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.

Really on fertile land when we have thousands of acres of land where there's scant topsoil, it's granite or limestone scrubland. Suitable for sheep. The sun shines on scrublands too.

They're being forced to sell in order to pay the tax

The NFU has already asked, before today's misunderstanding (shitshow in Wales), that everyone 'behaves'. Not now.

It depends.
There are tax allowances for passing homes to children
there are tax allowances for all adults
there are farm allowances
so up to £2.8m is tax free, the rest is taxed so most passes down

They already offer plant services here for farming, putting in septic tanks, dry stone walling, hedge cutting.

One point of my initial post was to indicate decline of self sufficiency in the most recent decades which is a fact.

Nothing more, nothing less.

That is so very true. These are mainly owned by large contractors. They may also own farmland but make millions from contractor services.

@ERnomore and how much easier would that life be if the value of your acres of land went down by eg 70%. It is only those with large pockets of land at inflated prices that will lose out.

This modest family farm in the South East does (family only, no staff). As I said upthread, on one particularly difficult year when the children were tiny, total profit was £4k and we were eligible for free school meals. Our annual income has been subject to higher rate tax once since the farm was purchased in 1935. We purchased the current combine harvester third-hand and maintain all machinery ourselves.

Why shouldn’t farmers pay Inheritance Tax?? Why are they uniquely exempt ?

Shroedinges Farmers … both eeking out a living, poor as church mice, yet eligible for Inheritance Tax.

Read yesterday that the government line that “70% of farms will be unaffected” is based on a misunderstanding/ misreading of the actual published paper. That stated that 70% of estates would be unaffected.

Some dimwit has misapplied the word estate to mean farm, rather than the sum total of worldly goods left by the deceased.

So if you have a two acre smallholding with half a dozen lifestyle llamas and are eligible for agricultural relief (due to the livestock) then you’ll be amongst the 70% of unaffected estates.

But the farmer with 200 acres who sells his produce to the public and local retailers, nope, he’ll likely be caught in the tax if his land is high value. If his descendants sell land to pay the tax then it won’t be a viable farming business so they’ll be better off getting rid of the machinery and going in for carbon offsetting or solar panels.

We’ll lose locally produced food, but Ed Miliband can claim we’re getting closer to net zero so all will be well. Assuming that air miles for food imports aren’t counted in his net zero calculations… 🙄

Well let's hope around here can feed the people 🙄

It's clearly due to ignorance though .

Blair was a champagne socialist money grabbing war monger. He currently has a massive housing portfolio. So I wouldn't take much comfort from anything he might have had to say.

We need farmland for farming.
Not housing or solar.

Italy :
www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/07/italy-bans-pv-from-agricultural-land/

And got nothing in farm subsidy payments either I bet! 😅

Cut your cloth accordingly like the rest of us. If you can't make a business viable, sell up in whole or in part. No other business ever got the level of public funding agriculture does.

Because we all have to eat and no foods = no food!

Just like the school vat thread politics if envy race to the bottom just awful

Another post missing the point. If they do this who is going to grow our food??

Does this mean for small businesses that are ongoing with the owner dies the value is tax emempt up to £2.8m?

Let me guess , you have a vested interest in both. 🙄

Well if this government continues with the way it’s currently going pretty soon we will be self-sufficient in food again - prices will rise, the poor will starve to death as they can’t afford the inflated cost so ultimately the population will drop until only the wealthy (plus a few servants) are left and they can all live off UK produce once again. 🤦‍♀️

They are uniquely exempt because every other government has realised that to produce food you need land and land owned by family farms has a high value on paper, even if the occupiers of that land don't ever actually benefit from the value of the land financially in their lifetimes.

I'm a tenant farmer and my elderly landlord will now be subject to IHT - previously we were confident that their children would pick up where they left off but now they will most likely have to sell some of the land we are currently farming. We won't be able to afford to buy it to keep the farm intact and with less land than we have now it won't be financially viable any more for us to make any kind of living from. The land most likely to be sold we already know will go for solar panels or rewilding, it won't continue to be productive farmland and we as the actual farmers of the land won't see a penny of the value of it ever but will be the ones harmed by this tax.

Planning regulations do need tightened up on solar farms. But surely it would be preferable for you to be able to purchase your farm when desirability of the land and it's value reduces with the removal of tax breaks, rather than pay a landlord?

Also Farmers do already get financial assistance due to the requirement for food production in the form of subsidy payments.

@G1nT1n my son was at public school so what ? The state sector cannot cope as it is food security is important without farming we have nothing why can’t people see this