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.

Could this tax cause a collapse in the price of farmland? And would that be a bad thing anyway? In that buying up farmland is no longer an inheritance tax evasion vehicle for the likes of Dyson and Clarkson, the price will fall. This will then further reduce the number of actual farms meeting the IHT threshold. Plus, why (or would it) be a bad think if the price of agricultural land fell? Presumably if the same piece of land cost £ or £££££ per acre it makes no difference to the amount of food that can be produced from it.

Not sure if you are aware. Those that build properties for their family also don't pay tax on those properties providing they remain in them for a certain period. They can then sell them and use it as a capital gains tax loophole.

Can they not pass it on now and then there will be nothing to pay!
And anyway, I'm sure I read that 1 million is exempt and then if both parents are alive you won't really have to pay it until you hit around 3 million pounds, so actually you will probably be fine.
As will a lot of others who are all just panicking instead of getting advice and making a plan.

The public funding was to keep food prices low. If farmers charged the actual cost of food production without subsidies it would be unsustainable, it almost still was even with subsidies!

why do the public resent domestic farmers being paid centrally to produce food at a price that is affordable? Would you rather we abandoned them and just imported it cheaply from places with low regulation and poor welfare standards

They cound do that in other ways.

With the greatest respect. One job I had was supplying farm vehicles. We knew when our busy period would be as our customers openly told us they needed to get rid of the subsidy money. Same with any profit the farm may show.

In the same vein, why should Mr Hoover Dyson get £10m plus in subsidy payments each year and then catch a tax break on death that no other business does.

Didn't the previous government really fuck the farmers over with brexit? And with that australian trade deal? No-one cared about the farmers then.

How is this government fucking over current farmers with inheritance tax? If I have understood it correctly, the farmers will be dead.

Their children will have to pay less tax than the children of other buisness owners if they wish to keep the farm. Also don't they get 10 years to pay this discounted tax on the money that they get?

Tell you what give me 3 million quid and tell me that I will have give 600,000 of it back over 10 years, and I'll still be richer by 2.4 million.

Absolutely 💯 not true! My family are not landed gentry. We are a generational farmers. Meaning My parents inherited their farms and the land which they have farmed. We are normal farmers who will be hit by this.

Politics of the envious and uneducated. Thankfully, they will run out of everyone else’s money. Hopefully that’s before they damage our food and employment industry too much.

Don't you go looking at it logically. Our wealthy farmer friends won't like it! 😆

@SherbetSweeties What makes your inheritance more important than somebody who leaves a business and it's assets in a different sector?

@ARealitycheck

There 'plight' may have garnered more sympathy if they hadn't rocked up in £70k Range Rovers and similar

This comment shows just how disconnected people are from food production and farming,
Range Rovers aren’t actually a posh school mum car, they are a necessary piece of equipment in a rural setting. 4 x 4’s? You ever wondered what they are for?

We do pay inheritance tax on everything else it's only farm land that's protected as it's working land.

Thry could buy the agricultural IHT allowance is one of the most popular UHT avoidance scams going. This had to be done, and can be avoided easily by small farmers (<£5m) by getting some simple IHT advice. It’s the big agricultural players who bought masses of land purely to avoid IHT who are raging, and they’ve got the Daily Mail and the Telegraph behind them. Don’t be fools folks.

Perhaps someone can answer in more detail but I'm pretty sure they can't pass it on and then continue to live/work on it.

given most farmers expect to continue working full time well into their 70s and often early 80s that creates a very difficult situation.

also what most people miss in these discussions is the farm business is often owned entirely separately to the land. Most farming businesses will probably already be set up with the next generation in partnership but the land and buildings remains in the sole ownership of the oldest generation and gets passed down on death. That can no longer happen, without sufficient notice for farmers to appropriately plan.

we aren't talking about slick adaptable business men in suits here we are talking about mostly men, mostly in their 60s and 70s who mostly left school age 14 with basic qualifications and know nothing other than how to care for the land left to them by their fathers and look after the animals the are currently farming with their sons and daughters and grandchildren.

Very sorry to hear this @ParkAndRider and there are some quite unkind comments here.

because of property and buildings is valued at approximately £2million ...

Three people working full time plus some contractors - the farm made a profit of £55k last year.

But the £2m value is likely to be significantly inflated because of agricultural property relief. It makes agricultural land artificially expensive, not because it is especially productive, but because it has such a valuable tax advantage. With the relief stripped away the farm is likely to adjust to a more realistic value, which would mean that it could be passed down more easily.

The new IHT rules don’t just apply to farms, they apply to ALL family businesses.

If your family has owned a shop on a (now) fashionable high street for the last 60 years and you were hoping your children could inherit and run it, then think again.

If the business is worth more than £1,000,000 and that’s mostly tied up in the property then your descendants will have to sell the premises and look for somewhere cheaper to move the business to.

Instead of independent family shops the locals can look forward to nameless faceless chain stores. Won’t that be lovely?

The church Commission has life eternal. It does not seem likely to die in the foreseeable future, so it will not pay IHT.

Dan Neidle seems to be relying on an assumption that most family farms are jointly owned by a married couple - but is that actually the case? How are family farms protected/passed down through the generations?

It’s crappy tax policy in my opinion. I thought agricultural property relief would change but there should have been a greater lead in time to allow farm owners in their old age to transfer them to the next generation without a risk of massive IHT charge in the next seven years. Personally I would have had an exclusion from IHT for farms owned by owner/operators so those who actually work the land don’t pay - those who own it for tax breaks and lease it out do.

Most businesses don't require the ownership of 100s of acres of land, that's why farmers are different for IHT purposes because it's recognised that you can't farm without land and land, on paper, is and expensive asset.

which subsidy payments would those be then post Brexit?

What she won't be saying is that the farm made profit over and above their wages and the mortgage free house that is heated and lit by the farm business. Remove your mortgage, electric and gas and I'm confident you could live on a lot less take home pay.

@hamstersarse As previously said, I worked in selling vehicles to the agricultural sector. Why was an £80k range rover needed when a £30k pick-up did the same job. Did that Range Rover need to be changed every two or three years?

@ARealitycheck

You have a disproportionate level of hatred for farmers, why is that?

And also an unbelievable insight into the personal finances of all farmers, including how often they change their car. I had a neighbour who was pretty skint but drove around in a Porsche, which he changed every few years on finance deals. Should I have hated him? Is that what we have to do?