Small Farms and Family Businesses

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Thursday 12th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Earl for promoting this debate, and I declare my interest as a retired farmer who has already handed on to his son.

To plagiarise LP Hartley’s famous opening lines: “The farm is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. There is a different culture, with different priorities, in this foreign country. Here is where humans work from dawn to dusk, weekends included, to harness the soil, with its miraculous ability to produce growth. Here is where those humans manage this growth to feed the nation, and where most are simultaneously nurturing the soil and biodiversity so that the next generation can also feed the nation—live as if you die tomorrow, but farm as though you live for ever.

Those nurturing these farms do it not for the small amounts of money desperately needed to keep the bank at bay but because they have come to love the land on which they were reared. The rewards are the pride they have in their own work—there is nothing better than harvesting a crop that you yourself have sown and grown—and pride in the local recognition of being good stewards. To sell would be a betrayal of their duty, a betrayal of their grandchildren, and to fail in the eyes of their community. Underlying this morality in this foreign country is a key emotion that says to them that they do not own the land, it owns them. As I say, the farm is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

These inheritance tax changes will undoubtedly force family farms to sell their assets—which they know how to manage better than any man alive, which is a key point—thus placing more land in the hands of large corporations. It is a form of madness to change this tax when food security is now more important than ever in our fragile world and when the Government’s stated priority is growth—it cannot be the growth of food, nor of business. Business property relief is vital to all family businesses, wherever they might be based, such as key local shops or those that make the nuts and bolts that keep our wider economy on track. These businesses have involved the owners, and probably their parents before them, working all hours to make a living, earning the respect of their community and paying their annual taxes to the Government year in, year out—a Government who now seem determined to undermine them and their country’s economy.

We are a nation of shopkeepers, of family businesses. It is the essence of what we are and what makes us so resilient. So why attack rural and other businesses in this way, for comparatively small reward, when your declared priority is economic growth? Surely a priority is a policy that trumps all other interests and prejudices. It makes no sense. It also shows a complete lack of understanding of what makes our countryside tick and re-emphasises my point about farms and family businesses being a foreign country to our political masters. If this goes through as it currently stands, they will never be forgiven.