Lord Campbell-Savours
Main Page: Lord Campbell-Savours (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Penn
I pay tribute to the noble Baroness for her campaigning in this area. I reassure her that the Government have recently implemented an online service for inheritance tax where excepted estates can provide assured accounts to HMRC through a simple online portal. We will continue to consider ways of making the payment of tax more simple; for example, during the pandemic we have recognised that the provision of wet signatures may not be possible so we have introduced the acceptance of e-signatures in their place.
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, does not the current crisis and its impact on the wider tax take offer us the ideal opportunity to reform inheritance tax by abolishing it and treating inheritance as income under the Income Tax Acts, with an added tax-free allowance or threshold? This would increase the tax take, substantially widen the recipient base, make for a far more equitable distribution of wealth, and foster entrepreneurship on potentially a huge scale. Why not seize this opportunity while we have it?
Baroness Penn
My Lords, as I have said, we will look at the public finances and how we can put them on to a sustainable footing after this crisis, but during this crisis our focus is on getting support to households now. We have made a number of changes to the inheritance tax system recently, including the Office of Tax Simplification report, and we will continue to keep all these aspects under review.