Greens Urge Government To Rethink Tax On Farming
Farmers protest outside the Northern Farming Conference in Hexham in against the government's proposals to reform inheritance tax rules (PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
3 min read
The Green Party has urged the government to take “another look” at its plans to introduce inheritance tax on farm land, as farmers prepare protests in the capital this week against the changes.
Up until now, agricultural properties have been passed down through the generations tax-free. However, in her Autumn Budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves outlined plans to scrap the Agricultural Property Relief, meaning that inheritors of farms and other business property would have to pay 20 per cent of the value of any property or land above £1m.
Farmers are now planning a mass protest in Westminster on Tuesday to coincide with a lobby being held by the National Farmers Union (NFU) against the changes.
In an interview with The House magazine, Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay said the government was “right to identify that the loophole that enables very wealthy people to put money into farmland as a way of avoiding tax is being exploited”, and that the loophole “needs to be addressed”.
“It's not good for real farmers if land is being bought up by people who are not interested in farming and are just using it to avoid paying tax.”
But he added that the government needs to “have another look at what it's got planned” and be able to “make a clear distinction between people who are speculating in buying land and actual family farms”.
The Treasury claimed that 28 per cent of farmers would be affected by the new inheritance tax, but analysis by the NFU of data produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) subsequently suggested that up to two-thirds of farms could be impacted by the tax.
The Green Party MP for Waveney Valley said the government had “got into a muddle over its figures” and highlighted that there was “disagreement between different departments about how many farms would actually be caught up by this planned tax”.
With two of their four MPs running in rural, formerly Conservative-voting constituencies, the Green Party made backing farming a key part of their manifesto.
Ramsay said farmers in Waveney Valley are telling him they “want to be able to more easily access funding for nature-friendly farming”. However, the government said it would maintain, not increase, the current £2.4bn annual budget for farm payments, which reimburse farmers for making nature-friendly changes to their farms.
While the Green co-leader said this “effective reduction of funding for nature-friendly farming” did not “get that much attention” following the Budget, “the big national environmental charities have highlighted there needs to be a significant increase in more than doubling of the nature-friendly farming budget”. He said he is “really keen to push that”.
“I've got lots of examples of farmers in my constituency who are either already promoting agroforestry and other examples of green farming, including some green councillors who are farmers in Suffolk, for example, but the amount of investment is nowhere near enough.”
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