Farming and Inheritance Tax

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Wednesday 4th December 2024 Commons Chamber

[Victoria Atkins]

rose—

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

On a point of order, Mr Speaker.

[Mr Speaker]

I have a point of order—from the shadow Minister’s good friend, of course.

[Simon Hoare]

This point of order is spontaneous, unlike that intervention. [Interruption.] I am Mr Spontaneity.

Mr Speaker, you are entirely right that many right hon. and hon. Members read their speeches almost verbatim, but surely it is just rude and discourteous to the House for the hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Alison Hume) to read a supposedly spontaneous intervention as if it had just come into her mind. She managed to find a typewriter and a printer in order to write down two pages of intervention.

[Mr Speaker]

As I expected, spontaneity did not make it a point of order.

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[Mr Speaker]

We do not have much trade with the Chagos islands.

[Simon Hoare]

My right hon. Friend is right to highlight the devastating effect of this policy and to highlight the incredible rounding-up exercise on the Treasury account books of the contribution that it will make to NHS expenditure. With the Labour party having a serious foothold in rural constituencies for the first time since 1945, does she not find this rather inept politics, which is perhaps not surprising from such a London-centric Front Bench? The policy shows a wilful ignorance of rural life and a deliberate attempt not to understand the pressures and is, in essence, selling those rural Labour MPs down the river.

[Victoria Atkins]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point. There is some interesting polling coming out today, which I will deal with. Of course, Mr Speaker, I very much accept your point about trade, but we are genuinely concerned about the national security implications of the Chagos islands deal.

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[James Murray]

I reassure the right hon. Gentleman, for whom I have a lot of respect personally, that we carefully considered how to calibrate the policy to ensure that significant relief from inheritance tax is still available to family farms, while at the same time fixing the public finances in as fair a way as possible.

[Simon Hoare]

I am very grateful to the Minister for giving way. He has just referred to his analysis of four years of data which led him and the Government to this position. That is an incredible thing to ask the House to believe, because just a few months ago his right hon. Friends the now Prime Minister and Secretary of State were specifically ruling out these policies to audiences of farmers and landowners. If the data of four years’ standing told him that this was the right policy, why were those now Ministers economical with the actualité when they spoke to the farmers themselves?

[James Murray]

The data we did not have before the general election was the £22 billion black hole that the hon. Gentleman’s party left in the public finances. He knows that, because it is acknowledged by the Office for Budget Responsibility that the full information was not shared with it. It has said that its forecast would have been “materially different” had it known that that was the case. We have had to take a number of difficult decisions.

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[Daniel Zeichner]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am not sure that Conservative Members do want to listen, really.

As a result of the anxiety that we know people are feeling, it is right that the Prime Minister, the Environment Secretary and I have all met with the NFU president Tom Bradshaw to talk about the proposed reforms. The Government have and will continue to engage with the NFU, the CLA, the Tenant Farmers Association and other stakeholders. The reforms will not be introduced until April 2026, so there is plenty of time for people to plan for change and to get, as they always should when running major businesses, professional advice about succession planning.

Let us be honest: last month’s protests were not just about APR. Rural communities have felt ignored and let down by this place after decades of failure. The Conservatives sold out British farmers in trade deals with New Zealand and Australia. I listened to the shadow Secretary of State, the right hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins)—did we get any apology for the trade deals? Not a word; no contrition. They have learned nothing. They left farmers facing spiralling energy bills because they refused to invest in cheaper home-grown British power—a decision that sent fertiliser and animal feed costs soaring.

The Conservatives were so incompetent that they failed to get £300 million earmarked for farmers out the door, leaving farmers out of pocket as the money sat idle in Treasury coffers. The disastrous kamikaze Budget crashed Britain’s economy and sent interest rates and mortgages skyrocketing, at massive cost to our farmers and rural communities. As a result of all that, public services are broken; hospital waiting lists are at record highs; schools in rural areas are crumbling—if Conservative Members use them, of course—and roads across country areas are cratered with potholes.

Rural communities are rightly feeling ignored and left behind. This Government will not accept that. These reforms will disincentivise the wealthy from buying up agricultural land to shield their wealth from inheritance tax, and they will also raise the money needed to fix those public services. This is a turning point for national renewal. The Budget also commits £5 billion to agriculture over the next two years.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

claimed to move the closure (Standing Order No. 36).

Question put forthwith, That the Question be now put.

Question agreed to.

Question put accordingly (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the original words stand part of the Question.