In her closing speech at the Tory party conference in Birmingham today, Kemi Badenoch said that a Conservative government would abolish inheritance tax (IHT) for family homes and that couples would be able to leave a sum of £1 million to their families tax-free. This came after speculation that she would commit to scrapping inheritance tax entirely.

Paul Johnson, formerly of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has already pointed out that this would incentivise older people to avoid downsizing because they would then be exposing any freed-up capital to inheritance tax. But what exactly is a ‘family home’? If it’s simply whatever your parents own, and pass onto you, it could range from a three-bedroom £70,000 pebbledash terraced house on the outskirts of Sunderland to a £35 million townhouse in South Kensington. This open-ended definition means........

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