Beyond the Headlines: The full story of the 2024 inheritance tax reforms – and lessons to learn

At Demos, we have spent two years exploring inheritance tax, investigating underlying public attitudes to inheritance, co-designing a set of reforms with the public, and advocating a rebalancing of the tax system onto wealth and inheritance. This briefing paper evaluates the current reforms in the context of our evidence and analysis, the subsequent political and media debate, and how all of this likely affected public perspectives on inheritance tax.

This is part of Demos’s wider work to help create a Citizen Economy – one where households, businesses, the state, regulators and markets are reformed to focus beyond their self-interest and support the wider needs of our society and economy. Our research shows that inheritances – people’s increasing reliance on them, their inequalities, and an ill-equipped inheritance tax – plays a part in financial insecurity, inequality of opportunity, and underfunded public services. Reforms to inheritance taxation were, and are, needed to help address that.

At Demos, we put people at the heart of policy-making. In this project, our evidence and analysis is guided by what the public has told us in surveys, focus groups and deliberative workshops.