Everywhere I looked, Nigel (and it's been a couple of years and I can't remember exactly), the advice was that you could give £3000 per annum before tax liabilities potentially kicked in, plus a number of gifts not exceeding £250 each, but it was not made clear that this only applied if your assets went beyond the nil rate band. Understand that most of us non-millionaires only have to grapple with this a couple of times, if that, in our lives, and that it's a learning curve every time. I spent hours and hours on this, wondering whether my mum could give all us kids the money from house she'd sold for £125000 after my dad died (she could, no hassle), without a tax liability kicking in. We're not all accountants or people who are genned up on every aspect of tax law. The information on this was extremely difficult to obtain.