Neil MacGillivray: Shifting through the gears of gifting

HMRC's recent study, entitled Lifetime gifting: reliefs, exemptions, and behaviours, set out to explore peoples' awareness of inheritance tax (IHT) rules and exemptions and to what extent these factors drive gifting behaviour. The results, published in May, gave an interesting steer as to what motivates individuals to gift - and it appears it was not as expected. For the purposes of HMRC's study, ‘gifters' were defined as people who had given any single gift worth £1,000 or more, or multiple gifts of at least £250 totalling £3,000 or more, in the two years prior to their interview. A gif...