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  • 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.

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