Farmers call for inheritance tax U-turn ahead of crunch talks with ministers
NFU president Tom Bradshaw is to meet Steve Reed on Monday amid a growing furore over the Chancellor’s decision to make farms subject to inheritance tax.
Under plans announced at the Budget, inheritance tax will be charged at 20% on farms worth more than £1 million, although the Chancellor has said in some cases the threshold could in practice be around £3 million.
“Final straw”
But writing in the Daily Telegraph, Mr Bradshaw said the prospect of being unable to pass their businesses on to their children would be “the final straw” for many farmers.
He said: “The vast majority of the people who will bear the brunt of this decision aren’t wealthy people with huge cash reserves hidden away.
Tax experts have suggested the changes could affect fewer than 500 farms a year, once the tax thresholds and farmers giving their property to their children before they die are taken into account.
“Skewed view”
But Mr Bradshaw said the Treasury had a “completely skewed view of the structure of farming in the UK”.He said: “Very few viable farms are worth under £1 million.
That could buy you 50 acres and a house today. No viable food-producing business is 50 acres. The average farm in the UK is more than 250 acres.
“I don’t think it is affordable to carry on with a relief like that when our public finances are under so much pressure.”
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Essentially like so much modern government they didn’t do their research. It really needs to be recalibrated so that the mesh lets the smaller fish escape and catches the massive psuedofarmers avoiding tax. Exactly the same approach crashed the NHS reforms of Kenneth Clark which were imposed ideology without any research into the actual processes on the ground.
You have to wonder the suitability and experience of the people who carry out the impact assessments for govt prior to implementing policies, as there are similar issues of glaring omissions of rudimentary problems that occur time after time.
All driven by ideology which might be reasonable in a wholly urban society where every one lives in 1-30 rooms relying purely on cashable investments and incomes from employment. By now it should be obvious that there is a limit to the viable divisibility of the majority of family farms.