Winning hearts and minds: How revenue-raising reforms could build support for inheritance taxation

In October 2024, Demos published a package of proposals for the reform of inheritance taxation, as found in our briefing paper, Plugging the Black Hole. This package is expected to generate £2.6bn for the government in the current tax year, or around £16bn over this Parliament. Yet, beyond raising revenue, the package has also been designed to respond to the public’s concerns about the tax and boost support.

This paper demonstrates the level of support for the recommended inheritance tax reforms based on polling with a representative sample of 2,029 people in September 2024. It finds broad support for all the recommended reforms, and for the package of reforms as a whole:

• The public are much more in favour of the recommended inheritance tax system than the current system. Preference for the recommended system was consistent across voters of different parties.
• The public overwhelmingly think the government should prioritise inheritance tax reforms over cutting public spending or borrowing the equivalent amount in the Autumn Budget, including a majority of Conservative voters.
• The public overwhelmingly thought the reform package is ‘fairer for working people’
• All of the individual policies within the package received higher levels of support than opposition