Small Farms and Family Businesses

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for giving us an opportunity to ask again that Ministers really hear the concerns of farmers through our remarks here today. I found the speeches surprisingly moving, because this topic matters. By the way, I must fangirl the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege: she and her work really matter and she has changed the face of women’s liberation.

It strikes me that Government Ministers seem genuinely to have been taken aback by the despair and fury of thousands of farmers reacting to the Budget’s inheritance tax policy. I thought that, when they saw the backlash, we would find Rachel Reeves and team saying, “Oh, we didn’t mean you. We were targeting”—oh, I do not know—“big agriculture, mega-rich landowners or Jeremy Clarkson types”. But, instead of backing down, Ministers seemed to double down, and, worse, they defensively demonised hard-working farmers and carry on doing so. Those who graft 365 days a year with 5 am starts in all weathers, for often meagre rewards—working people, albeit not public sector employees, so possibly unfamiliar in Westminster bubble circles—are now smeared as tax dodgers who are avoiding paying their dues to society for public services.

I sometimes wonder whether Ministers are getting their insider knowledge of farming from “The Archers”. There has been an interminable political messaging storyline on the virtues of rewilding, which has driven me mad for a while. Yet, in a mere 30-second exchange on this topic recently, David Archer said:

“There’s a lot of anger about this new inheritance tax on farms”,


only for this to be batted away by Leonard, who says:

“But we need those taxes to pay for things like the NHS”.


This is scurrilous propaganda, and actually misinformation.

It is concerning when those who are influential in society seem oblivious to the material reality of working lives. Yesterday, one Labour MP went on the BBC’s “Politics Live” and smirked that it was

“quite hard to find a poor farmer”.

She needs to get out more—she could have even walked out of the Millbank studio and met the drivers of the magnificent 400-plus tractor parade going around Westminster, or she could watch Together’s Alan Miller’s insightful interviews with farmers from all over the country vividly explaining their plight.

As one explained, anyone who says that farmers with assets of over £1 million are rich is someone who does not know that a combine harvester costs over £500,000. One bit of confusion is on what family farms are. Commentators talk as though they are a Downton Abbey-style hereditary dynasty. Instead, I present John Shaw, who farms at Crookdyke. His farm’s history is telling, and a challenge to stereotypes. His father was not a toolmaker, but his great-great-grandfather was a coalminer and his great-grandfather a railway worker. His grandfather left school at 14 and worked as a farm labourer. He was forced to, but he got the bug, so, in 1929, when he married, he took a tenancy of a small farm. Three more tenancies later, he bought the farm that John now owns, which his father worked on from leaving school—as did John and John’s son.

This should be an inspiring story of nearly four generations building up a family farm that supports two families and is at the heart of the local community. However, now that the farm has been valued, John says that after his death, the inheritance tax of £750,000 will be impossible to pay without selling most of the land, with the remaining land being unviable as a farm. It is tragic, wanton and destructive.

So I issue a warning and a plea. We are told in this House that we should look to Europe. Do not stop at the EU when you look to Europe. Look at the European farmers, who have brought down Governments, taken over streets and been involved in a revolt. I want to see our farmers win. I would rather that the Government sat round the table with them before they took to the streets in a destructive way, but they have to resolve this.