The proposal is about as surprising as news of Cheryl Tweedy getting some new hair extensions.

Tories calling for tax cuts is nothing new, but scrapping IHT altogether strikes me as simply bizarre.

In the submission to the shadow cabinet, elaborately named 'Freeing Britain to compete: equipping the UK for globalisation', Redwood's Economic Competitiveness Policy Group did make the reasonable point that many people were finding themselves caught beyond the £300,000 IHT threshold because of rising property prices.

But then making the leap to scrapping IHT altogether is all a bit sudden and extreme.

Raising the threshold would be a far simpler and less dramatic measure to solve the escalating house price issue.

The idea of massive amounts of wealth been handed down, tax free, to people who have done nothing in particular to earn it is something that strikes me as unfair, especially when one considers that people in work who earn a living enjoy no such benefit.

Wouldn't it have been a better idea to propose rewarding industry, entrepreneurialism and old fashioned hard work with dramatic, headline-grabbing tax cuts instead, rather than offering a fillip to people simply living off the fat of a big inheritance?

I think that would have been a much better idea, but the sceptical side of me suspects that scrapping IHT, which is only worth a miniscule percentage of total tax takings, is a much easier area to make sweeping changes than in other areas.

Nicholas Neveling is a senior reporter on Accountancy Age