Inheritance tax: Turning a dream into hard cash

George Osborne has come up with some clever ways to hobble inheritance tax, says Merryn Somserset Webb.

Look at George Osborne and John Major and you might think they are as different "as chalk and cheese", says Ian Cowie in The Sunday Times. But they have one clear thing in common. They want, as Major put it back in 1991, to see wealth cascade down the generations. Major wasn't able to do much about inheritance tax back during his term in office it was politically impossible at the time. But Osborne has come up with some clever ways seriously to hobble it, even if we're not sure we approve of all of them.

First, he had already promised tax-free inheritability of defined-contribution pensions: from next April, if you die before you are 75, your pension passes 100% tax free to your heirs. If you are over 75, they will only pay income taxat their marginal rate on withdrawals.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.