Conservative Party sources have told the Mail on Sunday that leader Kemi Badenoch is likely to pledge full abolition of UK inheritance tax if the sums can be made to add up — a move that would remove the 40% levy currently charged on estates above the £325,000 tax-free threshold (effectively up to £1 million once the main-residence nil-rate band and spousal transfers are applied). The pledge is not yet confirmed policy: a Conservative spokesperson quoted in the same report said the party “has not decided our policy platform for conference,” and that any announcement would be “fully costed, backed up by specific savings.”
Scrapping inheritance tax outright is estimated to cost around £9 billion, which the sources said would most likely be funded by cuts to welfare spending. One possible venue for an announcement is the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham next month, a move some Badenoch aides reportedly hope would discourage Labour leader Andy Burnham from calling an early election — echoing George Osborne’s 2007 conference pledge to raise the inheritance-tax threshold to £1 million, credited with helping derail Gordon Brown’s snap-election plans that year.
Badenoch has previously called abolishing the “death tax” “high on my list” and said she commissioned internal research into its affordability. Her Shadow Chancellor, Andrew Griffith, has also been openly critical of the tax, citing Sweden’s abolition of its own inheritance tax as a precedent worth learning from. John O’Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, and James Lawson, chairman of the Adam Smith Institute, both welcomed the reported move on the record, with Lawson calling for outright abolition and noting inheritance tax “raises less than 1% of the total tax take.”
