Far right attempting to subvert the farmers protests in London.

I think the government should propose increasing the farmers inheritance tax in line with everyone elses. That will shut them up.

I mean, the protests were/are called No Farmers, No Food for a reason…..they’re going to have to keep on farming if we want food!

You can always get it from someone else, everyone needs clothing but how much is made here,

In 2020, the UK imported 46% of the food it consumed. Having a diverse range of international sources makes food supply more resilient, as if the production or output of one source is disrupted, other sources can meet demand. No one country provided more than 11% of those imports, a picture which has been stable for some time. By value, £48 billion of food, feed, and drink (FFD) was imported and £21.4 billion was exported.

I do think they need to tweak it to allow the older farmers the time to pass it to the kids.

What the difference between this and blocking the roads with slow moving tractors?

Nothing. Any illegal activity perpetrated by any protestor no matter what the subject of the protest should be treated equally by the police and courts.

I do like the idea of dipping the tanks and charging those found to be using red diesel illegally

https://bsky.app/profile/josiah.writes.news/post/3lczy2becz22g

You can always get it from someone else, everyone needs clothing but how much is made here,

Yeah – sod the air miles and pollution and welfare – fly all the food in!

Yeah – sod the air miles and pollution and welfare – fly all the food in!

I think the point being made is that farming seems to get a special pass. We need/needed steel, coal, clothes, cars, etc. all of those businesses don’t/didn’t get the same support and don’t get this special tax exemption.

We need/needed steel, coal, clothes, cars, etc.

Not the same – does Jaguar pay inheritance tax, does Tata steel, does Primark etc.?

They are run to different rules and all have their own (tax haven) ways of avoiding tax. They are not passed down parent to child.

Perhaps a solution could be a delayed inheritance tax? To take farms out of the hands of investors perhaps you shouldn’t be able to sell the farm or substantial assets within 5 years of the death of the owner. If it is sold then tax it at a punitive rate. The investors will soon stop investing if they can’t get their money out.

After 5 years of being farmed by the family it was left to then let it go untaxed so it can carry on to be farmed.

All businesses can get a tax exemption except for property ones

I’ve not really been looking at the details.  Why can’t a farm be a business with family as shareholders/directors. Then surely IHT/CGT is on shares.  The bulk of the worth of the farm stays in the business and only incurs a tax bill when sold.

There are lots of ways to set up a farm as a business to reduce the IHT liabilities, I’m sure.

Interesting when they were interviewing some of the farmers at the protest on 5Live earlier, IHT was the last of a long list of issues they have with government policy.  One of them had been attending protests in London since March – before the budget and indeed this government.

Seems the media and the Clarksons of this world are distracting us from bigger problems.

Why can’t a farm be a business with family as shareholders/directors.

It can, but any increase in value of the farm assets will be reflected in the valuation of the shares so you don’t really achieve anything from an IHT point of view, there may be other reasons to do it but there are downsides as well, such as, any property in a company is essentially subject to potential double taxation.

The problem is treating a particular sort of business differently from others. If you have a family owned engineering company, bike shop, restaurant chain etc the estate has to pay inheritance tax on assets over the normal limits. If you have a farm business you get an exemption now. Why is that fair? Bike shops are also having a hard time – why don’t they get the same exemption?

If small and medium  farms are a special case because it’s so hard to make a profit, address that whilst removing removing the investment advantage. Be prepared for struggling bike shops and other retailers to also argue that they’re a special case (which they are until we sort out a more equitable way of taxing online retailers).

The problem is treating a particular sort of business differently from others. If you have a family owned engineering company, bike shop, restaurant chain etc the estate has to pay inheritance tax on assets over the normal limits.

It doesn’t.

I don’t get why people can’t see how important farming is. Do you want your chicken battery farmed from America? Your beef stuffed full of hormones and antibiotics from Australia? As a country we should have some self sufficiency when it comes to food production.

I don’t think UK farming is perfect. The fact that it can be better for farmers to rewild fields or grow a non edible crop is pretty bonkers. The icing on top is that farms aren’t even slightly viable without government subsidies.

We (as a country) have an absurdly low average food cost. It should probably cost more to be honest. Supermarkets are partly to blame, the general public and well. A race to the bottom in price just serves to make everything pretty shitty and the normalise the shittyness.

I kind of agree about food costs. I live in a rural area have friends that farm. Try to buy good local meat etc but it’s still cheap relative to my income.

When young my dad was a head of maths and my mum was a nurse. Yet I remember sugar sandwiches because jam was expensive. A chippy tea was a treat. Lots of cheap stews etc. but there weren’t large supermarkets driving prices down and massively impacting UK farming by buying cheap and at the same time impacting CO2 emissions by driving the international food markets. But they are international businesses so are farmers in other nations suffering the decreased prices?

I have chucked my opinions in back up this thread, don’t think for one minute these farming folk have a heart of gold toiling in the fields for a pittance so we can enjoy our turnips. I know I have lived among them for 61 years, they don’t give a **** about poor people. They are business people with a business that has had exceptional trading circumstances, they were conned by the supermarkets i will give them that and milk businesses like Arla. They all know the soloution… become a limited company but most don’t want their finances in the public domain….

And remember folks agricultural land is dead, nothing will grow without nitrogen or slurry injection,  lime and so on.

catdrasFree Member
I don’t get why people can’t see how important farming is.

I do think people do see that, but unfortunately a part of the population look at farmers as people who have historically taken subsidies from the state and live very well so the sympathy level isn’t really that high amongst them. For every story about the effort that some farmers have to make ends meet there are others about how they manage to ensure that their income is small whilst appearing to be well off in lifestyle terms.

I don’t get why people can’t see how important farming is.

What’s that got to do with the right to inherit land and a company of limitless value tax free?

Farming is essential. The right to hand on huge amounts of land tax free is not. Pretty easy to argue that the tax loop hole will destroy farming if it isn’t closed.

“All businesses can get a tax exemption except for property ones”

“It doesn’t”

I’m really curious about these statements, as they break my understanding of how IHT works. Do you have any more details or a reference on the exemption(s) you’re referring to?

Business Property Relief which it is proposed is similarly going to be restricted to £1 million.

Business Property Relief which it is proposed is similarly going to be restricted to £1 million.

Thank you – I didn’t know about that. As you say, it seems that exemption is also proposed to be limited in an identical way to agricultural relief.

Rural land owners are still getting a better deal than other business owners after these changes, in fact this whole noisy debacle is because they are to be treated more like other wealth holders on their deaths, but still on better terms

“Rural land owners are still getting a better deal than other business owners after these changes, in fact this whole noisy debacle is because they are to be treated more like other wealth holders on their deaths, but still on better terms”

Please could you expand on the “better deal than other business owners” that you are seeing?

I wasn’t aware of “business relief” until 30 mins ago, but now I know the term, it’s easy to find memos from KPMG etc stating that exactly the same limitations will be applied to business relief as agricultural relief.

Now, is there a difference to the IHT treatment of e.g. financial assets – yes. But you specifically refer to “business owners”, who seem to get an identical exemption today, and expect to have it limited in an identical way in future?

So is there something else, perhaps, to be aware of?

We (as a country) have an absurdly low average food cost. It should probably cost more to be honest.

That’s all well and good if you’re fortunate enough not to be one of the 14 million already living in poverty in the UK.

That’s part of the same problem, those 14 million are poor so that the .1% can be rich.  That’s literally how it has to work.

The UK farming thing is a distraction.

Where do you think Tomatoes and Olive oil comes from?

I’ll give you a hint, it’s not from the UK.

You can always get it from someone else, everyone needs clothing but how much is made here,

There was literally just a resilience test done on this. Climate change is going to make it ever harder to ‘just get it from somewhere else’. The Guardian did an article about it yesterday that scratched the surface. But in very simple terms, no, we cannot buy our way to food security in a world of increasing climate change and biodiversity loss.

The UK farming thing is a distraction.

Where do you think Tomatoes and Olive oil comes from?

I’ll give you a hint, it’s not from the UK.

And likewise, where does a lot of the stuff the UK farmers produce go to, another hint it it is not the UK either.

If the farmers want to play the ‘will have no food without them’ game then maybe they should be producing more food that the UK wants (use of huge polytunnels for example) and then just sell to UK.

Just a point about food security, if growing our own is so important the sooner these family run farms that are so borderline they can’t afford tax either as a limited company or a family run business go and replaced by someone who can grow food efficiently the better.

I don’t get why people can’t see how important farming is

I do, which is why I realise that agri land needs to be taxed fairly so that the price isn’t pushed up by rich people trying to avoid IHT.

The price will drop down to what it is actually worth as farmland, almost all actual farmers will drop out of the £3m band and so won’t have to worry about it any more…

What’s the problem?

I don’t get why people can’t see how important farming is. Do you want your chicken battery farmed from America? Your beef stuffed full of hormones and antibiotics from Australia? As a country we should have some self sufficiency when it comes to food production.

That’s the bit of the circle I can’t square, and seems to be the non-IHT part of their complaints. They should be growing as much of our food needs as the climate allows, and to a better health/ethical standard than other countries, but supermarket price gouging and wider food poverty is screwing them over. And I have no problem paying them to for better environmental work such as flood prevention.

Yes, we can import our food needs. That didn’t work so well when half Europe’s grain was stuck in Ukraine and prices shot up.

Given the current state of the world, we need to be ensuring UK based food security. But that is a different argument to the proposed IHT changes to rich landowners.

I do think they need to tweak it to allow the older farmers the time to pass it to the kids.

And the same for every other business with an older owner?

Please could you expand on the “better deal than other business owners” that you are seeing?

IHT at half the rate other companies will be paying and 10 years to pay the tax (interest free) seems pretty sweet to me.

dyna-tiFull Member
I think the government should propose increasing the farmers inheritance tax in line with everyone elses. That will shut them up.

And then really piss on their chips by offering the same sweetheart deal to anyone owning and operating a Pub or small shop?

Why can’t a farm be a business with family as shareholders/directors.

If a farm were set up as a limited company, the organisation would have to do an annual return and pay tax on profits as well as the farmer paying income tax. The properties and equipment would also been seen as a business asset rather than personal.

Living a working in a rural community, with many farmers – it’s not the farmers (at least in my area) that are complaining. Probably because I’m in the Cotswolds, where every celeb (Jeremy Clarkson inc.) and investment banker has bought up property and farms. It’s these very wealthy land owners (not farmers) that are complaining about the policy in my shop.

Where do you think Tomatoes and Olive oil comes from, I’ll give you a hint, it’s not from the UK.

I don’t know about olive oil, but lots of supermarket tomatoes are grown at Thanet Earth, the UK’s largest greenhouse complex, it covers 200 acres.

I buy UK tomatoes for my shop – but they do cost me (and my customers) around 1/4 more per kilo to buy in than imported from a wholesaler.

However with the weather that Spain has had recently, imported fruit and veg price are rapidly rising at the moment so I’d expect Spanish tomatoes will match UK prices now. Saville oranges are particularly scarce, my local jams and marmalade supplier is having a hard time trying to source any at all and doesn’t want to relabel all of his marmalade jars.

“IHT at half the rate other companies will be paying and 10 years to pay the tax (interest free) seems pretty sweet to me.”

Did you read the link above about Business Relief?

In current form, it provides exactly the same exemption to non-listed company shares as Agricultural relief does to farms.

According to the Policy Paper, exactly the same restrictions will be applied to Business Relief as Agricultural relief.

According to this page it is possible to pay over ten years for the IHT due on unlisted shares (and it says interest applies btw).

So as far as I can see from the .gov sources, there is no current or proposed difference between the treatment of a farm as opposed to a non-farm business when it comes to IHT exemptions. This was a surprise to me. 24h ago I had the same understanding that you do, and also viewed it as unfair. I’m still unconvinced that the disparity with the treatment of financial assets (e.g. a pension pot) is justified by some social good, but that’s a separate topic

The new limits on both agricultural relief and business relief are clearly a good thing. I’m not convinced it’s reasonable to make the change with little notice. Presumably the solution is to structure a farming business as a Ltd company or LLP, and give the next generation their shares well before dying. So there will be a bunch of farms that don’t have time to do that and get caught out in the meantime, and then in a few years this will be moot?