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.

If we were French I expect there would be plans to drive a lot of tractors on the A14 plus a few slurry tankers round Whitehall by now.

I don't suppose the NFU is the right sort of union the Labour Party wants to cosy up to.

A lot of farming families who send their kids private do it in two ways

1. they have diversified. Many many farmers know rent out sheds/ have solar panels etc. I might get shot down in flames for this but the latter pays our kids school fees alone.

2. old farmers don’t retire. My Dad is 77 and still pulling a 60 hr week on average. He doesn’t touch his pension. my in-laws are in their 80’s and do a lot of work we’ll have to pay others to do once they’re gone. Lots and lots of family farms like that and trey contribute to school fees out of excess income.

If you look at the actual farm numbers then it’s pretty dire stuff at the moment. It’s a huge problem in agriculture that diversification has made businesses that are not ok look ok.

I do thing there was a huge issue with rollover that needed to be addressed. By doing this though they are catching the family farms that need to IHT free.

In the farming world a small farm is 1000 acres these days for arable. Add in stock, machinery and a house and you are very quickly at the threshold.

also, we need farmers to farm for the long term. I’m currently ditching. It’s a once in 20 years job and I do it because my kids will hopefully be running the farm in 20 years. Will I pay the thousands of pounds it’s costing me if they won’t be? I’d like to think I’d be a good steward of the land but the reality is I probably won’t.

Farming is hard, really bloody hard. Sunday nights, week in week out at the mercy of the weather and the market. So little of what you can affect you is out of your control.

There might be £5mil left over but that’s only if they have to sell which brings it back to the whole point which OP is upset about…. Loosing the family farm or her dad feeling like he has to kill himself in the next 18 months

I do agree OP needs to get legal advice and exploring options to get the best outcome for their family. MN certainly isn’t the place because not everyone knows what they’re on about

This budget is a car crash for everyone apart from the Google and Amazons of this world. Some really shocking and moving things said by business owners on Sky News report of it linked below - we will ALL pay in our pockets for these attacks.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14023813/Pub-group-says-Labours-new-budget-cost-1-7MILLION-force-prices-businesses-continue-round-Rachel-Reeves-tax-rise-bombshell.html

"Mr Dicker, who owns five hair salons, is facing a £127,000 rise in staffing costs for his business The Chapel.
'Employers' NIC affects hairdressing and beauty businesses five times more than it affects traditional retail,' he said.
'I am just flabbergasted. 200 people from our industry wrote a 17-page paper that went into the ministry. 'We've been speaking to HMRC for five years and they promised us things that they haven't delivered on.'
He questioned why it is hairdressing and beauty businesses who are bearing the brunt of the budget.
'The gig economy didn't get touched by this budget,' Dicker said. 'You could be a delivery company turning over £1.5billion and making £120million in profit and from my calculations you don't pay a penny.
'What the hell. I pay £86,000. Why? Just tell me why? Why are we five times harder hit because you haven't listened to us for successive administrations.
'We've tried to tell you. I am angry and sad and shell shocked and our industry is totally done. They have no choice now. We have to get rid of all our apprentices.'"

"Louise Maclean of Signature group pubs said that the budget has pushed her company and many others into the red, which will affect the consumer.
'Why is it always us? We all knew that employer NI was going up and that the national minimum wage was going to increase but the drop in the threshold was a bit of a kicker we didn't see coming,' she told BBC Radio 4's Today program.
'The total impact for our business is a £1.7million increase in staff costs and we don't make that in profit.
'Yesterday's budget made us a loss-making enterprise, so we are going to have to make some changes in April to tip us back into profit. We don't want to let people go or close revenues.
'We will have to pass it on to the consumer which we don't want to do. This will mean increased prices in every venue across the country from April 1"

Like I said, only very stupid and uneducated think this budget won't affect them hard.

Inheritance tax for working farms is insane, this policy just makes things worse.
I have a friend who has just had to sell the family farm after bereavement as they already couldn't afford the tax bill, this new bill will tip more families over into that territory.
My friend went round to show the new owners which fields flood, which crops grow best in which area etc and he looked at her as if she was mad. He's a city trader, he wants to build hangars on it to house his car collection, has no intention of farming 😳.
When the price of sweetcorn, potatoes and kale is rising, we will know why.
Farms are businesses and the UK's larders, if they are ever sold it should always be to someone who will farm that land. Every tax relief should be afforded.
I voted labour, I didn't vote for this and I am so sorry OP.

The court action (about a partnership) to which I linked above I believe found that the farm was worth about £8m. I don't agree with the budget changes but the result given the changes to trusts law and IHT might be that farmers will have to move off the farm earlier and if they want to work on it live elsewhere in a local village once they pass it to the child 7 years before they will die, and then be paid a wage for their work by the child who has taken the transfer.
This might not be a bad idea as it means families will have to sort out inheritance a lot earlier and probably have things in writing so every child is clear which one will get what earlier. I would rather we followed Sweden and abolished IHT entire. As a single mother my IHT tax free band is only £325,000 because of where I live in London and my children are therefore homeless if I die due to 40% IHT on most of the value of the house. No one will feel sorry for me of course and that's fine but IHT is a pretty nasty tax particularly as ever penny of equity in my house has been taxed at 40%+ already due to my divorce.

@TizerorFizz ah I don't despise anyone and I'm a company director paying 45% tax and more for over twenty years.
I earn as much as a banker!

Bankers only pay the most tax because they are embarrassingly overpaid. I imagine a fairly huge whack of them are extremely good at a bit of tax dodging too.
To the fellow farmers- there will be ways to get around this. We need to stick together.

MN would feel sorry for you and miss you Xenia!.
I've NC now but have chatted with you (and sometimes clashed with you) over the years.
I completely agree that your tax situation is ridiculously unfair.

Yes, exactly- we will see how far the increase in the NMW will go then. Esp when the owners of businesses drastically and intentionally downsize their businesses because there’s no actual cash to pay any IHT if it’s valued at more than £1million and they get rid of staff as part of the downsizing as they couldn’t afford to pay the NMW and eers NIc increase. This budget wasn’t for growth at all, they are punishing the very people needed to grow the economy.

The UK has had dismal growth for over a decade, so whatever the Tories were doing pre July's GE for smaller business, it wasn't working.

So why would we want to continue with these policies?

Btw, Jeremy Hunt backs the increase in NMW.

It's hardly the end of their world if they have to sell it
There's people using food banks ..
And these guys can sell their farm and get 6 million .
Then buy another farm for 5 million
Plus it's only the top 25% this applies to
Not having inheritance on farms just keeps the wealthy wealthy,and stops anyone else getting afoot in the door ..granted anyone able to buy is also going to be very wealthy,but at least it's a bit more fair ,than wealth being passed down ,just because of a family you were born in to

Not a way to increase sympathy for farmers.

Why is it an either/or. You will note that there has been a devasting global pandemic in that time, two wars that affected global trading.

Maybe Labour could start by implementing policies that actually make economic sense and don’t result in people worried their dads are going to take their own life, closely followed by saying at least one sentence without referencing the Tories. I actually didn’t vote for either in the last election.

Daisy really this post shows such a lack of understanding.

You can't just buy and sell farms as though you were selling sweets.

You do know that right?

Taxes , environmental regulations,legal constraints, and it takes time ,needs a specialist,but yes farms can be bought and sold and do get bought and sold

Good point, will it affect Crown land too?

Are you ok? I take it you know nothing about farming, you don’t just sell one farm and buy another, it’s not a. Newbuild 3 bed adorned with “life laugh love” signs in the grey velvet interior.

Who would buy the £6m farm? Probably not someone who would farm it. Farms/herd's etc are built over generations, arable farms require good knowledge of the land where soil conditions have been cultivated. Not to mention CGT on the sale,

May be take your I’ll conceived ideologies back to the 6th form common room where they below, have a think where the food in that food bank comes from at every stage of it getting there!

Now that you mention it…!

Well the government seem to think it's a good idea ,with half of them having had a private school education...so yes much better education than mine .are they all stupid as well..?.makes you wonder why people pay for private school ,when adults end up with ideas like that
Why shouldn't the richest in society pay the most .
They are only doing this to the top 25 % of farms .
I guess ,it will make farms easier to sell .

Yep, I mentioned upthread we will see some kind of incentive scheme to gift farms and businesses to the government at a huge discount to settle these debts. Suddenly the government will be the owners of businesses and control the production of food. What could possibly go wrong???? Worked so well in other countries!!!

Oh I don’t think they’re stupid at all! They clearly are very Machiavellian.

People thinking it’s a great idea on the other hand….,,

Good to know half had the luck to have private education- a Shane they now want to make that unaffordable for all but the very wealthy. -why is that? - why are they so keen on stopping people bettering themselves?

Have you ever heard of the phrase asset rich, cash poor?

Why on earth would it make farms easier to sell, and to whom. How much of the UK’s food is produced by that top 25% of Farms?

This is the most ignorant, blind and tone deaf thing I have read on MN, and that's saying something. Talk about 'I don't understand the OP's position, nor have I tried to, or bothered to RTWT, or switch on my brain, turn off my innate entitlement or show an iota of empathy'.
I'm not a farmer but live and grew up in a rural community and feel every sympathy for the OP and all British farmers and share their rage. The threat to our food security, environment, animal welfare, wildlife, way of life and farmers' lives is real and potentially catastrophic.

I'm only on the first page of this but I agree entirely.

For every family farmer that inherits their farm from their parents, effectively they're going to have to sell off 20% of the land to be able to pay the IHT.

The land will be valued on what it could achieve if sold. While from a farming perspective that land isn't worth a huge amount (you'd use multiples of income/profits to value), a developer would pay £££ for it. That is the value that would be attributed to it for IHT purposes.

It's previously been exempt as a transfer of a business.

Now, as OP has said, those generational farmers are going to have to find, in OP's case, £1m to pay IHT when they don't have £1m in cash going spare.

The only way they're going to be able to fund it, is to sell a chunk of the land to said developers and therefore reduce their own ability to earn money going forwards.

It's really, really shit.

@Xenia your threshold isn’t £325k-it’s £500k if your property is included in the estate-and is left to children or grandchildren.