Buy Gold (Jewellery / Bars / Coin etc and give to family)

A minute‘s thought suggests there is a problem here. You want the insurance to pay £350k on death but the total insurance premiums over the term of the policy would be a small fraction of that. The flaw is that many people would outlive the fixed term and there would be no payout on death. Buying a life insurance policy to meet an IHT bill is just a form of investment (or gambling). You are paying away, or investing, premiums from your current assets in return for a payment on your death which may be nil if your policy has a fixed term.

On other points in this thread, the treatment of the SIPP pot after it has been subject to IHT must be part of the consultation. No point deciding what to do until the full details are available. Otherwise you risk making poor decisions.
I’d like to see the whole IHT regime simplified: no exemptions for trusts of any kind; no exemptions for gifts or particular categories of beneficiary. And a lower uniform IHT rate. No games to be played by the wealthy and their advisors. But as my godfather said: live in hope, die in despair….

Bad Enoch was a mis-spelling. What your excuse for using childish labels?

Seems to me the insurance people could have a whole new income stream. Say I give away £500,000 when I'm 70. I might live seven years and the recipients of the gift are home and dry. There's a reducing liability over the seven year term. So I don't need an insurance policy to simply pay 40% on death. There's a type of insurance policy called decreasing term assurance. It's cheaper than normal life insurance because it will only run for seven years and as those years pass, the tax liability to be covered by the policy reduces. Should I expire at say 75, the policy pays the tax due. Should I live the full seven years, the policy lapses. I think there's an opportunity there.

It will take some some time to adjust to the new parameters (and let us remember that up to 10 years ago, pension savings were just that - saving for our pensions).

I have already checked the option of gifting money, along with purchasing a 7-year life insurance (made payable to the beneficiary of the gift) and even at the age of 75, I was surprised how inexpensive such a policy could be.

An additional possibility (in my case) is skipping a generation - making grandchildren beneficiaries of the inherited SIPP. As they will not be earning for another 15 years or so, income-producing equities and bonds could be used each year, up to the income tax allowance limits, and moved into junior ISAs. Given what university fees may well be in the late 2030s, that would be very useful.

I have also planned to give 10% of my taxable estate to registered charities - though we do not yet know how the pension plans would fit into this. The effect of the charitable gifts is to reduce IHT on the rest of the estate to 36%. This means (more or less) that on a taxable estate of £1M, the legatees will receive £576K net of IHT, while the charities will receive £100k. So in effect a donation of £100K will cost my family £24K.

There will be other options, some of which we will only be able to work out after the results of the consultation will be published.