To support UK Farmers

[TheHateIsNotGood]

And due to KS's inability to face them in Wales today they are now thinking of going on strike. Because the govt are being too stubborn to reconsider how they apply IHT on working family farms. By all means close the loophole that allows the 'landed gentry' to take advantage of the agricultural exception but not with so blunt an instrument.

I was hoping to add a post to an existing thread but there isn't one despite it being headline news today.

Many farms don't generate a big profit because as soon as it looks like there is a lot of money coming in...they invest in machinery etc to bring down the income.

Same as many other businesses really.

And there is a cultural aspect of 'we are poor farmers'- hence thr really wealthy who drive around in battered old land rovers in ancient clothes, whose farms made £12k last year but who are minted in assets.

Farming background and used to be married to one

In what way? If you're implying it's to build solar / wind farms then there's no need to land grab. I work in this area and land owners are battering down the door to have them installed.

Sell up to who?

But we need them to carry on producing food for us !!

I've lived rurally the majority of my life. I have had farmers as customers over the years. Don't fall for the poor farmer hype. The reason for agricultural land being so expensive is down to the farming community and their union NFU. They are the ones who petitioned for these tax breaks. They are the ones who for decades farmed the subsidy system and not the actual land.

Why do you think people like Clarkson, Dyson and investment companies have bought up agricultural land. Remove the tax breaks and return the subsidy system to it's initial purpose of making the UK self sufficient and food affordable.

Once land returns to affordable prices, actual farmers can buy the land rather than work it as tenants at excessive rates.

YANBU

Have they shared the land and property like this or just the business? The farmers I know have shared the business,but not the land.

I believe it was a 50/50 split actually, the same as the rest of the country. I agree it was idiotic, though.

My father in law is 90. I’m not aware of any legal tax planning that is likely to save my family’s farm.

We’re real people that you’re talking about.

Edited to correct a typo.

err because that land will be farmed, the sad reality is that small farms get eaten up by bigger ones, been going on for decades.

Why can they not plan for IHT like everyone else? Split the ownership with their partner, pass on shares to their children earlier in life, and so on?

We need food security in the UK.
Farming seems like hard work to me undertaken by people who work from dawn till dusk, and further complicated by the vagaries of climate change and the difficulties of finding seasonal labourers willing to bring in the crops.
I'm not of the opinion the government should be targeting farmers to balance the books because they stupidly pledged not to raise any of the big three taxes.
I really don't care if farming families get a better deal when it comes to inheritance tax, I just want them to keep doing what they're doing for the benefit of the rest of us.
If billionaires are using a tax loop hole to avoid IHT target them not the genuine farmers.
When farm land is sold off to pay IHT and subsequently paved over with yet more housing (thus adding to the flooding issues) they'll be no going back.

But farmers were always going to be the ones most impacted, as they did so well out of the CAP.... yet so many still voted for it.

@PenGold
There are multiple ways to reduce the bill even if the farmer is 90
Talk to a good accountant right away

I certainly didn’t!

Its a common myth that all/most farmers voted for Brexit and its actually untrue. Remain/leave Votes were actually pretty evenly split reflecting the country as a whole. I'm from a farming background and my extended family etc all voted remain. It saddens me that this narrative about 'oh they (othering) all voted Brexit' has spread. It feels so shitty jist to be lumped together into a homogeneous group everyone can callously sneer at.

Your farm won’t be eligible for IHT so you can sleep easy. The £1m agricultural allowance is on top of the normal home owning couple’s £1m allowance, so the true allowance is £2m assuming there’s a farmhouse involved and the owners are a couple. If there’s more than one household involved, as sounds like the case here, the zero rate band could be £4m or higher.

I don’t get the argument about food production. Or rather I do get it, but I think it’s wrong. Exempting land from IHT has made land prices rocket as it’s become a massive tax dodge. That’s made it near impossible for tenant farmers to ever buy their own farms. Hopefully this will bring land prices back down and make it easier for tenant farmers to become landowners. Most farmers won’t be affected because £2m (inclusive of the normal £1m IHT allowance) is a very high threshold, land prices will fall so even a farm currently valued at £2.5m might soon be below the threshold, and it’s easy to dodge anyway by simply giving the farm to your children seven years before you and your spouse die. If a farmer is 75 and wants his children to inherit but is still unwilling to give them legal ownership today, then more fool him.

Have they shared the land and property like this or just the business? The farmers I know have shared the business,but not the land.

I don't know for certain about the land, but I know that the properties (a massive farmhouse and a converted barn) are both owned by the business. And they are both worth a significant proportion of the total value.

This
All the farmers in our area are the ones with kids in private schools driving ££££££ cars and out riding ponies. They voted for Brexit big time in our area with little thought of the impact on the rest of the community and continuously stick Tory placards on their land every single election. The Tories aren’t in power now so they’re just going to have to suck up policies that don’t suit them like we’ve all had to through 14 years of Tories. Didn’t notice any farmers or landowners having the back of local communities shafted by Tory policy the past decade and a half.

They all did in our area- we saw the placards on all their fields. They are so xenophobic and anti EU even though the whole area benefited from the EU. I have zero sympathy and give zero f*ks re inheritance tax on multi million pound properties for the likes of Tory loving land owners.

Sorry I didn’t talk about any specific financial or land ownership details in that post so please don’t make assumptions. It is the whole anti farming and uk based food production narrative as a whole that is very worrying. Wasn’t a labour aid quoted as saying that “let’s do to farmers what Thatcher did to miners.”

That's your area. Rural areas vary nationwide. You can't compare East Anglia with Eryri.

Farmer here.

There are many ways to avoid this tax. As someone said up thread farms under 2.8 million won’t be affected. You can gift it. You can move from a partnership to a company model.

The land agents are putting farmers into 3 categories. Less than 60, no bother. 60-70 you need to think and make plans. 70-80 gift quickly and 80+ you’ve left it too late.

I actually agree with this policy to a degree. There is a huge problem with elderly farmers not passing on the reins and this will help that by forcing early gifting. There is an issue with some farms where the owner 80+ living in a farmhouse has the problem of where does he live if he gifts it and I do feel sorry for them. Being harsh about it though if that situation is there it probably means the farm isn’t viable. I do think there is a small argument for it not to affect farmers over 80 as they’ve been advised for the last 20 years not to gift. I also think a lot of farmers forget how much people pay to live. Most farmers have no rent or mortgage, their council tax paid and electric paid by the business. (This will be adjusted for personal percentages in the accounts so for example only 30% of the farmhouse electric might be allowable as a business expense but the electric bill isn’t going out of their personal accounts, it’s often going out of the business account).

Put it this way, I’m also on the Education Not Taxation group and there’s a lot of farmers grumpy about VAT and IHT!!

What I am incredibly angry about though is that they’ve done sweet FA to address rollover which is a huge driver of land prices. I also think they’ve still left farmland open to be an IHT avoidance loophole as for the real big hitters they’re still getting a 20% discount on IHt.

@cardibach . Fair point. I think the price of agricultural started to increase about 20 odd years ago when "land adjacent to existing development" could be considered for housing planning permission.

And as a PP identified, given the work involved for little return, who would 'wish' such a thing on their dc. So, as I've also previously stated, it takes a die-hard dc who wants to inherit the 'farm'. But they do exist and just like we rely on other workers (NHS, Education, Police, etc) who help maintain our society (producing food) they should be encouraged not discouraged.

I am not a farmer, nor a farmer's daughter.

I lost patience with UK farming when farmers took EU handouts then voted us out of the EU. Farmers do nothing for communities. Nothing. You reap what you sow.