I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Upper Bann (Carla Lockhart) for working so hard to keep the plight of farmers throughout the United Kingdom in the mind of this Parliament. She does her constituency credit, as always. I declare an interest as a member of the Ulster Farmers Union and as a landowner and farmer.
I have spoken on this issue so many times, yet I do not grow tired of it. The reason is clear: without small family farms there is no food sustainability or, subsequently, food safety. Most of the 25,000 farms in Northern Ireland are small family farms run by one or two farmers. They are not the massive profit-making industries that perhaps the Government have been led to believe they are. The farmers might be land rich, but they are cash poor. They love the land; they have it in their blood. They do not toil to make a massive profit, but to pay the bills and continue doing what they love.
The fact is that most farms—65% of farmers—could not survive with this inheritance tax. That does not pave the way for food security or production in Northern Ireland. We do not have large farms making millions each year. We have families who are working farms that cannot even pay a living wage. On some of the best farms in my constituency, the sons work the farm but also work privately for income, as they cannot raise a family on the farming income. That is the reality in Northern Ireland. I beseech the Minister to listen to the points I am making, because they are made with sincerity and honesty. If we add to this the inheritance tax and remove the protection from the farming grant, we are left with unprofitable farms, and sons and daughters who have no option but to sell the land and get a job.
The end of farming as we know it is not simply sad, given the history and the lifeblood that flows through farming families, but worrying, as it leaves us beholden to other nations for our food. The average farm in Northern Ireland is worth £14,000 an acre, and the average farm is 100 acres. If the Minister or his civil servants add up the figures, they will see that that means that the threshold is quickly reached. For many farms in Northern Ireland the situation can be fixed if the Government look at it honestly and come up with a different scenario and a different threshold. The quicker they do it, the better.
5.21 pm