(No silly spreading videos this time, sorry 🤣 - but if HM Treasury and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs want to avoid farmers actually spreading muck on the 10 Downing Street roses 💩🌹, they might do well to take a look: )
Dan Neidle's post is one of the most thoughtful analyses I’ve seen on the IHT changes for farmers in Budget2024. Dan has really dived into the data on both APR (Agricultural Property Relief) and BPR (Business Property Relief) and come up with a potential compromise that might just satisfy both farmers and the government.
In summary:
🚩 The NFU (National Farmers' Union) and The CLA are absolutely right to warn that the current policy is a blunt instrument. It risks hitting actual family farms, while doing little to target those buying farmland for tax avoidance purposes.
💡 Dan proposes a fairer solution that could give Rachel Reeves and Steve Reed a face-saving way forward. Instead of fully backing down on a flagship Budget measure, this approach could avoid the worst unintended consequences while still achieving the Government’s aims of:
✅ Closing a tax loophole.
💰 Raising revenue for the Treasury.
Dan suggests:
• A full IHT exemption for family farms (capped at £20m).
• A clawback mechanism if heirs sell the farm within a set period.
This means farms who are genuinely looking to continue across generations - exactly as many farmers said at the recent protest - wouldn’t be affected. But if those heirs decide to sell up and cash in, why shouldn’t they be taxed like everyone else? And this should make farmland much less attractive as an IHT avoidance wheeze.
With farmer protests fresh in the memory and likely to ramp up this winter, perhaps this could be the basis of compromise that works for both sides and saves the government from a winter of slurry spreading on Parliament Square. 🚜 💩 👉 Definitely recommend reading Dan’s full article.
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