The farmers' tax could be a pig in a poke for the country

With the agriculture sector warning the new tax will send us sleepwalking into a food shortage’, Zoé Beaty looks at the reality of an industry in crisis and how we may all pay a price

- Zoé Beaty

“You can’t catch old birds with chaff,” he’d warn. The sentiment is that the wise could not be easily fooled. The chaff – worthless husks of corn – would not suffice to convince the astute of a weak idea.

The phrase has come to mind a lot recently as family farms come under threat of the newly proposed tractor tax. Since the Budget, when Labour announced that there would be a 20 per cent tax hike on inherited agricultural assets worth more than £1m, the countryside has been alight with fury.

Keir Starmer insists that the tax is there to catch any farmers buying up land to avoid inheritance tax and no one else – that only the “wealthiest 500 estates each year with smaller farms not affected”. The birds are not convinced.

In fact, the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has made their own estimates that appear to cast doubt over government calculations. Alongside the Liberal Democrats, they’ve found that around one-third of farms in the UK – there are around 209,000 – are worth more than £1m, putting 70,000 at risk.

Proponents of the bill will say fair enough: why should farmers be exempt from paying the same inheritance tax as everyone else? Wealthy landowners, as we understand it, stay wealthy through avoidance; their trust fund babies are protected by law.

But, this, say the farmers, is to misunderstand them and how they have been mistreated by successive governments.

Already, food production and farming – an industry worth £120bn to the UK – has been squeezed by supermarkets and pulled apart by Brexit; the majority of farms are now operating on extremely narrow margins. The tractor tax could push farms that are already on the brink into dangerous territory and that is the message that thousands of farmers will deliver on Tuesday, as a mass protest descends on London.