Why are a tiny number of rich farmers dominating the news cycle?

[InvisibleRadiator]

I've been reading around this inheritance tax issue, and the more I read the more I agree with government policy!

For starters the government thinks this will only affect the 500 richest farms and some think this could be as low as 100 farms!
x.com/DanNeidle/status/1852064433738256394

How on earth have such a rich elite managed to whip everyone up into such a frenzy, making it sound like poor old farmer Giles's kids are going to have to sell the family farm when he dies.
The following article explains how when taking into account the IHT property exemption, a married farming couple would not pay IHT unless their assets exceeded £3 million!
www.independent.co.uk/news/business/inheritance-tax-farmers-protest-maths-b2649181.html

And there are so many concessions such as having 10 years to pay, and being half the rate most others pay! And there are many ways to legally reduce the impact of the tax.

It's clear that wealthy investors have been pushing up land prices, and apparently farmers are involved in less than half the land sales now, when compared to 15 years ago.

And now this tiny band of super rich are trying to plead poverty? I don't believe a word of it.

This final article puts it far more eloquently than I ever could.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/17/farmers-have-hoarded-land-for-too-long-inheritance-tax-will-bring-new-life-to-rural-britain

Good on Labour for standing up for the average person and trying to claw back a tiny portion of generations of inherited wealth for our public services!

The Tories were.

People who aren’t from farm families don’t understand this. Everything is about the farm. Even for those who don’t get to inherit any part of it.

www.glassdoor.co.uk/Salaries/dairy-farmer-salary-SRCH_KO0,12.htm

As I've said upthread, round here farmland is bought by people with lots of horses or by solar energy firms. That has been the case for every single farm sold near me in the last 18 years. Not one farm sold during that time is still a farm.

And people are clamouring to accelerate this process.

The workers get nat minimum wage or salary since the Ag Wage Board was folded because suddenly farm work is now considered unskilled thanks to NFU and the like lobbying on behalf of large corporations that ag was not a spacial case. Then they tried a U turn on that because the workers from EU agencies they could pay even less to couldn't come over and the powers that be told them that ag was either a special case or it wasn't so which is it? I laughed my socks off at that.

@SheShaft was claiming farmers get paid way more than minimum wage.

In many cases their profits will be much lower than minimum wage.

Your right. It will be way way lower than minimum wage!

The farmhouses are part of the farm. They may have been in the family for hundreds of years.

Nice cars? For a start if you’re a livestock farmer you need a vehicle that can tow a trailer and animals, and one that you can drive onto the land with in some cases.
Round here it’s usually a pick up truck. Occasionally upgraded to ensure its reliable.

If a carer is self employed then yes they can.

They’ll lose benefits such as sick pay, paid holiday and such like, but it’s an option.

I honestly think most people have completely missed the point.

The point is not that 'how come farmers were not subjected to IHT before now?'

The point is that NO ESTATE should be subjected to IHT. It's theft pure and simple. It's a tax on assets that have already been taxed, often several times over. Countries who did away with death duties tend to grow ion wealth overall, and certainly grow in wealth created by entrepreneurship.

And if you think that IHT only hit the rich, it does not. The threshold has not been raised for ages, so more and more estates are drawn in. £325 k is a very different animal in some parts of the country rather than others. A modest bedsit in London is well over. But also- every single estate is subject to IHT. Estates under a threshold are subjected to 0%. But the point is, it attracts a tax. It is much easier for governments to raise a tax that already exists than introduce a tax on estates that don't. So you think you are immune because your parent's estate is under £325 k? Nup. Maybe for now, but it's 0% rated for now, but next budget that may be raised.

Yet surely using land as an inheritance tax wheeze as Jeremy Clarkson has done pushes up the cost of land, causing problems for actual (not TV) farmers?

Absolutely!
💯

Yes sure that's what will happen if we tax multimillionaires HALF the amount of tax EVERYONE ELSE PAYS 🙈🙈🙈

Yes, I think food should be more and I think people who own millions of pounds worth of assets should have to pay inheritance taxes just like the rest of us. I think the government should support farming in other ways but 100-500 millionaires unable to pass on their full wealth and having to pay inheritance tax like the rest of us isn’t something I feel outraged about.

Totally This 💯

No land prices have gone up at the roughly the same rate as ALL property prices have risen.

Big landowners like Clarkson and Dyson are essential for tenant farmers to get a foot in farming.

Many many big landowners rent agricultural land out at very reasonable rates for tenant farmers. They do so because they don't need the money for the rent (it needs to cover its cost not much more) because the payoff comes in the form of reduced IHT.

I personally know a farmer who rented land for 17 years from a landowner. Then when landowner was considering selling up he sold it to the farmer at a really good price and guaranteed the farmers mortgage!

@XmasMarkets perhaps you might like to do a bit of reading around what is happening and how it will impact farmers and YOU before making uninformed judgments?

How are you expecting people on low incomes to pay for increased food cost, given the fact so many are already struggling and having to choose between eating and heating? How will that work?

There are a lot of people on this thread who don’t understand farming that’s for sure. Land values, farming yields per acreage, finance, being asset rich but cash poor, running a business etc etc.

So A farm worth 4 million with 2 million pounds of debt has no IHT.

If all these farms have all these loans there won’t be any IHT due

IHT is worked out on the net estate after debt.

It's so depressing, isn't it? Tiny handful of millionaire farmers 'dominating the headlines', don't make me laugh?! Let's hope they enjoy eating reconstituted insect protein.

If you read the post I quoted, you will see the poster said food should cost more. I was querying how they thought that would go for people who are already on low incomes and having to choose between eating and heating. I don’t see how that would work, as things stand. Do you? How would it work?

And yes, some farmers are on low incomes. You clearly don’t have any knowledge of farming, but have you not read the thread?

If you’re concerned that people owning farms shouldn’t be wealthy, it seems counterproductive to cheer on a policy that will lead to small independent farms being hoovered up by large conglomerates. Which will then be able to call the shots on food pricing and security. And will no doubt ape most large corporates, by headquartering themselves outside of the UK so they pay no tax, while creaming off millions of billions of profits.

Doesn’t seem like an intelligent way to go about things to me, but clearly others are more interested in sticking it to farmers than protecting food accessibility or security. It’s not a mentality I admire or understand, tbh.