Inheritance Tax

Jeremy Wright Excerpts

Wednesday 14th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Griffith (Arundel and South Downs) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to cut public spending in order to abolish Inheritance Tax on family homes, farms and businesses.

There is a divide the size of Manchester’s Etihad arena in British politics today: between those who want to tax family farms, and those who do not; between those who want to tax family businesses, and those who do not; and now, between those who want to tax family homes, and those who do not.

Not content with the highest tax burden in peacetime history, in their first Budget the Government chose to impose inheritance tax on farmers and family businesses. The Conservatives would scrap the family farm tax and the family business tax, and we would abolish inheritance tax on the family home. That is because we believe that people who work hard and save hard should keep the rewards, rather than seeing them sold and snaffled up to pay a taxman who refuses to make hard choices and to cut welfare.

We will hear later from the shadow Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins); she has been a stalwart defender of Britain’s farmers, who this Government have attacked. I will speak briefly to the family businesses that this Government are also attacking. Many of them are small businesses: people who get up every day and take on the responsibility of hiring—often hiring young people—of making payroll and of creating growth in this country.

[Sir Jeremy Wright (Kenilworth and Southam) (Con)]

I appreciate that my right hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins) will respond to the point on farms, but before the shadow Chancellor moves on, does he agree that one of the many examples of foolishness in the Government’s approach to a tax on the inheritance of farmland is that there is a challenge with the age of farmers? We need more young people in farming, and if the Government make it more difficult and expensive for those young people most likely to go into farming—namely, the children of farming families—they will exacerbate that primary problem.

[Andrew Griffith]

My right hon. and learned Friend is exactly right. The original reason for the exemption in death duties that previous Labour Governments respected was that generational aspect—the fact that a business or farm does not necessarily produce the cash flow necessary to hand over an enormous part of that value when, tragically, death takes place. I know that my right hon. Friend the Member for Louth and Horncastle will pick up on that point later.

I will move on to businesses, which, as Members across the House will know, are far more numerous than the farms who we know are impacted. Inheritance tax affects businesses in every one of our constituencies, on every one of our high streets and in every one of our trading estates. Often they are businesses that have been in the same family for multiple generations. This is causing extreme jeopardy, to the point that people are having to take action right now to protect those family interests.

Edmund Burke, a man much beloved on the Opposition Benches, said that society is a partnership

“between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”

There could be no better manifestation of that than Britain’s family businesses, which are rooted in their local community and provide jobs down the generations. Yet this Government are hellbent on breaking them up and forcing them to sell the pieces to pay an inheritance tax bill that they should never have to face. We Conservatives are on the side of family businesses.