Brown softens trust tax rules - papers 9th June

The Treasury has abandoned plans to effectively force parents to leave assets for their children to inherit on their 18th birthday or face a punitive new tax rate, and another move which would have made it prohibitively expensive for husbands to leave their assets to spouses in a trust rather than outright was also dropped. Parents will now be able to defer their children’s inheritance to the age of 25 and be liable to a lesser charge of 4.2 per cent while the spousal exemption on trusts has also been restored as this tends to be used by Muslim families with Islamic wills who are not allo...