In a moment.
Since the Budget, the Central Association of Agricultural Valuers has analysed the family farm tax and applied tax law and the realities of modern-day farming to it. Its analysis has revealed that up to 75,000 individual owners of farming businesses could be affected over the coming generation, even before inflation, which is the equivalent of five times the Government’s figure of 500 farms affected in 2026-27. How could they have got this so wrong? It is because this city-dwelling Chancellor, Secretary of State and Exchequer Secretary do not understand modern farming or the countryside that they have overlooked a major area of tax policy and forgotten to consider thousands of farmers.
As the Exchequer Secretary has confirmed, the Government forgot to include one of the three routes to the relief in their calculations. They have not included business property relief-only claims in their figures, which means that as many as 14,000 tenant farmers who cannot claim agricultural property relief because they do not own the land on which they farm are absent from their calculations. What is worse is that Ministers do not know how many farmers are affected by that.
The city-dwelling Chancellor and Secretary of State have also forgotten about the farmers who in years gone by followed professional advice and transferred their farms into companies or partnerships. Those farmers will claim only BPR, so they have been left out of the calculations. Again, Ministers do not know how many farmers are in that position.