Autumn Budget 2024

Baroness Mallalieu Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Minister on his clarity and stamina and the noble Lord, Lord Booth-Smith, on his noteless and apt maiden speech. My five minutes will be devoted to farming and inheritance tax changes. I declare my interests as president of the Countryside Alliance and as having a small livestock farm on Exmoor. It is so small that I do not believe the APR changes will affect me, although they certainly affect a great many in the very rural community from which I come—and will affect all of us, not for the better, if they go through in this form.

On general election day, there was real good will towards the forthcoming Labour Government. Results showed that “It’s time for a change” was a universal feeling throughout the country, including in rural areas. Where there had been only 17 Labour MPs in rural seats during some of the 14 years of the Conservative Administration, there are now more than 100. That good will has, sadly, evaporated very fast. It is hard to be a Labour MP in a farming area right now. There is certainly anger but, perhaps even more, anxiety and a very real fear for the future.

My local livestock market at Cutcombe now has a drop-in centre for mental illness. Before the election, Steve Reed, then the shadow Minister, now the Environment Minister, publicly and privately assured the farming industry that this policy was not even in contemplation. I believe he was honourable in what he said, but that is an indication of how hasty and inadequate the preparation has been for this policy. Since then, there has been no consultation or impact assessment and, as we have heard, there is great confusion over the number of people who will be affected.

I understand why the Chancellor might wish to bring those who had bought farmland to shelter funds from tax with no intention of farming it themselves within the tax threshold; they pushed land prices sky-high. However, this measure pushes the genuine farming family into a position where they will have to sell land, and presumably—I ask the Minister to clarify—in addition to paying inheritance tax, pay capital gains tax on top of that.

This has simply been pitched far too low, and there are many other ways in which those investors could have contributed to the Treasury without pitchforking the very people the Prime Minister promised to protect from tax: working people. It is not just the farmers themselves; it is their employees, contractors, suppliers and customers, and even the local community, of which family farms are so often the cornerstone, who will be affected.

The word “unkind” was used. It is unkind, but I do not think it was deliberate. I think it was inadvertent, because the research had not been done, clearly the consultation had not taken place, and the results of this policy—if it were to go through—were not appreciated. Do we really want to see productive farmland transferred to companies and large-scale agri-businesses, probably to be used for carbon off-setting, greenwashing or large-scale industrial livestock production, or do we want to see that land farmed by people who know it and love it, who produce high-quality local food, and whose work has made our countryside one of our greatest assets?

Henry Dimbleby, in producing the National Food Strategy, said we need to be resilient to withstand global shocks. The next food crisis may well be one not of distribution but supply, and if we reduce our home production, we will all have very good reason to regret this proposal. From every side of the House in this debate so far, there have been calls for the Government to look at this again. How do you increase productivity by forcing people to sell off their means of production? I ask the Minister to take this back and look at it again.

Assisted Dying Bill [HL]

Baroness Mallalieu Excerpts

Friday 7th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft]

My Lords, there may indeed be one or two occasions on which that is the case. However, we are looking for at least two medical opinions here, both of which will regard the sanity of the individual. If that individual decides, in full knowledge of what is going on within the family, that that is the decision they want to take, then, on balance, I suspect that we should let them.

[Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)]

My Lords, I have put my name to the amendment. I support the Pannick version of judicial intervention for the reasons already given with great care by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick. I also listened with care to almost all of the 129 speeches at Second Reading on 18 July in this House. There is a need to address two major reservations expressed by a number of noble Lords, which I accept have validity.

In essence, those reservations relate to two undeniable traits of human behaviour which we must accept exist and which no Bill of Parliament or amendment can extinguish. The first is selfishness. I see the noble Lord, Lord Tebbit, was trying to speak and I hope that he will shortly. He referred in his Second Reading speech to “the vultures”: relatives or friends who might have a financial or other interest in the death of a dying person and be tempted to put pressure on that person to end their life, to bring forward the date of the realisation of their expectations or, perhaps, to save care fees—albeit that, under the Bill, they would only have to wait a maximum of six months in any event.

Secondly, there is selflessness: those who feel guilty about the expense, trouble, time, worry and distress which they are causing those whom they love, and who may be tempted to shorten the process—not because they truly wish it—not for themselves, but for others. There are, of course, subdivisions: the relatives who cannot bear to see mother suffer, and so on. I accept that those are genuine concerns and they are the reasons why I primarily support the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Pannick.

Although neither selfishness nor selflessness can be eliminated, through judicial oversight it can be guarded against, possibly even better than it is at present. The medical condition of the applicant can be assessed by a medical expert and by a wholly independent, experienced judge—although there are crooked lawyers and experts of every kind, our judiciary is still, thankfully, totally respected—who by training and expertise is qualified to judge pressure, coercion and genuine or false wishes, and to examine or evaluate evidence as to whether somebody has capacity, is acting voluntarily and has a clear understanding and a settled wish to end his or her own life. I want someone like that to have the ultimate say on the decision.

However, it is not a question of a decision being made by a doctor or by a judge; I want the decision to be that of the person who is facing death. We have got to get back to that. Judges, especially in the Family Division, are dealing with judgments of that kind—about what people really want, whatever they say, and about pressure and coercion—day in and day out. I will of course listen carefully to the amendments in the next group that have been tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, and others on judicial oversight. However, on the basis of what we have heard already from the noble Lord, they appear to present a bureaucratic, legalistic obstacle race which is bound to be both lengthy and costly to the applicant. One of the objects of the Bill is, I hope, to leave behind the absurd anomaly we have at present whereby, if you are rich enough, you can go to Zurich, but if you are not you have no choice but to endure possibly totally unnecessary suffering at the end of your life.