Sandra Chapman writes: Is your children’s inheritance safe from the government?

If I was very rich I would probably be spending my retirement working out how to make sure I don’t have to fork out a whack of it to the government given that I’ve already being paying income tax for more years than I care to remember.

If I was really with it I’d have an expert to help out with the figures while Himself and I head off to all those countries we didn’t have the time or the money to go to when we were working.

It’s always the case, though, that just when retirement arrives and you can afford the time and possibly the money to take as many holidays when and where you like that your ageing limbs start screaming at you suggesting that a rented holiday home in Portrush is a much better idea.

But there is something else to worry about now that that golden age has arrived.

Boris Johnson and his clan at Westminster imagine we retirees are all rolling in money and he wants to get some more of it for Treasury coffers.

Yes, he has eyed up where he thinks there’s a fortune waiting to be tapped into it – our homes – particularly those of us who have the mortgage paid off and a house worth over a certain amount.

Now, there was a time when that ‘amount’ seemed a glorious thing to look forward to in retirement, or if you had no interest in travelling the world, at least to pass on to the children you kept on the mini wage when it came to pocket money. But that’s all about to change.

You will have heard, of course, about President Putin’s plan for Ukraine and I’ve a feeling Boris thinks he needs to start putting more money into government coffers just in case Putin starts chucking bombs at people.

Boris and his fellow travellers in the Treasury seem to think now is a good time to up inheritance tax revenues, something they have been quietly doing since the spring of last year.

The housing market boom this year is still rising. I read this week that up to January past ‘the public purse bolstered by a 16per cent increase in inheritance tax receipts with the Chancellor expected to raise billions more from people passing on their wealth in the coming years’.

Outstanding rises in house prices sounds wonderful until you realise that anything beyond £325,000 is fair game for the government, so all may not be looking golden for the children we oldies leave behind. It’s a depressing thought given how hard we’ve all worked to get there.

Years ago, just after the Second World War when I was getting near school age I remember the men on bicycles riding around the houses asking for food and clothing. These were men who had arrived back from the war and had no-one to look after them.

They had fought for their country but the government didn’t do anything for them, probably believing that they should be thankful just to have survived the conflict.

Those were men living on their nerves and handouts and where I lived there was no abundance of jobs for them. It is that’s generation’s grandchildren who today face a government trying to squeeze every last cent they have out of them while the millionaires and billionaires are well able to protect themselves.

My generation has worked hard and paid all our taxes and now the government wants to fleece not just us but the children who will inherit what we leave behind.

Billions of pounds are expected from this inheritance tax grab because it has arrived all of a sudden without any prior discussion.

The extremely rich and those inheriting massive estates are well able to control the government’s threat to their fortunes.

The rest of us in the firing line may lie awake at night wondering how to protect what we’ve built up over the years through hard graft. Simply, there is no protection. Not even downsizing is an option.

Fleecing the elderly is the government’s new game.

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