It is a privilege to contribute to the debate. I represent Salisbury and south Wiltshire, which has a large number of farmers. A large number of them visited me here in the House of Commons and, a week later, I had the largest meeting of farmers I have ever had in Salisbury. They were gravely disappointed and concerned about the implications of this Budget measure. It was a shock, because it was widely expected that this measure would not be on the table when the Labour Government came in.
One of the greatest privileges of my career was to spend most of the past eight years—six and a half of them—in the Treasury in various roles. I was PPS to a Chancellor, Philip Hammond, and then I was Economic Secretary and Chief Secretary. I understand the dynamic between spending Departments and the Treasury in the run-up to a Budget, and I have a serious degree of sympathy for the Ministers who were in DEFRA in the run-up to this Budget, but when APR and BPR were put on the table in front of me and my ministerial colleagues at numerous points during our time in the Treasury, we said no.
I acknowledge—I am trying to be as reasoned and as reasonable as I can—that other choices would have had to be made, and I recognise the difficulty of those choices. We faced difficulties when we came into government in 2010 with a 10% deficit. This Government had a different set of challenges, although I would dispute some of the numbers. However, I want to keep my remarks focused on the measure at hand.
The reason I would never have wanted to progress the removal of APR and BPR was that that policy was the product of a technical desktop economist’s view of tax raising. It was not an option when one took into account the reality of what would actually happen to the rural economy and the implications for farming. A number of colleagues have rehearsed excellent examples where farms of quite modest size but serious capital value would be massively compromised by that policy, even with an opportunity to repay that inheritance tax interest-free over 10 years, as the Chancellor said to the Select Committee. I acknowledge that—it is standard practice for this sort of relief—but given the profitability of the typical farm, it is just not a realistic prospect.
I have had some dealings in the past with the farming Minister, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner), and I genuinely have a great deal of respect for him—I do not want to embarrass him by saying anything more. He has a large number of issues to deal with, and I think all of us in this House want to see some clarity around the land use framework, and how we reconcile the question of where we build more homes with the challenges of renewable energy. However, we have to keep in focus the core function of our farmers, which is to produce food. I recognise the point made in an intervention earlier, and I am not suggesting
that the Government are going to say, “We are going to have solar farms everywhere,” but we do need to have a coherent farming policy as a whole and a land use strategy that people understand.
The issue with this policy is that it is going to decimate the number of family farms unless there is a significant increase in thresholds, there is an age limit on when the policy applies, or an alternative tax mechanism like business asset roll-over relief is examined by the Treasury. Unless those changes happen—and there is time to consider those changes before the legislation comes before this House, which will probably be at the end of next year—we in this country are going to be in real trouble with the legacy of this decision. I urge the Minister’s colleagues in the Treasury to think again and come back with better proposals for their colleague.
4.32 pm