Do you need your parent/s to die before April 2026? *MNHQ adding content warning mentions suicide*

[Spatulation]

Absolutely reeling that we're losing the farm that my grandfather bought, my father expanded and my son hoped to takeover.

The budget today means that we'll owe £1000000 in tax and we won't be able to get a mortgage as that's 5 times our annual income and over 35000 times bigger than last year's profit.

We own soil. That's it.

Agriculture has the highest suicide rate in any profession - sadly I can see it hitting an all time high in the next 18 months. My father (83) is already talking about it.

I'm so sorry OP. I was concerned by this policy announcement and the impact on farmers like your own family. I think it was a poor decision by RR and reflected a lack of understanding for your industry and the importance of food production. I hope something can be done to relieve the impacts of this and that your father can get some help.

OP the sooner the farm is transferred to the next generation down the sooner the clock starts ticking on the 7 years. Get legal advice as soon as you can, and get the ownership transferred.

I think the issue is that farms will need to be sold and who will buy them? Wealthy Brits or overseas owners who have them as ‘estates’ , they’ll somehow wangle in a company link for a tax angle ( conference centre, training days ) Or farming will become owned by huge corporations , probably mass, lower grade food grown, maybe less animal welfare. They need larger fields so hedges and even historic stone walls could go. I might be overthinking it.

Thats mad , I do believe the tax should apply if any of the farmland is sold within a certain period after it is handed on , but if it is carrying on as a working farm it shouldn't apply.

This this this! My Dh is from a farming family and we know many farmers. There’s lots of things you can do to mitigate a tax bill.
I do have little sympathy for the ones I know, they work incredibly hard but have an arrogance and stubbornness which is unappealing. One example is most of them voting for Brexit, despite the NFU telling them it would be a disaster! Sid they listen- no!

Even with my limited financial understanding I can see a huge difference in inheriting a large mansion worth 6 million quid and a working farm. What is the point in forcing families to sell farms? Other farmers won’t buy it -builders will. And that means houses on farm land. This means more food needing to be imported. Britain is blessed with good farming land and a good climate for growing. Now more than ever we should be growing food here and only importing what is absolutely necessary.

Are you sure your farm is worth what you think? If 1000000 is 35000 times last years profit that implies you only managed to make £28 out of a £5m asset.

That doesn't add up

Was that the profit left after paying a lot of wages to family working on the farm?

What was the profit accumulated over the last 10 years? Im guessing more than £28.

A well run farm with such a high value parcel of land should be generating profit & be able to borrow to pay the tax. There might be an odd bad year where weather doesn't cooperate but that should even out against better years

Also this.

This is terrible to read. I'm so sorry OP, and for all our wonderful farms.

If this does go through it will cause major issues and I hope they rethink it.
Ive worked with people who are going through this in part because of a divorce and one of the couple once half of the worth of the farm.
A couple of solutions that they came up with that are worth considering, is developing one small area of the farm into a property that then they either sell or rent put that can be used to raise finance.
Secondly, and I love these, is to make the farm community owned, selling of shares of the farm. This has multiple benefits and can see a huge improvement in the usage of a farm.
Thirdly, is it possible for your father to transfer the farm into your name's now and see if he lives longer?

Family owned farms are vital for food security. No other ‘farmer’ will buy a £5m farm. The land either goes out of production or will be bought by a massive agribusiness conglomerate. Worldwide our food supplies are increasingly in the hands of a few global conglomerates who care absolutely zilch about local food production or local ecosystems.

Not to mention how now tech firms are moving into food production. These firms are strategically alive to the fact that we can live without a lot of goods and services but we cannot survive without food. The world’s biggest technology companies and distribution platforms, such as Microsoft and Amazon, have started entering the food sector. What does this mean for small farmers and local food systems?

• It leads to a strong and powerful integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data and have access to food consumers.
• On the input side, agribusiness are joining the trend of getting farmers to use their mobile phone apps to supply them with data, on the basis that they can give ‘advice’ to the farmers.
• On the output side, big e-platform corporations can be seen buying their way into the sector and taking control of food distribution.
• Together, they favour the use of chemical inputs and costly machinery, as well as the production of commodities for corporate buyers not local markets. They encourage centralisation, concentration and uniformity, and are prone to abusing their power and monopolisation.

OP I’m so sorry most people don’t understand the situation farmers and the farming community are in. For everyone making flippant comments - this is not the same as someone inheriting a £6million flat in London. Engage your brain and think about why, and then if you don’t think this will effect you and you still want to leave a comment about how OP is still privileged then consider what will happen if the UK loses all its farms and farmers. Catastrophic.

Labour have made such a mistake here it seems unbelievable.

I imagine the government are hoping farmers will sell their land to developers, so we can make sure every square inch of the country is covered with housing estates and Amazon warehouses. That seems to be their target.

You can’t ‘spend’ land - it’s only worth money if you sell it, at which point you can’t farm it. If you don’t sell it, your income is what you make from farming it, which is almost certainly not millions. All this means is that as farmers die off, the farms will be sold to pay off the tax, and there will be no more farms

Blame Jeremy Clarkson for saying the reason he bought tland in the first place was for tax reasons.

Don't be so ridiculous. This reply is laughable.

OP I feel for you. I don’t have much to add to what has been said. Hope the gov will back track on this.

aaah.

Why wouldn’t your father gift you the farm as a potentially exempt transfer and then you take a gamble that he lives more than three years so you get taper relief on the IHT (or seven years and no IHT)?

I assumed that this would just become the standard planning where previously the land would remain in the elderly parents ownership until death so in practice this would not be such a huge change.

But as you say most of us don’t understand farming so perhaps it’s not straightforward.

Is there any point in selling to developers if someone at a County Council office hasn't made a few marks on a piece of paper and changed 'agricultural land' into 'development' land?
Every day I look at two f---ing developments that have been plonked on good agricultural land, and they are two of many.

Why doesn't the government levy a high rate of tax on the sale of farms but exempt them for inheritance tax? That way people would not profit from buying up land to resell it but small family farms would be able to be passed down to the next generation.

a: we don't know the details of this change in the rules and b: a £6m farm is around 600 to 900 acres, dependent on where and how they farm.

So hardly a small family farm.

Land is often sold to other farmers, pension funds (rented back to the farm) and occasionally developers (again rented back until planning granted) in which case the land is still farmed or only a small amount is needed to pay a IHT bill of £1m, if sold for housing.

Farmers in my experience are only too willing to sell land to developers for huge profit.

Plus plenty of people would like to pass on generational wealth without paying tax or care home fees but cannot.

The threat to UK farms/food production comes from loss of subsidy, which many farmers, not all, voted for.

I’m sorry that your father is feeling so unhappy about the budget changes OP, but he can still get help from his accountant with estate planning and he does have options.

We currently import most of our steel, coal and textiles and no-one seems to be wailing about that?

Maybe this is an attempt to redress the balance after the Tories sold off all our industries, but then only the poor working classes were affected by those callous decisions. Small industrial towns in the North and Midlands were plunged into poverty and it’s taken years for many of them to partially recover.

Don’t forget that many of the larger land owning Tory farmers voted to leave the EU and therefore lose the farming subsidies, but they didn’t seem too bothered by those changes, did they?

I have sympathy for anyone losing their livelihood but that’s not what is happening here. These tax changes are to close an inheritance tax loophole used by wealthy Tory donors for years, and not to penalise small family farms.

You do realise people on benefits work?

It's a ridiculous policy.
Some people on here do not have a clue how farming works.