Inheritance tax is no reward for a life of hard work and prudent planning

SIR – I have everything crossed that you succeed in your campaign to scrap inheritance tax (report, June 2).

My friends and I all own our houses due to hard graft and paying our taxes. When my husband did his military service I got an evening job at Lyons café in Charing Cross while also doing a day job, and I saved enough to buy a caravan. We lived in it for nearly three years and saved enough for a deposit on our first house.

I also waited eight years before having my first child as I couldn’t afford to leave work. Good luck. Valerie Stockdale Carshalton, Surrey

SIR – I have always voted Conservative and will continue to do this despite the present confusion in the Government, as all the alternatives are so much worse.

It is accepted that our tax regime is a mess that needs sorting, and inheritance tax is especially disliked. However, the bulk of inheritance tax paid on individual estates comes from property values. There is no capital gains tax on one’s own residence, and the vast increase in house value stems from society rather than individual effort or achievement.

It does not seem unreasonable that society rather than the individual should have some benefit from this fact. Roger Lear

Tenbury Wells, Worcestershire

SIR – Inheritance tax is currently applied to certain individuals with the most extreme unfairness. I refer to siblings sharing a home together, as in the case of our two daughters, both single mothers who co-own their home.

On the death of the first daughter, inheritance tax will force the surviving daughter to sell her home to pay inheritance tax. This is bizarre, since any unrelated pair of individuals of the same or different sexes living together can avoid inheritance tax by choosing either to marry or enter into a civil partnership. However, as siblings, neither marriage nor a civil partnership is open to our daughters. Therefore they face the inevitable prospect of the grieving, surviving daughter being rendered homeless to meet the demands of inheritance tax.

How can this exceptionally cruel application of inheritance tax be considered fair? Alan Stedall Sutton Coldfield