Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has pledged to exempt family homes from inheritance tax and raise the threshold for the levy to £500,000 if her party wins the next general election.
Speaking at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, she said the changes would more than halve the number of families paying inheritance tax, allowing couples to pass on an additional £1million tax-free.
The proposals would be funded partly through the reintroduction of the two-child benefit cap and reductions in welfare spending, as Mrs Badenoch promised a "tough love" approach to benefits and measures to get more young people into employment.
Other pledges include halving employer National Insurance contributions on earnings for workers aged 21 to 24, scrapping the planned mansion tax on English properties worth more than £2million, and cutting planning bureaucracy to accelerate housebuilding.
Mrs Badenoch also announced plans for a £10billion defence programme, dubbed Britannia Shield, designed to protect Britain and its overseas bases from drone and missile attacks.
Attacking the Labour government, she said: "It’s the same old high-tax, high-spend Labour: no common sense; addicted to welfare; drowning our country in debt; choking our economy with taxes."
She said reviving the economy would be the "central organising principle" of a future Conservative government, while ruling out an electoral pact with Nigel Farage's Reform UK.