ANDREW GRIFFITH: I can imagine the string of four-letter words our inheritance tax plan would produce from Angela Rayner and her allies

Published: 23:39 BST, 8 October 2026 | Updated: 23:53 BST, 8 October 2026

No one forgets the first home they buy: turning the key in the lock, the smell of fresh paint, and that first night among all the cardboard boxes under your own roof.

As Kemi said to the Conservative party conference, our homes are where we feel safe, our children take their first steps and families gather at Christmas. They are where important memories are made.

To Labour, people’s homes are just another thing to tax. But to Conservatives, they are the primary stake a family has in our economy and our society. The security they provide is what encourages people to work hard – and the reason young people are so desperate to own one. A home of your own, in other words, builds independence.

That is why so many of our announcements this week focused on home ownership.

Scrapping mandatory Net Zero and gold-plated building regulations to lower the cost of buying a new home by up to £50,000 will help more young people get on the housing ladder. How you heat your home, or whether it needs an EV charger, should be your own choice – not a decision made by Whitehall bureaucrats.

These announcements built on our commitment last year to abolish stamp duty on primary residences, because this bad tax gums up the housing market and penalises people putting down roots in their communities.

Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith believes his party's plans will help homeowners prosper

The Tories have pledged to repeal Labour's family homes tax, which hits ordinary people

This week, we doubled down, by pledging to repeal Labour’s family homes tax. They pretend it’s a ‘mansion tax’ but, in truth, it hits ordinary people in major cities, as well as those living in ordinary homes a long commute from our capital city.

This immoral tax could cost someone up to £75,000 over ten years: where is a widow supposed to get that sort of money?

Labour simply don’t care. They are wedded to their pernicious tax – and if Andy Burnham implements it, we will scrap it.

That’s not all. Another big promise this week is that a Conservative government will abolish inheritance tax on the family home altogether.

To be clear: we would prefer to abolish death duties entirely, but we will only ever offer tax cuts that are affordable, in line with our fiscal duty to bring down the deficit.

We have started with promising to abolish inheritance tax on the family home: first, because that is the asset most likely to force families to pay the tax, and second because taxing grieving relatives following a death is wrong. Labour want to tax your home when you buy it, tax it again when you live in it and tax it a third time when you die. Conservatives don’t – and won’t.

To address the threshold freezes of recent years, we will also raise the inheritance tax threshold for other assets so that a couple can pass on £1million, in addition to their home, tax-free.

This will ensure that people are not incentivised to ‘up-size’ their home just to avoid inheritance tax. The very rich will go on using trusts and other complex structures beyond the grasp of normal folk. Our changes will help people across the country.

The Left won’t like this. I can only imagine the string of four-letter words our plan would produce from Angela Rayner and her fellow socialists.

But while Rayner, Burnham and Chancellor John Healey dream of returning us to the 1970s, we will do as Mrs Thatcher taught us, and prioritise hardworking people. Some have asked: Whose side are the Conservatives on? That’s easy. We are on the side of those who work hard and pay taxes, who have had a raw deal after being treated by government like an endless cash machine.

That includes those who would, under our plans to extend childcare support, no longer be penalised for having the temerity to earn over £100,000.

It includes the one in six young people looking for jobs but unable to find them, who would get a chance under our plan to halve the jobs tax for 21 to 24-year-olds. And now it includes those who want to own a home and pass it on.

There is an old Greek proverb: ‘A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.’

A society in which the state cuts down those trees with every passing generation would not be a Conservative one.

We are the party of home ownership – you’ll be better off with us.