George Osborne’s 2007 pledge to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m, which spooked Gordon Brown into calling off an early election, is still remembered as a political masterstroke. But the combination of the crash and the coalition means that the Tories haven’t even come close to delivering it. In the 2012 Autumn Statement, Osborne announced that the inheritance tax threshold, frozen since 2009 at £325,000 (£650,000 for couples), would rise by just 1 per cent in 2015-16 to £329,000. More recently, he revealed that to help meet the £1bn a year cost of the coalition’s social care plan, the threshold will be frozen at £329,000 until at least 2019. Many more “ordinary people”, to use Osborne’s 2007 words, will be hit by inheritance tax (although, in reality, only around 6 per cent of estates are affected). Were the threshold to rise in line with inflation, it would stand at £420,000 in 2019.
It is notable, then, that when asked about this subject at a pensioners’ event today (hosted by Saga magazine), David Cameron suggested that the Tories would promise relief in their manifesto. He said:
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