It might be tempting, given how much coverage has focused on it recently, to assume the forthcoming changes to inheritance tax regime are the single biggest issue facing farmers these days.
But the reality is these tax changes come at a moment of extraordinary pressure, with farmers having to contend with a swathe of unsettling issues, many of which could prove existential for their livelihoods.
Put them all together and you realise that for many of those marching in the streets in London, inheritance tax isn’t the only problem – it’s more like the last straw.
Why does this matter for the rest of us? In part because there’s a deeper story here.
For decades, this country’s level of food security has been more or less constant. This country has produced roughly 60 per cent of our own food for two decades (the figure was even higher in the 1980s). But farmers warn that given all the pressures they’re facing, that critical buffer could be about to be removed, with domestic production falling and dependence on imported food rising.
Whether that eventuates remains to be seen. As of 2023 the amount of food supplied domestically was still 62 per cent of everything we consumed. But now let’s consider the challenges facing farmers (even before we get to inheritance tax).
The first of them comes back to Brexit.
Following Britain’s departure from the EU, the government is making dramatic and far reaching changes to the way it supports farmers. For years, those payments, part of the EU-wide Common Agricultural Policy, were based on the amount of land farmed by each recipient.
Alongside these main farm payments there were other bolt-on schemes – Environmental Land Management schemes, to give them their category name – designed to encourage farmers to do more to look after local wildlife. But these schemes were always small in comparison to the main land-based farm payments.
There were problems aplenty with this old scheme….
