Posted: Mar 27, 2014 4:40 pm
Emmeline wrote:Have I got this right?
If a person's house & estate amounts to £525,000 & they wish to leave it split between 2 children & 4 grandchildren, the £200,000 above the tax threshold would be taxed at 40%, meaning that the government gets £80,000 of their money before it's split between 6 people. We're not talking about the super rich here are we?
According to this wiki page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inheritanc ... Kingdom%29
it's a little more complicated than that due to the potential for pooling the tax-free rate of a married couple. And of course plenty of other ways of avoiding the tax.
But according to the same page, in 2007 only 6% of estates had to pay any IT at all. The Guardian article put that at 3% - not sure why the difference. But either way you're right, we're not talking about the SUPER rich - but we are talking about a pretty small minority of the population. And even of that minority, a lot are only going to be paying a pretty small rate overall, like the 17% that your example comes out at.
I think that while everyone (including themselves) knows that the Queen and the Duke of Westminster are a world apart, a lot of upper middle class people fail to realise just how far up the scale of wealth across the country as a whole they are - ie just HOW MANY people there are below them, for whom the idea of ever having £325,000 worth of assets (or double that for a couple) to leaves their kids is just laughable. Many of these are the people that actually need the things the government spends tax money on.