Budget day. Watcha hoping for/dreading?

[Cousin Jack]

Most farmers are tenants…..

Not sure where you got that idea. I spent my life as a vet working in Cornwall; virtually all our farmers were owner occupiers - family farms, owned and farmed for generations, where this tax decision will cause major difficulties. It seems that it’s been taken, as often, with limited and blinkered understanding of the effects it will have on the ground (literally in this case). “ Oh, we didn’t realise….” Except they never actually say that.

Used to be true, lots of small family owned farms.....
BUT many of them gave now been sold to big agribusiness companies. Instead of farm labourers driving to the next village for a few days work you get minibuses full of Lithuanians and 4-tracs towing trailers clogging up the A30.

[demographic]

There's also pretty massive areas owned by the Church Commission
Some details of this can be found below on the Who Owns England website.
https://whoownsengland.org/2019/11/04/g ... issioners/

I'd go as far as to say that between the Church Comission, Haugheys relatives and Philip Day there's almost a ring shaped bit of farmland (much of it just growing phesants in the case of the latter two) round the Carlisle area.

[Count Steer]

Bit of a boing here for those that are interested. Article from The Spectator, so not home to anything left of somewhere to the right.

'Could inheritance tax changes help farmers in the long run?'

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/cou ... -long-run/

Interesting stuff about land prices rising driven by investors. eg 44% of farmland was bought by investors last year.

The Centre for Analysis of Taxation - of those estates that benefited from inheritance tax relief, just under a half had no record of farming activity in the five years before death, another third received income primarily from rents.

The combination of falling land prices + the change to inheritance tax might benefit actual farmers and mean a bit less rewilding and 'solar farming' and a bit more growing stuff.

Anyways I paraphrase, but it adds something to the discussion I think.

[Saga Lout]

Shouldn't the law be applied to everybody equally, "without fear or favour"? If farmers or anybody else need a special dispensation to protect them from a particular tax, maybe that tax is inherently a bad tax. Scrap it.

[wheelnut]

I notice the royal family didn't lose their IHT exemptions on their privately held land and estates.