Kemi Badenoch used her Conservative party conference speech in Birmingham to announce the party would abolish inheritance tax on family homes if elected, with couples also able to leave an additional £1m tax-free to their families. Her stated ambition is to eliminate inheritance tax entirely "as soon as we can afford it." The policy would halve the number of families paying the tax — currently fewer than 5% of estates are liable — and would be funded from £70bn in savings the party claims to have identified but has not detailed. The announcement caps a conference week of policy proposals aimed squarely at affluent middle-class voters: childcare support for households earning above £100,000, repeal of the mansion tax, and now inheritance tax relief. These are the voters who deserted the Conservatives at the 2024 election, and the party is bidding to win them back with a package that reads as a direct fiscal transfer to the asset-rich. Critics lined up immediately. Tax Justice UK called it "a massive inheritance tax giveaway to some of the wealthiest people in Britain" that would "deprive public services of cash when they most need them." The TUC's Paul Nowak noted that 95% of estates already pay no inheritance tax, making the cut irrelevant to ordinary workers. Labour's Bridget Phillipson accused the Tories of "prioritising the wealthiest" over families struggling with social care costs. Even Reform UK's Robert Jenrick argued the policy would affect only 2% of houses, "the majority in London," positioning his party as broader-based. The housing market implications are significant and largely unaddressed. Exempting family homes from inheritance tax creates a strong incentive for elderly homeowners to remain in large properties rather than downsize, potentially worsening supply constraints in an already overheated market. This is a policy that treats housing wealth as sacrosanct while doing nothing to address housing availability — a tension the Conservatives did not acknowledge. Badenoch devoted much of her speech to attacking Reform UK, rejecting calls to "unite the right" and drawing a sharp line on race after Suella Braverman, the former Conservative home secretary who defected to Farage's party, suggested minority ethnic people could not be English. "I am black. I am British. I am proud of my country," Badenoch said, in a passage clearly designed to contrast Conservative inclusivity with Reform's nativist drift. She also acknowledged the party's dire polling position — still below its catastrophic 2024 election result — and pledged economic growth as the "central organising principle" of the next Conservative government, citing planning reform, a third Heathrow runway, and deregulation. But the concrete policy announcements this week tell a different story: the economic offer is primarily about protecting existing wealth, not generating new productive capacity. The strategic logic is clear but narrow. The Conservatives are trying to rebuild from their traditional southern English base by making asset protection the party's calling card. Whether that base is large enough to matter — or whether locking up housing wealth and cutting taxes on the richest estates constitutes a growth agenda — is the question the party has not answered.
