Ouch! That budget really hurt, right down to the potential fourfold increase in various taxes on my double-cab Land Rover pickup.

Particularly painful, for this farm, though, was the sudden near complete truncation of basic payments. While some of the other budget measures had been flagged up, this was a cut I simply hadn’t anticipated. Had I known it was coming, I would have approached some recent rent negotiations with my landlords very differently.

Then there was the steep increase in employers’ national insurance contributions, similarly large increases in the minimum wage and the announcement of carbon taxes on imports of aluminium, steel and fertiliser, all of which are likely to prove very costly to my farm (the carbon tax on fertiliser is forecast to add £50/tonne to farmers’ costs).

But what really seems to have hit a nerve with farming colleagues is the abolition of agricultural property relief (APR), which will now make farmland subject to inheritance tax (IHT) at 20% upon the death of the owner. As someone who owns enough farmland to take me above the £1 million threshold, I have to admit to being a little baffled by the strength of objection to this tax change.

Perhaps it’s because, when my father gave me my share of a farm as a lifetime gift in the 1980s, I had to pay a significant amount of IHT (it was called capital transfer tax in those days). Paying off that tax bill was a severe financial burden for me for many years, and I’m sure I grumbled a lot about it at the time, but I was young enough and active enough to cope.

And before the next generation of farmers complains too much about the loss of APR, they should remember that, provided mum and dad can be persuaded to give some or even all of the farm away at least seven years before they die, there will be no IHT payable anyway.

In terms of the ‘next generation’ of farmers, it is a moot point as to whether APR was really their friend anyway. APR was seen as something of a tax ‘loophole’ by many wealthy people who simply invested their money into farmland to avoid having to pay IHT after their deaths. As Jeremy Clarkson, of Clarkson’s Farm fame, for example, wrote in The Times in 2013: “Land is a better investment than any bank can offer. The Government doesn’t get any of my money when I die.”

So, personally, rather than make too much fuss about farmland being subject to IHT at 20% (and only then if the owner doesn’t give it away at least seven years before they die), I’d rather the ongoing farmer lobbying of government for changes to the budget concentrated on things like protecting the £2.4 billion farm budget for England, keeping carbon taxes within affordable bounds and ensuring that future food trade policy doesn’t allow imported food to be produced to lower standards than those required of British farmers.

Getting these measures in place is what will protect the next generation of farmers, not creating a lot of pointless noise about changes to inheritance tax.

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