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.