Farmers demand personal meeting with Chancellor | Politics | News

Wealthy landowners who can afford expensive lawyers will find a way to avoid inheritance tax, but ordinary farmers will suffer, shadow environment secretary Victoria Atkins has warned.

Farmers are demanding a face-to-face meeting with Chancellor Rachel Reeves amid warnings that her plans to force families to pay 20 per cent inheritance tax on estates worth more than £1 million risk “destroying” rural communities.

Ms Atkins told GB News: “The richest landowners will be able to find expensive lawyers to work through the trusts. What’s so troubling about this is that it literally pulls the rug out from under farmers who, for generations, have done nothing but do the right thing, farm their land, raise their children to understand how to manage farm, how to work with livestock, how to farm.”

The National Farmers Union warned that the Treasury had “significantly underestimated the scale of the impact on British agriculture and British food production”. It states that “around 75 per cent of commercial family farms will have income above the £1 million threshold.”

Tom Bradshaw, the union’s president, said: “All I want to do is sit down with the chancellor and discuss the way forward, but so far she has refused. Rest assured that the NFU will continue to actively pursue the repeal of the family farm tax; It’s cruel, it’s wrong and it risks destroying our sector.”

A government spokesman insisted: “Our commitment to our farmers is unwavering – we have committed £5 billion to the farming budget over two years, including more money than ever for sustainable food production, and we are developing a 25-year farming roadmap , with a particular focus on how to make the sector more profitable in the coming decades. Since this change was announced, we have made it clear that this will impact around 500 agricultural and commercial property relief claims each year – this is based on actual claims data – and even when Inheritance Tax does come into force force, it will actually be half the rate paid. others.”