In the news

Interesting collab

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fpick-a-lane-v0-8dtvy2mtov1e1.jpeg%3Fwidth%3D640%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D474928ae5ac9827934d6703ca763d1cd064509e7

A phalanx of fake farmers leaving the tufton street offices

Was Sir Bufton Tufton with them?

Dominating the news cycle tho....which may be preferable to the risks around the changes in employer NI contributions or the disagreements on projected growth and the market reaction.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/19/opinion/bird-flu-disease-outbreak.html

H5N1 in the States. Apparently not enough is being done to give the worlds scientists a clear picture of the new virus currently affecting poultry and pigs in the US.

No brown in Town

The daily mail will explode

Pretty sure RFK has this covered

I’ve yet to see anything beyond emotive arguments (pretty standard for British politics) from the farmers side most of which contradict themselves or are so extreme to be false.

There seems to be a general confusion between farmers and landowners.

Feels like there’s way more revenue to be had taxing gambling and massive corporations

Aaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah... hahahahahah.

Just imagine.

I wonder how far back in time you'd have to go, to make the one change which would put that on the table.

I understand that their being excluded from inheritance tax originally was not meant to be forever - is that correct? I think also that they're now going to be taxed at 20% instead of 40%.

I've not seen (though I've not closely looked) a justification for the original exclusion, nor a reason for them to benefit from the lower rate of tax now, let alone for a total exclusion. Is there a reasonable justification for their exemption other than "just don't want to pay it / asset rich cash poor etc"

Farming isn’t, and hasn’t been for a very long time, an economically viable occupation without significant subsidies. Brexit allowed the government of the time to make sweeping changes that changed that- and reduced the subsidies on offer from what little I can see.

So you have people with 8M in assets making £40,000 per year (ostensibly), after subsidies have been taken into account.

I don’t see how you fix this - not without dramatic food price inflation anyway.

Could closing the tax loophole and instituting a “good farmer” check on any agricultural land purchase drive down the value of said land? Probably. Would that help farmers? It might drop them below the IHT threshold and make it easier for them to buy more land to farm.

I’d love to see Dyson’s estate have to pay 40% on his massive landholding I have to say.

That’s my understanding, also a higher threshold.
I’ve lots of questions I’ve not seen remotely addressed by the comments I’ve read and interviews I’ve seen.

The BBC Verify article about farming IHT tax is okay, but it just explains where the different figures come from.

I think the critical thing is that many experts in the area are saying the government has got their figures wrong when they calculated the impact this will have. They used the figures for agricultural property relief (APR), and not for business property relief (BPR). They're then saying "only x% of farms would be impacted", ignoring the fact that APR claims =/= farms. If I were a farmer who died, APR covers my land and buildings. However, machinery, livestock, deadstock, and diversified activities fall under BPR.

Looking at the APR figures here, 59% of APR claims in '21-'22 were for less than £250k. There isn't a food-producing farm in the country that is worth less than £250k for the land and buildings. Those are clearly not farms. They're just parcels of land with potentially a barn on them.

So the government has made a mistake in the figures they used to work out how to achieve their stated aim of taxing the most wealthy farmers. However, when experts have pointed this out to them, the ministers (i.e. non-experts, like myself) have just doubled down, rather than going "oh okay, tell me more about this and let's have another look just in case we did get it wrong".

Example article that I think sums up the issues fairly concisely: https://www.caav.org.uk/news/jeremys-blog-15th-november-2024-budget-confusion-and-challenges

Note I'm not advocating that things should have stayed the way they were. I think the government needs to listen to the experts and go back to have another look at their data and the threshold they set.

Would that help farmers? It might drop them below the IHT threshold and make it easier for them to buy more land to farm.

Maybe getting the value of the land in line with the income you can gather from it would be a good thing. However, I bet that may farmers also like to see / rely on land assets worth £8m and would rail against anything that decreased the value of that as well.

Now farmers want to cite experts? ;-)

But they keep saying that the value of the land doesn’t matter to them?

Please just put the wealthy landowner class out of their misery and nationalise food agriculture. Make farmers civil servants with a good pension and a property tenure.

Also, the absolute state of farmers posturing in the news over the last few days about "protecting the countryside" as if farming isn't a highly industrialised and bio negative practice in the round.

Doesn’t that overlook the farming of rented land, not all farms are owner farmed.

I did see but can’t find maybe the OBR(?) or similar support the Government statements.

Theres also something slightly amiss in the idea that one landowner single handedly farms their land passing it down only once they die to one successor.

Wait I thought we weren't allowed to do this to r flag

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pRoTekT aR3 flag!11!1!!

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Yeah, I think one of the things is the government has pointed to Paul Johnson from the IFS who have backed their position. There's no shortage of economists and academics backing the government on this. This is appealing to authority, though. In other words; "look, this authority figure agrees with me so I'm right", rather than actually offering any supporting evidence.

However, farming is a strange business. There's lots of peculiarities. I myself am definitely not an expert. I'm just interested as I've known quite a few farmers over the years and have lived rurally for most of my life. The huge majority of people (myself included) just wouldn't go into farming because it doesn't make much sense to do so. You've got to really love farming, or see yourself as having no other feasible choices.

As such, the real experts are people like agricultural land valuers, land agents, or agricultural economists. Why are they not being listened to?

I just did a quick search and apparently 14% of farms in the UK are tenanted, and 31% are mixed tenure. I don't know what mixed tenure means in this context. Some forms of tenancy will allow passing down the tenancy to an hier. For example my mother's former partner rented the farm off the local council and was able to pass it down through the generations.

What do you think is amiss about the idea of one farmer single handedly farmings and then passing it down once they die to one successor?

That scenario is definitely not typical. Farming is hard, but farmers tend to do it until they're old because most won't have built up much of a pension. If they gift the farm to their heir more than 7y before they die then there's no IHT to pay, but certainly sometimes the parent will die before the 7 years have passed. As it's a hard job, sometimes farmer has a heart attack while farming and so the estate will pass down unexpectedly early.

What do you think is amiss about the idea of one farmer single handedly farmings and then passing it down once they die to one successor?

It builds in bias for people with family connections. Shouldn't farming, and all other choices in life, be equally available to all?

Can we call farmers kids nepo babies?

Very fair question. Yes is my answer. I think that's what landlords of farms who rent them out to tenant farmers would argue they're doing. Allowing those who want to farm access to that job at an accessible price point. Sadly buying your own working farm is eye-wateringly expensive these days.

I could be wrong, but I don't think there are queues of people who want to get into farming in this country but can't do so. It's a hard life.

In the village I live in, a cow farm had been up for sale for several years unable to find a buyer. Just as we moved the local wildlife trust announced that after crowdfunding they had bought it for a reduced rate. They're now setting about rewilding the place and turning it into a nature reserve.

I'm thrilled about this for hopefully obvious reasons. More nature and a nice place to go with my kids that we'll walk or cycle to! To my surprise, loads of locals were up in arms because they felt we needed more farms not fewer, and were worried about food security. I couldn't understand this POV. They'd tried for years to find a buyer, reduced the price several times and still couldn't. Also, I don't think many in the village would honestly be able to afford locally reared beef very regularly during a cost of living crisis.

What evidence is required to agree?

I’m not convinced IHT relief should be the mechanism to encourage people to farm.

My issue is what is the heir doing in the mean time? Where are they living, how are they supporting themselves.

There’s loads more questions that I’ve not been able to find answers to. What currently happens if I inherited a farm and cease farming, is the sale tax free from an inheritance perspective?

What do you think is amiss about the idea of one farmer single handedly farmings and then passing it down once they die to one successor?

Seems fine to me, but I'm still not sure why farming (as opposed to a father who ran any other business type) would be exempt from the inheritance tax. I imagine a construction company is also hard on the body and people could die suddenly for example if that's really the cause of concern