There was something unusual about my train journey to London on the grim morning of Tuesday 19th November. It wasn’t just the smell of waxed jackets or the abundance of green wellies in a carriage normally filled with brogue-clod commuters. It was the conversation. Travelling with my wife and septuagenarian father, I spoke to farmers from across the country, from the neighbours who I bumped into at the turnstile, to the whole farming family sitting on the row next to us; a father, mother and grown-up daughter from near Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire. And there was Guy, a tenant farmer from near Hull in north Yorkshire. Farmers were moving, and today they were moving in numbers.
Big numbers. Thousands of farmers gathered in London, undaunted by the chill and persistent November drizzle. With work boots still coated in the muddy evidence of our toil and raincoats soaked through, we came not because we wanted to, but because we had no choice. When the policies that govern your life and livelihood threaten to destroy all you’ve built—not just for yourself but for the next generation—there’s no option but to do something about it.
At the heart of our anguish was the government’s recent budget, announced on 30th October, which proposes huge reductions to Agricultural Property Relief, a concession farmers have historically enjoyed on inheritance tax. Everyone pays tax on inheritance over £325,000, but previously farmers did not have to pay tax on agricultural land passed from one generation to the next. After the new budget, farmers will not have to pay tax on agricultural land worth up to £1m and after that will enjoy a 50 per cent discount on inheritance tax. All this still sounds like a good wheeze, but unfortunately farm businesses have been squeezed for many years such that their profits average less than 1 per cent, with farmers reportedly working for less than the minimum wage.
For years, the tacit agreement has been that while farming earns an extraordinarily low return, our land can be passed to the next generation without a crippling tax. Land values are huge, but the earning potential is very low; farmers are asset rich but cash poor. This had been fine, but now a farmer with an average-sized farm of 250 acres valued at £2.5m (before you count the farmhouse, machinery, livestock and farm buildings) will be paying £300,000 in tax. According to the Country Land and Business Association, farms would have to pay, on average, 159 per cent profit every year for a decade just to pay this tax. Land would most likely need to be sold off, and with farms barely making any profit, the loss of land would lead to a loss of the whole business as it becomes unviable.
According to the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), an estimated 75 per cent of UK farms could be affected by this new tax burden. For decades, Agricultural Property Relief has been a lifeline for family farms, but for many of us, that lifeline has been severed. This emotional weight was laid bare on the streets of London. I moved between the “Mass Rally”—organised by a group of farmer ambassadors—and the NFU-organised “Mass Lobby”—where 1,800 NFU members met with their MPs to lobby them for change.
While politicians of all parties–including a Labour peer from the House of Lords—spoke against the budget announcements, the emotional climax of the day came during a speech by the president of the NFU, Tom Bradshaw. As he spoke, his voice cracked when he described what farming means to so many of us: the joy of seeing your children take their first steps in the same fields your grandparents and great-grandparents walked; the hope of passing down not just a business, but a heritage.
Our farm makes a profit some years, and some years a loss. We’re in line with the national average where returns on farmland are between 0.5 and 1 per cent. Squeezed by downward pressure on selling prices, rocked by extremes of weather, battered by global shocks affecting inputs from fuel to fertiliser, our family farm won’t survive this levy which the government promised pre-election wouldn’t be changed.
The question now is whether the government will listen. Our MP, who I met later in the day, was “in listening mode’” but resolute that there will be no concessions to us farmers who are, frankly, in “pleading mode”. Rallies alone can’t undo the damage, but they can spark action.
On the trip to London, many of us farmers brought crates of fresh produce—vegetables, eggs, milk, and more—to donate to local food banks. It was a way of showing that even in tough times, we remain committed to feeding the nation and supporting those in need.
