In which Rupert Lowe keeps the grief tax in his sights, produces a much larger tax programme… despite no actual conference taking place!

Introduction

My June mid-term report placed Restore Britain on the radical flank. Abolish inheritance tax. Scrap IR35. Offer the lowest corporation tax in Europe. The direction was clear, even if the funding was rather less so. [1]

I promised to return to Restore despite its absence from the conference circuit. This is that final instalment. No conference hall, then. Just Rupert Lowe and some published reading material.

The documents are the March paper Abolish Inheritance Tax and the subsequent economic programme, The Wealth of Our Nation.

The inheritance tax commitment predates my mid-term review. The broader programme supplies considerably more detail against which to judge it. [2, 3]

My verdict has moved on.

Restore now has a recognisable programme for a smaller state, with specific tax changes and an attempt to price them. Some proposals address genuine defects. Some of the figures, however, need more than a patriotic dusting.

The radical flank has a budget

The headline is £155.7 billion of annual tax cuts by the end of a first Parliament, set against approximately £178 billion of spending savings by that stage. These are Restore’s estimates, not an independently certified fiscal forecast. [2, pp. 30–40 and 41]

The paper says the cuts would be phased in only when funded. It also excludes its anticipated general growth dividend from the headline calculations. Both are sensible disciplines. A government should not spend the same imagined burst of growth before breakfast, lunch and dinner.

That is a more serious proposition than a collection of tax cuts followed by a hopeful reference to the Laffer curve. It also means the spending programme is central to the tax offer. If the savings arrive late, the paper’s own rule requires the cuts to wait.

The grief tax still gets the full axe

Restore remains committed to abolishing inheritance tax entirely. Its separate paper makes the case in terms of family continuity, property rights and the difficulty of finding cash when wealth sits in a farm or business. [3]

There is a coherent argument here. The ability to pass on an enterprise can encourage people to build something that lasts beyond them. A tax bill arising on death can create a financing problem quite unrelated to whether the underlying business is healthy.

But the familiar claim that all inherited wealth has already been taxed goes too far. An estate can include substantial unrealised gains. Under the usual CGT rules, death does not itself trigger a disposal and the assets acquire a market-value base cost. [4]

If IHT disappears, does that CGT treatment remain? Restore should say. Abolishing one tax while leaving the existing uplift untouched would allow some lifetime gains to escape both charges. That may be a deliberate choice, but it deserves an explicit defence.

Full abolition would also benefit large liquid estates. The sympathetic example of a family farm does not describe every beneficiary.

Compared with the other parties I have reviewed, the distinction remains clear. Reform has prioritised income tax relief. The Conservatives have proposed a major home exemption and larger allowances. Restore wants the whole IHT regime gone. [5, 6]

A bigger allowance and a much bigger basic rate band

However, the income tax proposal is also substantial. This includes a £16,000 personal allowance, a £100,000 threshold for entering the 40% band, and restoration of the allowance to everyone. Restore estimates the combined annual cost at £49.2 billion. [2, p. 45]

Removing the allowance taper would tackle the effective 60% income tax band which makes the system so peculiar above £100,000. This is a concrete answer to a problem which other parties have variously recognised, postponed or risked making worse.

On the stated design, an employee in England earning £40,000 would save £686 in income tax. At £80,000, the saving would be £6,632. Those illustrations assume ordinary employment income, today’s rules as the comparison and no other reliefs; they exclude National Insurance. [7]

That is a broad allowance increase combined with a particularly large reduction for people currently paying higher-rate tax. Restore can defend that as improving incentives and retaining skilled workers. It should describe the beneficiaries accurately.

Nor does removing the tax allowance taper automatically remove the separate childcare eligibility cliff. The number £100,000 appears in more than one badly designed part of the system.

Corporation tax and the difference between profit and the bill

Restore proposes no corporation tax on the first £50,000 of profits, then 19% above that level, with 15% a later aspiration when affordable. That is more useful than June’s promise of the lowest rate in Europe, although it is a different and less sweeping starting point. [2, pp. 49–50]

We are told that this removes 95% of companies from corporation tax.

The narrative gives approximately £24 billion for the allowance and 19% rate, then £4 billion for each further percentage-point reduction. The headline table uses £41.3 billion. Perhaps the table includes a later rate cut or additional measures. It needs to explain which. [2, pp. 41 and 50]

A company allowance could help smaller businesses. Its design also needs rules for connected companies, otherwise a business making £200,000 of profit may discover the attractions of becoming four businesses making £50,000 each.

Simplification still requires the draftsman to anticipate obvious, behavioural responses.

VAT and stamp duty get substantial attention and other proposals

The VAT offer is an 18% standard rate and a £150,000 registration threshold.

A higher VAT threshold would reduce compliance burdens for businesses below it. It would also move the point at which some businesses stop growing to avoid registration. That cliff has relocated rather than disappeared.

Stamp duty would disappear in all forms, with the supporting receipts table including property and share transactions.

There is a strong case for reducing taxes which discourage people from moving home or reorganising their affairs.

However, devolved property taxes do require separate treatment across the various components of the UK.

Insurance premium tax, air passenger duty, emissions trading and the climate change levy also appear on the abolition list. [2, pp. 56–59]

The CGT proposal needs an proof-reader before it needs a Chancellor. The main text specifies a £20,000 annual exemption; the headline table says £40,000. Both attach a £700 million cost. The executive summary offers a range. [2, pp. 7, 41 and 53]

The spending cuts are doing the heavy work

Restore identifies major changes to welfare eligibility and uprating, the end of the pension triple lock in favour of CPI, freezes in quango and departmental budgets, and the removal of net-zero expenditure.

Working-age benefits would be restricted to British citizens. [2, pp. 30–38]

These are substantial choices about entitlements and services.

Some estimates depend on particularly large behavioural responses. Restore expects tax deductibility for private healthcare, together with charges for non-citizens, to improve the public finances by £20 billion annually.

Private school fee deductibility and related education changes are credited with £10 billion of annual savings. [2, pp. 37–38]

Relief costs money when claimed by people already buying those services. Savings depend on additional people switching, the public costs that can actually be removed and the capacity of private providers. A pupil leaving a class does not automatically remove one-thirtieth of the teacher’s salary.

The paper deserves credit for not banking a general growth bonus. That does not make these specific behavioural assumptions disappear.

The savings also need one consistent timetable. Annual savings reached in year five are different from cumulative savings over five years, and freezes across departments and quangos need to be checked for overlap.

On the headline figures, £178 billion less £155.7 billion leaves £22.3 billion. That is an implied margin against the chosen baseline, not proof of a balanced budget. A year-by-year account of receipts, spending and borrowing would make the funding claim testable.

A smaller state with a bigger ministerial blacklist

The IHT paper has another feature worth examining. Its funding proposals extend beyond reducing expenditure into changing charity law and repealing the Equality Act. It proposes ministerial control of the Charity Commission and red, yellow and green lists determining access to public funding and tax breaks. [3, pp. 6–8]

This, arguably, is a tension with the wider paper’s promise of predictable rules and less arbitrary state interference. If tax privileges depend on which list a minister puts an organisation on, the design needs objective criteria, reasons for decisions and an effective route of challenge.

The test is whether Restore would be comfortable with the same machinery operated by a government it strongly opposed.

The separate IHT paper explicitly postpones detailed costings. Its spending suggestions therefore need to be reconciled with the wider programme, rather than treated as an additional pot of savings already available to spend.

IR35 and remittances remain unfinished business

The party’s current tax webpage still promises to scrap IR35 and impose a levy on remittances abroad. Neither has a separately identified line in the economic paper’s headline tax table. Their absence there should not be mistaken for withdrawal. [2, p. 41; 9]

IR35 is especially relevant alongside the proposed company allowance. Scrap IR35 while exempting the first £50,000 of company profits and the incentive to incorporate changes considerably. The resulting income tax, dividend tax and NI effects need to be considered together.

My June preference for addressing the underlying income tax and NI differences still stands. Otherwise, another distinction between employment and incorporation will require another rule to police it.

The scorecard

Issue	My June assessment	Position now
IHT	Full abolition; funding unresolved	Reaffirmed and placed within a wider programme; CGT interaction and funding still need work
Corporation tax	Lowest rate in Europe	£50,000 profit allowance and 19% rate; 15% conditional; coverage claim and costings need correction
Personal taxation	The main emphasis lay elsewhere	Specific allowance and band changes; substantial relief for higher earners
IR35 and remittances	Abolition and a new levy respectively	Still on the website; no separate headline costing or worked design
Funding	Detail secondary to the message	Spending proposals and staged tax cuts; assumptions and internal inconsistencies need resolving

Verdict

Restore has done enough to change my June assessment. There is now a programme worth examining, and it would be lazy to dismiss every proposal simply because the scale of the ambition is large.

Removing the personal allowance taper, reducing transaction taxes and making a clear choice about IHT all deserve serious debate. The insistence that cuts follow funding is welcome.

But a costed document needs its tax bases, policy descriptions and totals to agree. There appears to be a corporation tax category error and competing CGT allowances which are concrete defects.

Across this series, I have asked each party to show what changes, who benefits and how the bill is met. Restore now gives us more of that answer. It has not yet supplied a fully convincing one.

The tax axe is sharp. The arithmetic should also be sharpened up before anyone starts swinging it.

 

 

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[1] Andy Wood, UK Tax Policy Mid-Terms #6 Restore Britain, 9 June 2026. Source

[2] Restore Britain, The Wealth of Our Nation. Analysis uses the supplied PDF; page references are its printed page numbers, which are two below the PDF page numbers. Publication page dated 3 August 2026. Source

[3] Restore Britain, Abolish Inheritance Tax. Analysis uses the supplied PDF and its printed page numbers. Publication page dated 17 March 2026. Source

[4] Taxation of Chargeable Gains Act 1992, section 62, especially subsections (1) and (4). Source

[5] Andy Wood, Reform UK conference review. Source

[6] Andy Wood, Conservative conference review, including the closing speech. Source

[7] HMRC, Income Tax rates and Personal Allowances, 2026/27. Illustrations are the author’s calculations using Restore’s stated £100,000 higher-rate threshold. Source

[8] HMRC, Corporation Tax Statistics 2025, tables 10A and 10B. Restore’s figures 25 and 26 reproduce liability-band data, not profit-band data. Source

[9] Restore Britain, Reward the Nation’s Grafters, current tax policy webpage, checked 11 October 2026. Source