of annual income.

[PSCMUM]

o 23 balloons fgs - how will anything function if they get back in again??? i take it as your dh pays a fortune in tax that you are quite well off, so you';d be ok under the tories - but what do you think about people less well off than you? do you care that they will be just literally left to drift under the tories and their tax cuts bonanza? They have even mooted the poss of scrapping tax credits - a real chance for so many mums to get back to work who really hadn't a hope under the tories.

[Furball]

QofQ - it's £300K not £350K and for every £50,000 over the £300,000 you have to give £20,000 in tax.

I think that to put up the tax threshold by a few thousand every year is unfair when especially property is going up by that every other month.

[ImBarryScott]

Oh hurrah for some sense! I was all ready to get at this thread, but it's not gone wrong yet.

£350000 is bloody loads of money. And yes, I live in London zone 2, so I don't imagine too many people will live in a pricier area than I do.

House price inflation over the last 10, 20, 30 years has effectively handed free cash to homeowners, which they haven't had to work for. Case study - FIL buys house in 1980 £22000
FIL chugs along as normal
FIL now sits on large fortune well above inheritance tax threshold.
He's not worked for it (the price increase that is), DH certainly hasn't worked for it, so to give the govt their share doesn't bother me in the slightest.

[TellusMater]

Of course it's loads of money. And it is like a wad of cash really, for most people.

I do get the twice-taxed argument, but I think there are better places to put the money frankly.

[PSCMUM]

Barry Scott, you are very cool. WElcome to the people's republic of mumsnet

[PSCMUM]

not wanting to pay IHT is like telling your children not to share with the kid in the playground who has less toys. Or in fact no toys.
Its really scummy and greedy not to share.

[ImBarryScott]

Milk monitor -
Council tax pays for
bins
libraries
parks
leisure centres
roads
police (partial)
fire (partial)
foster care
residential care (children and adults)
home carers for old people/disabled
after school clubs
holiday play schemes
subsidised child care
public transport (partial)
disability day services

[gomez]

Fecking outrageous idea.

Quite clearly will be popular however - so utterly depressing that so many people are in all honest so short-sighted.

[TheQueenOfQuotes]

errmm - no she handed it over to her son 20 odd years ago because she LITERALLY had no idea how to run her finances - infact when he died 2yrs ago my parents had to teach her everything to do with her finances - she didn't even realise you could get money "out of the wall". And when her DH bought the house 40 odd years ago the bungalow was valued at no-where near that sort of money

"When introduced at the end of the 18th century, the legacy tax did not affect surviving wives or children. In the second decade of the 19th century death duties were extended to all relatives except spouses, but the rates were only 1 per cent for children and 3 per cent for siblings up to a maximum of 10 per cent for nonfamily beneficiaries.

It was, of course, estate duty introduced in 1894 that over time punished and even destroyed large wealthy landed estates ? through a top rate, by 1939, of 50 per cent on everything above £2 million and by 1969, 80 per cent on estates worth more than £1 million. So it was certainly a ?wealth? tax in the true sense. But at the lower end the rates were kinder.

Even IHT proper, introduced in 1985, did not seem too bad.

Between 1987 and 1992 the nil-rate band (NRB), on which no tax was paid, duly doubled from £71,000 to £140,000 to keep pace with inflation. However, while the NRB has risen by 16 per cent in the past five years, house prices have gone up by 60 per cent."

back in 1986 when IHT was introduced the average house price was £36k, now the average house price is £210k

[shreddies]

It's all to do with the bloody housing market IMO, the only reason that so many more people have estates worth more than £350k now is because of the ridiculous runaway inflationary house prices. Those people who complain that their family homes will be taxed are at the moment, the same people who are delighted that their average 3 bed semi is now worth half a million with them having done FA to contribute to it other than buy a house 20 years ago and sit tight. Yes I know, a London and SE issue only, but as someone else posted, this debate is aimed at the wealthy south

[12lbnaturally]

Public spending hasn't exactly boomed with the labour government has it? My local hospital which cared for Alzheimers patients has just closed to save the Primary Care Trust money. Cutting nurses pay isn't just down to the Tories, the labour government have given nurses a staged 1.9 % pay rise this year which doesn't even cover the rise in inflation. This government and governments preceeding it have gradually eroded and crucified public services by contracting out, tendering etc, they are privitising by the backdoor.

Personally I don't give a monkeys what they do with the inheritance tax, some people have loadsa money, some don't.

[TheQueenOfQuotes]

£3.3bn for raising the IHT threshold v £7bn (and rising) for an illegal war that no-one wanted........hmmm