Labour’s inheritance tax raid on household farms will enable ‘megafarms’ to swallow up swathes of land, warns one other get together MP breaking ranks to assault key Starmer coverage
Labour‘s plan to hammer farmers with inheritance tax could see vast swathes of countryside swallowed up by megafarms, decimating the local economy, environment and animal welfare standards, one of the party’s own MPs warned today.
Jenny Riddell-Carpenter said that changes to agricultural property relief (APR) from April, introduced by Rachel Reeves in the 2024 Budget, would have ‘incredibly severe’ consequences.
The Suffolk Coastal MP became the latest Labour MP to speak out against the plan to make farm landowners pay 20 per cent IHT on their agricultural land, on farms worth more than £1million.
At a meeting of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee she told Farming Minister Dame Angela Eagle there was a major danger of family farms being bought by businesses who could settle IHT liabilities.
‘That is not going to be good for farming, it is not going to be good for the environment and it is not good for animal welfare, standards are generally lower (on megafarms),’ she said.
‘It is not good for our rural economy, they employ less people.
‘The money won’t be spent in that local economy in the same way as it is via family farms.’
It comes 24 hours after Sir Keir Starmer was rebuked by another Labour backbencher who warned terminally ill farmers were considering suicide before April to spare their families from the tax burden.
Jenny Riddell-Carpenter said that changes to agricultural property relief (APR) from April, introduced by Rachel Reeves in the 2024 Budget, would have ‘incredibly severe’ consequences.
The Suffolk Coastal MP became the latest Labour MP to speak out against the plan to make farm landowners pay 20 per cent IHT on their agricultural land, on farms worth more than £1million.
At a meeting of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee she told Farming Minister Dame Angela Eagle there was a major danger of family farms being bought by businesses who could settle IHT liabilities.
Lancaster and Wyre MP Cat Smith said many farmers were considering suicide before then so their farms are not liable for inheritance tax for the first time, something which she said would make many ‘unviable’.
At the Liaison Committee, a panel of senior parliamentarians who chair the various Commons committees, she said rural communities ‘put their trust in Labour for the very first time in a very long time and gave us a mandate for change in this country’ in the 2024 landslide election win.
But she said farmers felt ‘misled’ by the changes announced months later in Rachel Reeves‘s first Budget, which triggered tractor protests in Westminster.
She said ‘elderly farmers, or farmers with a terminal diagnosis, are in a position whereby if they die before April, their farm will pass to the next generation with no tax implications’.
Mrs Riddell-Carpenter is the first Labour MP to win the Suffolk Coastal constituency and its predecessors in more than 100 years of Tory control.
