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Hmm it's no London, Birmingham, or Manchester, for sure.

Edit - done some googling and it's worse than the Derbyshire average for ethnic diversity and far worse than the UK average. Ho hum, this definitely makes me feel worse about it as a settlement.

+1 to what @EcuriePeril said. Having lived many places in the UK and elsewhere, I think somewhere like Belper in Derbyshire would be about perfect to retire to, personally. In fact I'd be planning for that if I didn't already live so close!

I don't know it as well yet, but have always felt similarly about Bakewell.

If you really want to prioritize train links to London, Grantham had a fast line in. I do not know how nice it is to live in, though.

Places like Bedford are becoming increasingly popular with London commuters. Leighton Buzzard or Milton Keynes are also definitely within budget, although I personally dislike both having grown up nearby.

Given what you've said about your parents, one other thing to consider is how multicultural the place is. Sounds like they'd like somewhere where there is a good diversity of people. I have a friend who lives on the outskirts of Wolverhampton, for example, which fits the bill in many ways. However, his one complaint is that most of the people he comes across were born and raised around there and don't have particularly diverse experiences or worldviews.

I'm very happy to volunteer time and money to keep LFGSS and the other forums going. Internet forums have been a positive part of my life for gosh, probably 20 years now.

I suspect the new act will be modified in time as ridiculous situations come to pass that aren't achieving what the designers of the act wanted. I absolutely understand the desire to not be the person in the crosshairs, and I'd do the same in your shoes, Velocio!

Definitely the Volvo out of that bunch! Lovely cars.

Obviously there's room for lots of personal opinion, but I'd swerve the E Class out of that list. They're not as nice as they really should be.

Well in good news I took it to the body shop earlier and they said everything looks perfect other than the number plate. The best possible outcome for everyone.

I'm honestly amazed. It obviously wasn't whiplash or car crush levels of force, but it really was a decent knock. I'm floored at how well the car stood up to the impact.

I assume what really happened is he put his foot to the floor on the brakes and ABS prevented him from skidding. I bought a car a while back with a new set of really cheap tyres on it, and they were lethal. I replaced them very quickly.

I don't have a dashcam, I do have a witness. He said he was reversing because he had been waiting 10 minutes, thought the lights must be broken, and was reversing to then pass the person in front and go through the red light. Moron.

I rang the police on the non emergency number to ask if I should report it and shared my concerns about a dangerously poor standard of driving and lack of attention paid. They said they'd only do anything about it with dashcam footage or a witness who was prepared to testify in court.

I've decided to get the car booked in with a body shop to assess and quote for any damage that may or may not be there, both front and back. If it's front then it's clearly an insurance job. If it's rear I'll let Mr 17 y.o. know what the damage is, and unless he can pay for it upfront, ahead of the work being carried out, I'll go via his insurance. If the assessment isn't free, Mr 17 y.o. will be paying for it.

Thank you all for the perspectives. I completely understand those of you saying don't even think about anything other than claiming on his insurance. I know I'm being far nicer than I need to be, and I'm good with that.

Fingers crossed it does end up just being the numberplate 🙂

Could well have been. I see so much of it on the bike that it really depresses me. Almost certainly distracted somehow, whether it was a phone, changing the heating, or just general daydreaming on a bit of road he knows well.

He had his phone up in a holder on the dash and said it had fallen off in the impact. He said he was using Waze, but also said he was headed from his parent's house to his girlfriend's house 🤔

Renault 25 V6 turbo is indeed an awesome first car! My first was a 2000 Clio, and I can confirm it was made of soft French cheese 😉

I'm definitely not keen on reporting to insurance until I know there is damage costing more than the driver is willing or able to pay for. Doing so will make my premiums increase despite neither collision being my fault. I did check with the local police if I should report the collision to them, and they said only to report if someone was injured or there was significant damage causing the road to be blocked.

But yup, @pifko totally with you on it not being my fault they're 17. It's absolutely their fault and was a very avoidable thing had they left enough space and paid close enough attention

Not exactly car appreciation, but I'd appreciate some car based advice from those who know more than me.

I've had quite the week, especially given how little I drive!

Thursday morning sat in a queue waiting for a red light to change. After about 2 minutes sat there, reverse lights come on in front of me. I get in reverse, but before I can take the handbrake off, the bloke has reversed straight into me. He has a terrible attitude when he gets out - "oh well, stuff happens, this is why we have insurance, why are you acting frustrated about it?"

Friday afternoon I slow to give way to a bus coming under a low bridge. High vehicles have to go into the middle under this bridge, and there's a big flashy LED sign telling me and drivers behind me that there's an oncoming vehicle in the middle of the road. Boom, the car behind smashes into the back of me with quite some force. He says he has his brakes full on to try and slow down but his car skidded. This driver has what I feel is a normal attitude to it. He was incredibly apologetic, wanted to check if occupants and car were okay. He's a 17 year old who begged me not to report anything to his insurers as it's already so expensive, and promised he'd pay me in cash for whatever damage he had caused.

There does not appear to be any damage from either collision, apart from a small crack in the rear numberplate. I genuinely can't believe it, particularly the hit from behind as it really felt like a decent bit of force. I've had the boot floor out to see if anything is crumpled or pushed back there and it's fine. Panel gaps in the area all still look even. Parking sensors also somehow work perfectly.

Local mechanic has recommended I take it to a local body shop and get them to take a look in case there is damage I can't see that needs repairing.

I'll avoid a long(er) story, but basically I've got 2 kids under 3 at home and we're all struggling with sleep at the minute. As such, I know I'm not making the best decisions right now. Would you get it checked out or not bother?

The car is nothing special. It's very much a utility family vehicle in my head - a Seat Leon estate. I look after it well mechanically, but it's far from a pride and joy type car.

On the one hand I'd hate for there to be an issue that causes issues down the line that I end up footing the bill for one way or another. On the other hand I'd really rather not have the cognitive load and hassle of needing to book time off work, book in at the body shop, arrange a way to get back home from there while they're looking at it, etc.

Yeah, I agree. I did try and find the raw data to take a peek at that, but I couldn't easily find it. It sounds the Farm Business Survey and DEFRA surveys are the main source of data for this.

I worry that even if I were able to get the raw data it might not be all that useful, though. Everything I read online says that farms with a standard output of less than 25k EUR are excluded from the data. I don't know for sure, but it feels like there's probably lots of farms in a given year operating at a loss or a tiny profit, given the nature of the business.

As you point out, excluding those lowest profit farms will further skew the average.

I double checked, and it's "Farm Business Income". I couldn't easily find that defined online, other than here. It says it is similar to net profit, so my takeaway that this figure is post-tax.

You're right that there's a load of things a farmer could include in their business expenses that others could not. They own their housing outright, and would purchase all vehicles via the business. Don't get me wrong, 45k per year for a family in that situation isn't poverty line, but it's also not balling. Obviously the average as a statistical measure hides a lot, so there will be plenty who are poverty line, and plenty who are balling.

Haha yep, I think I've fallen the wrong side of the cunt-o-meter here! I had perhaps naively thought that this forum of people who either actively or at one time did enjoy being outdoors cycling where others tend to favour being indoors might have some sympathy with another slice of society who also enjoy being outdoors where others tend to favour being indoors. I'm guessing the London-centric nature of the forum means many have often experienced farming in ways which conflicts with their own hobby.

Yeah, Albion I got the ARB1 bib in their sale a couple of years ago, I think they ended up being 90-100 quid which is significantly more.

For me Assos are by far the most comfortable, but they're a lot more and almost never on sale

I bought a pair a few years ago. Looks like they have made some design changes since.

I don't wear mine often because they are too tight on the leg gripper, which isn't very stretchy. I honestly don't have huge legs either. They're a great company so maybe ask them about that. They took my feedback at the time and said they'd implement it, but I haven't been back.

I much prefer my Albion and Assos bibs that I've got for a bit more than the galibier bibs.

Sorry, that would have helped, wouldn't it!

On zooming I can see that it's not just a brick out. It's actually been cut out. So correct fix is remove what looks like 2 bricks and then mortar them in.

Also in the plan is to knock out the stud wall to the right, and then build a new insulated stud wall to the left, to bring all of this void into the thermal envelope.

I think your idea of bin bag or similar filled up with expanding foam could be a good idea. It'll very quickly fill the hole to prevent drafts for right now, and then be easily taken out later when I want to do the right fix. Thank you!

It's an old house with lime mortar, and I've got some pointing work to do elsewhere. I've told myself it's a job for the spring once the weather is better, though. I'll probably do this at the same time.

Thank you, and sorry that I missed this earlier. I'll have a read through and educate myself.

I'm totally with you on solar and turbines. You can even do both (some types of farming) and renewable energy on the same piece of land.

Fields that aren't next to a road would likely be unsuitable for housing. Unless you really couldn't avoid it, those wouldn't be the fields you'd sell.

We have a laundry "room" (glamorised cupboard) within the loft conversion of our house. There's a washer and separate dryer in there, and little other space due to reduced head height within the eaves. A big part of this space was taken up by a cold water tank for an unvented heating and hot water system, which was in an uninsulated cupboard-within-a-cupboard.

I've just had the whole heating system replaced with a vented system, which involved taking out that huge cold water tank. I can now see that the previous owner had an old school dryer with trunking that took the moisture outsize, via a hole in the exterior wall. I looks like they've taken out a brick or 2.

I'd like to get rid of that hole in the exterior wall for fairly obvious reasons. Does anyone have any smart ideas the best way to get that plugged quickly from the inside? I don't want to get up on a huge ladder to address it from the outside. I also don't want to just wait until I can arrange and afford a builder to properly repair it with bricks and mortar due to it being bloody cold right now.

Yep exactly, it's very little to support a family. In my fictional example under these new rules I think the heir would sell some land to cover the IHT bill and be alright, but reduce their profits. That would continue each generation until either there is no heir who wants to take over the farm, or the farm becomes non-viable because they don't have enough land to achieve economies of scale.

Perhaps the real answer to these problems is to figure out a way to massively reduce land prices. I don't know how we could do that, though.

Very valid question :)

It's because if forced to sell assets to cover an IHT bill, the working farm could become non-viable.

To give you an example, let's say I inherit a 500 acre arable farm with a farmhouse on it, several barns and grain sheds, a couple of tractors, a manitou, and a combine harvester. Let's say it's worth 5 million.

If I've got to pay IHT on everything over 3 million at 20%, that's 400k I need to find. Maybe I could sell the combine harvester for that, but then I wouldn't be able to crop my wheat without paying a contractor who owns their own combine harvester. I can't sell the tractor or the grain sheds because without them I can't do any arable farming. So I realise that I'm going to have to sell 40 acres of fields to cover the bill.

So I do what I need to do and sell those fields to another farmer or landowner. Now I've only got 460 acres of fields on which to grow my crops, at which point it may well no longer be a financially viable farm. If that's the case, I'm forced to sell the farm, which is now not a viable business to farm. This is how we remove a working farm from the economy.

Best case scenario it is bought by a landowner who rents it to a tenant farmer who finds a way to make it viable. Most likely scenario, however, is that other parts of the farm become unfarmed. Let's say the farmhouse and 10 acres are sold to a multimillionaire. The rest is sold to existing local landowners who rent it out to other farmers or smallholders.

To me that feels very different to something like a construction company because the difference between assets and profit isn't so cavernous. If the heir to the construction company has to sell some of their tools, vans, and storage space to cover the IHT bill it isn't such a big deal. The business could still be viable on a smaller scale.

I'd want to see data which supports the claims made by the secretary of state that 3/4 of farms will be unaffected by this change. As I explained in my post above, the government's own data doesn't support those claims, although I can totally see how the secretary of state made this mistake.

I think it's quite hard to get your head round the fact that an asset worth, for example, 7 million (the whole farm, so including both APR and BPR on death) only generates income of £45k per year for the whole household (this is the average profit of farms last year). It feels like it's not worth doing to me, and indeed I would never do it.

My point is that if the farm has to be split up to pay IHT, that will over time reduce the amount of working farms. I personally see that as a negative for the whole country that could be avoided while still making sure that buying agricultural land, assets, or whole farms can't be used as an IHT tax dodge.

My own anecdata is that the heir to the farm lives on the farm with their family and helps with the farming until they take over from the parent. It's a multi-generational thing even before anything gets inherited.

I believe that if you inherit a farm, immediately stop farming, and sell the farm there is no mechanism to go back and apply IHT. That's definitely a loophole you've thought of that should be closed, IMO.

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.

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.

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.

Agree that this is bad policy. Land prices have soared, currently nearly 10k per acre if you're anywhere down south. You probably need somewhere near 500 acres to make a reasonable living, so do the maths.

If farmers have to sell off some of that land to pay for their IHT bill, it's very likely to be bought by a wealthy non-farmer wanting to build a lovely huge house, further taking land out of farming.

Part of the outrage is how little time people have before the new rules apply. Older farmers who had been preparing to give the farm to one of their children feel like they've had the rug pulled out from under them and now have to desperately try to replan everything pretty quickly.

I empathise with their frustration.

FWIW, I agree with raising more tax via IHT. I think the government have got their thresholds wrong, though. I think they're accidentally going to have an impact on family farms rather than the massive landowners I think they should be targeting.

Yup, I don't know for sure that it's connected. I just happened to hear about the report in Le Monde today and also read this post. Potentially I'm putting 2 and 2 together and getting 5.

If it's linked I suspect it'll either be political pressure or just the desire to avoid negative pressure. I know they've a new CEO in the last couple of years, so I suspect that explains why nothing was done in 2018 and it's a different story now.