Introduction: context and questions

The Child Trust Fund (CTF) is meant to ensure that all citizens have capital on maturity. As the editors note in the Introduction, since the days of Thomas Paine, proposals for universal capital grants have been linked with proposals to reform inheritance tax (IHT). The idea is to move towards a new system of inheritance in which more of the wealth that passes across generations is socialised via IHT and distributed to all as a ‘citizen's inheritance’. So, might an egalitarian reform of IHT today provide a way to develop a more generous CTF?

One apparent obstacle to such reform is public opinion. In a recent poll commissioned by the Fabian Society's Commission on Taxation and Citizenship, 51% of those surveyed agreed with the proposition that ‘no inheritances should be taxed’ (Commission on Taxation and Citizenship, 2000, table 2.5, p 55). In order to explore public opinion on this issue in more depth, we used deliberative workshops in which a small group of people, chosen as broadly representative of the national population, were brought together to discuss a subject in the light of information and argument provided by facilitators and invited experts. Using the workshops we sought to shed light on four main questions:

• 1) What are people's initial views about IHT? In particular, what are people's initial views about the fairness of IHT?

• 2) To what extent (if at all), do views change after a significant period of discussion in which people have been presented with relevant information and exposed to the key normative arguments surrounding IHT?

• 3) To what extent (if at all) does the proposal to hypothecate IHT for specific spending purposes increase support for the tax or for an increase in the tax? In particular, does support increase if the tax – or a proposed increase in the tax – is explicitly linked to policies like the CTF (as the Fabian Society's Commission on Taxation and Citizenship speculated: Commission on Taxation and Citizenship, 2000, pp 286-7)?

• 4) If people could change the existing IHT in Britain, what features of it would they alter, and how?