George Osborne is planning to raise the inheritance tax threshold from £650,000 to £1,000,000 so a family home worth up to £1,000,000 can be inherited tax-free. In Cumbria, a house worth £1,000,000 is likely to be quite sizeable, but in the London area, it could still be a modest house. We could have a situation where a child lives at home caring for elderly parents, the parents die, and the child is then faced with a substantial inheritance tax bill on a house which is no mansion. It is as well to see the rules change to give some relief on this.
Inheritance tax is a tax which can be planned for. You might plan to avoid it, or you could have some life insurance or assurance to pay the anticipated bill. Because some people will plan for it while other people are unable to, the incidence of inheritance tax can be very unfair. The carer who stays at home to look after parents might have difficulty in planning for it.
David Porthouse & Co are accountants in Carlisle serving clients in Cumbria and North West England. They have a major interest in new technology and are developing an optical number recognition/datepoint system for scanning bank statements with the intention of reducing the costs of accounts preparation. They also have a spreadsheet system which can be e-mailed back and forth between the accountant and the client. They have now developed an online quotation system.