Do I agree with farmers?

[JudesBiggestFan]

I'm generally politically aware but on this issue of farmers' inheritance tax, I can't decide/figure out from the media coverage if it's a good or bad plan?
Jeremy Clarkson's involvement has not helped me feel any sympathy for farmers , but I may well be wrong! For all the protest and hullabaloo...is it worth doing?

I think JC’s involvement, whilst grabbing attention, probably detracts from a very serious issue. I do think the farmers are in the right here.

I have to agree regarding Jeremy Clarkson. Can't stand the bloke.

I don't see why farmers should get any special treatment. If a person died and left an engineering business worth £900,000 to his children, they would need to pay inheritance tax on roughly £580,000 of it. Why should a farming business worth the same amount be exempt?

I think that the inheritance tax should only be payable on the sale of the farm (or part of) and should reduce on a sliding scale if the farm is not sold. So if the beneficiaries choose to sell up straight away then tax is due but it gradually reduces so if they still own the farm after 20 years then no tax is due.

That way farming families won't have to sell up to pay the tax but if you inherit a farm that you don't want and sell up you can pay like everybody else.

I see where you are coming from but perhaps if you could pass on businesses like this then we would still have more industry.

I’m a farmer. I agree with the changes. However I think there should be an exemption that if you are 75+ as long as you gift your land in the next 18 months if you die and your kids are farming they shouldn’t have to pay. These old farmers have been told for 30 years not to gift and it’s possibly too late for many of them.

My brother farms 200 acres, mostly cereal in Lincolnshire. That's a pretty small farm. It's arable land, roughly £10,000 an acre and so on paper is worth £2m. That's without the tractors and combine needed to run it. It was originally bought and paid for by our great grandfather pre WW1. It's a small, family farm that just about keeps going.

For his son to pay IT on it means he'll have to sell off so many acres to pay the tax demanded that he can't farm it and make a living any longer, so the whole thing will be sold for huge amounts to go to the government, even though they pay tax on everything they earn off the land. That means his son (who works the farm with him) will have to give up farming as soon as my brother dies and find some other job to do. He's currently late 20s and farming is all he's done.

You decide if that's fair.

I think this is a sensible suggestion, and I think RR dived headlong into presumed cost savings without proper research or thought.

It really won't help our food production if farms lose a % of the land to pay IHT every time they get passed down. And it won't encourage hard pressed farmers to carry on farming.

I didn’t think I liked Jeremy Clarkson but having seen Clarksons farm and the effort he made for so little money I support the farmers. I know it’s only a TV programme and will have been edited for drama but I’m much more likely to read news articles about the weather and harvests and prices of wheat than I was three years ago and can see how much is going against the small farmer.

i think the government should’ve found a way of taxing the people who buy a farm to avoid paying inheritance tax rather than those who have had a farm in their possession for generations.

Why can’t he gift his son the land?

The amount of tax raised will pay for the running of the NHS for a day - (£200m ish) so it's not really about the tax take (IMO). The amount of damage that it will do to our food security and rural life is massive.

All that will happen is that smaller farms will have to be sold off and they will be bought up by vast agri businesses or solar farms with foreign owners, who don't pay tax in this country anyway.

If you want to ensure that the very wealthy landowners who have bought up land to avoid IHT etc pay, then penalising small farms in the process isn't the way to do it. And as a PP said, bringing in the change so quickly means that farmers may not have time to transfer land to their children to avoid the tax.

The return on capital for farmers is one of the lowest of any industry, given how labour intensive it is and how much equipment costs. Perhaps it should only have been bought on farms with a turnover over a certain threshold or something. If you are turning over £50k on a farm where its worth means you will have an IHT bill of £600k, then all you are doing is destroying the long term viability of smaller farms.

Because farmers are feeding the country and if they arent selling the land then they arent profiting from the value are they? Unless you're happy with the prospect of food shortages then I don't see how this is a good idea at all.

I daresay that will end up being the solution, if that's the only way to avoid paying tax. I'm not aware of how much can be gifted away, or over how long a period - I guess it's something DB will look into.

I'm simply saying that deciding to tax farmers on land that's been passed down, along with machinery isn't just 'taxing the rich'.

It will hit lots of small family farms.

The value of the land has been inflated because of its special tax status. None of these farms actually make any money yet have hugely valuable assets. I don’t know what the answer is but I can’t see it being good for small farmers to have billionaires buying up land purely for its long term investment potential.

It’s nuts to let whether you like Jeremy Clarkson or not affect how you feel on this issue!

@WhitegreeNcandle surprised at this. I am also from a farming family and I don’t know anyone who agrees this is a good idea - not just from their own perspective / whether they personally will be affected but more in breaking up the fundamental fabric of the countryside and the effect it will have on food security.

what sort of farmer are you, and why do you agree with it? How long has your farm been in your family for? What ramifications will this have for you?

Yep, I’m a (previously) Labour voter and halfway through a PhD in succession in farming, and Labour have either got their sums wrong or are misleading the public. Given the price of land, machinery, and buildings, most working farms will be asset valued at well over 1 million. It’s not liquid, it’s simply the equipment they need to keep farming, and selling it off means they go bust. There are a few e.g hill farms, city farms, and tiny parcels of land who call themselves farms (but owned by e.g investors who don’t actually work the land, and they’re the people who this policy is targeting) who might come under that £1 million mark, but it’s definitely not ‘most farmers’ like Starmer is saying. It’s pretty baffling, this isn’t going to raise a lot of money but will result in food- producing farms being sold to e.g Dyson, builders, and foreign investors who won’t contribute to rural communities, innovate in environmental farming, nor pay a lot of tax here. The massive farming companies rely on cheap and often foreign labour, denying opportunities to the young people who might want to have their own farms one day, innovate and diversify (farm shops, farm parks and PYO patches anyone!). The options for the kids who want to farm will be to be simply farm labourers doing seasonal work in sometimes pretty crappy conditions, rather than entrepreneurs. The reason lots of farmers don’t simply just retire and gift their farms to their kids is that often there isn’t enough income to support everyone, it helps when kids have off- farm incomes for as long as possible these days.
The initial IHT policy was put in place to enable farming to continue in the UK at a time where food shortages where a very real possibility, and we’re looking at that sort of risk again now if this goes through. I think they’re just banking on imports at this point.

Well, I think we'll look back at this moment in a few years and know the answer.

By then, the cost of food will have increased enormously, eating meat or drinking diary will have become unaffordable because both have to be imported from abroad due to insufficient domestic production, the farm land sold off will have been covered with solar farms/ wind turbines that don't provide enough energy so we have black outs or rationing and our economy will be in the toilet. Add that to declining living standards, sky-high tax rates, assisted dying on steroids, all public sector workers WFH full-time (paid for 5 days but working 3) and Lords All and Vince ruling the roost and we will be in socialist Nirvana, no?

Small farms have to be destroyed to achieve net zero.

This is bit like my take.

The land will be sold for solar farms, owned and operated by foreign companies, using kit made in China. The Green Revolution will push this country to its knees - we will face enormous food insecurity but the eco-nuts like Miliband do not care. IHT is the Trojan horse being used by Reeves and Starmer to sell it to the public. They know most people aren't aware of the above. Amazing post btw Twocheers.

I support the farmers. If they sell, we'll be reliant on imports and the financial and environmental impact that will bring.

I think this too. I can’t hand on my business without tax to my children and neither could my father hand on his assets. I think it’s outrageous to suggest that the tax burden should be shouldered by working people so these businesses can just hand on the privilege to the next generation.

This was my initial thoughts, but then they said only a very small % of all farm would be caught and I tended to think actually it might be good to target the Dysons of the country. So which is true? Are the treasury telling an outrageous lie about it only affecting 500 farms?

"There were a total of 462 inherited farms valued above £1m in 2021-22, according to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC):" so the 500 wouldn't be an outrageous claim ?

For me this is the crux of the issue. Is it something that could really seriously affect small family run farms or is it all a bit of a storm in a teacup that the Clarksons and Nigel's of the world have jumped on. To me Clarkson being involved says it's probably the latter, and I certainly think it turns many people off.

Farmers have been getting special treatment. They don't want that to stop even though the government plans will still give them special treatment. IHT at half the normal rate with 10 years to pay it back.

And we done actually want to encourage farmland to be hoovered up by the super rich, which is what is currently happening.