Zara Tindall has been slapped with a huge inheritance tax bill by Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Princess Anne’s Gatcombe Park Estate is believed to have fallen foul of Labour’s new inheritance tax rules
The Grade II-listed house in Gloucestershire has served as the Princess Royal’s home for nearly half a century.
The Gatcombe Park Estate was purchased by the late Queen Elizabeth II in 1976 as a wedding present for Princess Anne’s first marriage to Captain Mark Phillips.
The park’s former owner, ex-Conservative home secretary Lord Butler, reportedly sold it to the former monarch for a sum that would now be worth almost £6million.
Now, under plans announced in the Budget, inheritance tax will be charged at 20 per cent on agricultural assets above £1million.
But Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said that in some cases the threshold could in practice be about £3million.
With the value of Gatcombe being roughly double the £3million threshold, it means Anne’s two children, Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall, who also have homes on the estate, will likely now face paying inheritance tax on it when Princess Anne dies.
However, King Charles and Prince William are exempt from inheritance tax, as they benefit from a ruling introduced in 1993 by John Major when Queen Elizabeth II first started paying tax.
The clause means any inheritance passed “sovereign to sovereign” avoids the tax levy, which also saw the King avoid paying the tax when his mother died in 2022.
The ruling also has an exemption for inheritance tax from the consort of a former sovereign to a sovereign, which was last used after the Queen Mother’s death in 2002, when she left an estimated £70million fortune to her daughter Queen Elizabeth II.
In 1992, Elizabeth II volunteered to pay income tax and capital gains tax on her personal income, and the King now does the same.
The King now owns the Duchy of Lancaster, inherited from Elizabeth II, and William owns the Duchy of Cornwall, which was previously owned by his father.
The two duchies are exempt from corporation tax, but the King and William voluntarily pay income tax on the revenue they generate. However, the amount of tax they pay is not made public.
They do not pay capital gains tax because they do not benefit personally from any increase in the duchies’ assets, and William will also not pay inheritance tax when Charles dies.
As for Gatcombe, when Princess Anne and Captain Phillips divorced in 1992, the estate was split between them, and Anne still uses the home as a country residence with her second husband Sir Timothy Laurence.
Peter has a house on the site, as does Zara who lives in Aston Farm, a renovated seven-bedroom farmhouse with her husband Mike Tindall and their children Mia, Lena, and Lucas.
