Badenoch Opens Her Conference Open to Cutting Inheritance Tax
Kemi Badenoch has said she is open to cutting inheritance tax but will not commit to it, as the Conservative conference opens in Birmingham for four days. The tax is charged on most estates worth more than £325,000. She has also promised to abolish the £100,000 childcare cliff edge, at a cost of about £700 million a year, funded by cutting headcount at public bodies.
“It is morally right that people don’t get taxed twice,” Mrs Badenoch said, and morally right that someone who works hard and wants to leave something to their children should not have it taken away — while adding that she would not announce tax cuts “unless we can show how we pay for them”. The direction of the offer is becoming legible. Last year’s conference produced the abolition of stamp duty on primary residences, costed at around £9 billion a year. This week has produced 50,000 prison places funded by cutting overseas aid to £1 billion a year, a reduction of about 90% on current plans, and now a childcare giveaway that by definition only reaches households earning above £100,000, plus an inheritance tax hint. A Labour spokesman said it told you everything that the first Conservative tax policy to be unpicked was one helping higher earners, and that the Conservatives set the thresholds in the first place. The internal worry is about tone rather than arithmetic: one shadow minister said the party needs to win back as many voters from the Liberal Democrats as from Reform, that there is an economic offering but those voters “don’t want us to be so intolerant on social issues”, and that “the way we are going, we risk being seen as the nasty party again” — the label Theresa May coined as party chairman in 2002. The party is still polling below its 2024 result. Watch Andrew Griffith’s speech on Monday.