Farm tax loophole was used by rich people, now the Tories are proposing to enable them to do the same with ‘family homes’ - Yorkshire Post Letters

The most headline-grabbing announcement from the Conservative party conference just ended seems to have been that, in the event of future electoral success, family homes will be exempt from inheritance tax.

If ever there were an invitation to indulge in tax dodging, this is surely the clearest since farms and farmland were exempted. We know that many wealthy people invested in farmland specifically to avoid tax for the simple reason that some of them, such as Jeremy Clarkson, have declared it to be so.

Now that that loophole has gone, it would appear that farm prices are falling, to the obvious advantage of real farmers.

The question remains to be answered, how many homes might a family reasonably own as ‘family homes’? Is it just one or is it more than one? Shall we see a rush of wealthy people putting their spare cash into extra or bigger 'family homes' so that upon their demise, these assets will be tax-free. And further, what will such a rush do to the already upward trend in house prices?

Not very long ago, Conservative leaders like David Cameron were presenting themselves as the true representatives of 'working families'; any such pretence seems now to be dropped: the number of working families who would aspire to expensive family homes or to the extra one million promised on top of those would be quite small.