The family farm tax has fatally undermined the trust of rural communities in the Government

My Lords, I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Lords’ Interests as chairman of the Countryside Alliance.

I was proud to join the farmers’ demonstration in Whitehall on Tuesday. The sentiment was clear: farmers were already desperately worried about wider policy challenges, but the change announced in the Budget was a tax too far. The Government do not appear to understand that farms are not conventional businesses. Where farm incomes are too low to pay this new inheritance tax bill, part or all of the farm will have to be sold. If the next generation cannot afford to pay this tax, they will lose not just the chance to run a family business but their home, their way of life and their chance to maintain their family’s custody of the land.

So many talk freely of the “family farm”, without apparently the slightest comprehension of what that actually means and how valuable this institution is in the story of the British countryside. If it is so wrong that farms have relief from inheritance tax, why did Ministers, when they were in opposition, promise farmers that they would not change it? Reneging on that explicit assurance has not just fatally undermined the trust of farmers and indeed the wider rural community but damaged trust in politics generally.

Yet instead of trying to repair this fissure with farming, the Government seem intent on opening up the wound. The Defra Secretary has said that:

“Half of farmland sold last year went to non-farmers including wealthy individuals trying to avoid inheritance tax”.

Does he not understand that if family farms are broken, more farmland will be sold to non-farmers? He says he wants everyone to pay their share so that young farmers can realise their dream of buying their farm. So today, this is a Levellers’ policy to change the ownership structure of land. Yesterday, it was a redistributionist policy to help pay for the public services on which farmers rely. Only a few farms would be affected, yet somehow it would help to save the NHS.

“So many talk freely of the ‘family farm’, without apparently the slightest comprehension of what that actually means and how valuable this institution is in the story of the British countryside”

Even if the Treasury’s claim that only 500 farms a year would be caught by this tax was right—and all the agricultural experts say it is not—that would mean that over a generation of four decades 20,000 farming families would be affected. That is not a small number. It is a seismic change that would change forever the social fabric of the countryside.

It is intolerable that highly controversial tax changes such as this should be imposed without a proper assessment of their impact and where there is disagreement on the data within government, never mind outside it. If the Government want to find a way through this and genuinely tackle tax avoidance, which is a perfectly proper aim, the starting point must be to reach agreement on the actual effect of the change. I suggest that the Government should consider appointing an independent person or body to assess the true impact of the tax changes and to advise on how to meet their declared policy objective of preventing tax avoidance while protecting family farms.

Braving the rain and the cold will hardly have troubled farmers, of all people, this week, but it is not a small thing for these fundamentally decent, hardworking people to leave their farms to come to London to try to protect their livelihoods. These are the people who care for our countryside and who put food on our tables. They run one of our most important industries and manage one of our most valuable national assets. They deserve better.