YOU may have taken out a mortgage to buy your first property, you extend that when you move up the ladder into a larger house and/or change district on the promise that it is a good investment.

You have paid the lender a fortune in interest over all those years, the cost of living will have gone up during that time as have your out-goings such as council tax, maintenance, repairs, and VAT.

Your property value will have gone up, but so have all the others.

For example, when I first started selling properties in the Bournemouth area in the late 1960s, a detached bungalow was less than £3,000 and that property is now £200,000.

But my take-home pay for five and half day week was about £5, whereas today the minimum wage is more than that an hour.

A pint of beer cost 10p and it is now approaching £3. The list is endless and people of my age know exactly what I mean.

You will have paid a huge amount to have a roof over your head. But when you die, 40 per cent will be taken as inhertiance tax from everything you have over £285,000. That is not just your home, but your collectables, your savings. That will be your estate.

The government wants us to save for our old age and we parents also want to help our children and perhaps even our grandchildren.

In the past when property prices were a lot lower, that was possible but now with even the cheapest properties coming up to and into the threshold for inheritance tax, you all will be affected.

Surely it can not be wrong for us want to provide for our immediate family and pass on that we have managed to accumulate.

I ask all property owners to tell their MP. you will not vote for them unless they scrap inheritance tax.

I don't see any problem replacing it with 1p on income tax.

Political parties seem to have an obsession to cut the rate of income tax, when in reality that does not work. It adds to inflation.

Many other countries do not have inheritance tax, so why must we?

RICHARD F GRANT, Burley.