What's left

The nil-rate band was set at £325,000 in April 2009 and has not moved since. Someone called to the Bar in the year it was fixed is now around seventeen years' call, quite possibly in silk, and very likely to have acquired a house, a pension and a family in the interval. The band is exactly where they left it, and is currently frozen for several years yet.

Inheritance tax is charged at 40% above the available thresholds, and it is the tax that generates the most indignation and the least planning. Some of that is squeamishness. Some of it is that the rules genuinely are difficult, and the parts that matter most are the ones people have heard of without knowing the detail: gifts that fall out of the estate after seven years but not before, a residence band that tapers away entirely on larger estates, and trusts that do useful work but carry their own charging regime.

Two changes make this unusually live. From April 2027, unused pension funds are due to fall within the estate for inheritance tax, which reverses a decade of planning in which pensions were the most efficient asset to leave untouched and spend last. And the business relief regime was restricted from April 2026, which matters to anyone holding qualifying assets on the assumption that the previous treatment would continue.

For a profession that spends its working life drafting with precision, the Bar's record on its own affairs is not always immaculate. Wills go un-updated, intended gifts are discussed rather than made, and a great deal of tax gets paid that a conversation seven years earlier would have avoided.

The seven years is the point. Almost everything useful in this area takes time to work, which means the planning is worth doing considerably before it feels urgent.