Tories plan to cut inheritance tax… and woo billionaires to Britain

The Conservatives want to cut inheritance tax to help bring billionaires who have left the UK back to the country, the shadow Chancellor said. Andrew Griffith said cutting the tax on what people can pass on to their children would help persuade wealthy people not to quit Britain for more favourable tax regimes. It came amid speculation that Kemi Badenoch was preparing to announce a cut in either the inheritance tax rate of 40 per cent, or increase the threshold at which it is paid, which has been frozen for a decade and has dragged more estates into paying the tax. Shorts Tax exile and Manchester United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe recently said the UK was “on the slide” and said he understood why high earners were leaving for more favourable tax environments, as Britain has “a green eye towards wealth”. Griffith said the party could not commit to cutting inheritance tax until it was able to fund it, but stressed it would “solve some of the issues” causing rich people to increasingly leave Britain – a claim that is contested by tax campaigners. Asked how he would bring back billionaires who have left the UK, he told reporters at the party’s conference: “We’ve long criticised the Government for not even seeking to understand the scale of the problem, not doing any work on the data of who is leaving. “We, of course, want to get to, over time, a tax environment in which people feel supported, that the UK is a competitive place to remain, and we said as a long-term aspiration it would be to look at inheritance tax, which of course would solve some of the issues, but that is not something in my speech today. “We’ve been very, very clear we would have to find the funding to do it, and if not, we would look at other ways in which we can go back to a world where the wealth creators don’t need to leave the UK, taking not just their tax revenues but also the people that they employ and the potential investment for British businesses.” Inheritance tax is currently paid at a rate of 40 per cent on the assets of an estate above £325,000, unless it is left to a spouse or charity; or £500,000 if a home is left to children or grandchildren. One tax a year pledge Griffith spoke to reporters following a speech to the conference in which he promised to cut one tax every year if the party returns to power, following in the footsteps of one of the party’s Treasury grandees. He also pledged to scrap Labour’s so-called “mansion tax”, which it is planning to levy on homes worth more than £2m. And he promised to remove a tax on plastic packaging, as he claimed the Conservatives were now fighting “a battle of ideas about the very basis of where prosperity comes from” with Labour. Griffith told the conference: “I didn’t come here to raise taxes – I came to lower them. “No country in history has ever taxed its way to prosperity, so we will cut taxes, but only when we can afford to do so, and always saying clearly how we will fund that within our golden economic rule.” He added: “Like (Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor) Nigel Lawson, it’s my ambition to scrap at least one tax every Budget. What would we prioritise? There’s a lot. “Tax cuts that help growth, tax cuts that improve incentives to work, tax cuts that make life simpler and fairer.” His comments follow reports in The Times that Kemi Badenoch is expected to make cutting inheritance tax a core part of her speech to the conference on Wednesday.