Farmers face mental health perfect storm, Labour told

Rachel Reeves has been accused of traumatising” farmers with her new inheritance tax raid on a sector already grappling with a mental health crisis.

- ALEX ROSS

Farmers will have to pay 20 per cent of tax on inherited agricultural assets worth more than £1m from April under changes announced in the Budget last Wednesday.

Coupled with increases in workers’ minimum wages and national insurance for employers, farmers say the “tractor tax” will kill off generations-old family farms across the country.

But there are also fears that the controversial move could exacerbate a mental health crisis in the industry, which secretary of state for rural affairs Steve Reed said had the highest suicide rate of any sector in the UK in May.

Stockton West MP Matt Vickers told The Independent that farmers’ lives were being overturned by the measures in the Budget.

He said: “We know that farmers are disproportionately placed to have issues with mental health, we see higher suicide rates because they are out there alone in the elements and all the challenges that come with that.

“When you speak to the people I have spoken to since last Wednesday, and you hear the trauma. Literally their lives are being overturned. That place where they grew up, that place where they farmed all their lives. This has the potential to wipe them out. Pulling the rug like that from people is horrendous.”

He added: “The government just don’t appear to understand what is to be a farmer, they don’t understand that these people often work for very little in return and because they have some large assets, they are wealthy people. These people often have cash flow problems, they work all day and night for a very low return.”