Robin Swann
Main Page: Robin Swann (Ulster Unionist Party - South Antrim)Department Debates - View all Robin Swann's debates with the HM Treasury
Inheritance Tax Relief: Farms
Robin Swann Excerpts(2 months ago)
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Robin Swann (South Antrim) (UUP)
The Government have said they are listening. I also hope they hear the tractors and farmers from across this country outside this building today. They are showing their disgust at this proposal.
I want to bring the Northern Ireland angle to this debate. Some 150,000 petitioners signed the petition. I had the pleasure of presenting a similar petition, on behalf of the Ulster Farmers’ Union, signed by 15,000 people from Northern Ireland who oppose the Government’s proposal, which will decimate the Northern Ireland family farm and family farming industry. Because of the structure and size of our family farms, it will hit us disproportionately compared with the rest of the United Kingdom.
This is where the Treasury’s figures do not match up with those of the Northern Ireland Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs, or the Northern Ireland Rural Valuers’ Association. We have recently had bare agricultural land sell for £28,000 per acre. I want to emphasise that that is per acre because, when this proposal was first made, some in the Treasury got acres and hectares mixed up. That price of land starts to put the bare minimum small family farm in the scope of this financial grab, which will see the end of what generations of farmers have built up.
Figures from our own Department, DAERA, show that 80% of Northern Ireland’s total farmland, 90% of its dairy industry and 70% of its beef and sheep farming will fall within this scope, so when it comes to the wrecking that this proposed financial tax-grab will do to Northern Ireland farmers, as well as farmers across the United Kingdom, this Government have not fully listened to what has come out of DAERA or DEFRA here. It is, as a Member said earlier, simply a Treasury grab at a balance. It looks at a spreadsheet, but does not have a true understanding of the impact that this will have on families and generations across our country, so I ask the Government and the Minister to engage—and to make sure that the Treasury engages—with the farm unions across this nation, because they do not fully grasp the impact that this will have.