Tories says farm inheritance tax U-turn comes 'too late' because 'businesses and lives have been lost'
The farm inheritance tax U-turn is a significant win for the Conservative party. They described the budget 2024 proposal as a “family farm tax” and they have campaigned against it more vocally than against almost any other Labour policy.
But Victoria Atkins, the shadow environment secretary, has been a bit grudging in her response this morning – and notably less postive than the NFU (see 12.12pm). She says:
At long last, Labour has snuck out a partial u-turn on their vindictive Family Farm Tax.
It is too late for some, however.
Businesses and lives have been lost. Rural communities will not forget the distress, pain and panic this government has caused them.
NFU welcomes inheritance tax U-turn, saying it will be 'huge relief' to many farmers and 'common sense has prevailed'
The National Farmers’ Union has welcomed today’s farm inheritance tax U-turn, saying that “common sense has prevailed” and that this will be a “huge relief to many”.
In a statement, the NFU president Tom Bradshaw said:
Changes to agriculture property relief (APR) and business property relief (BPR) announced in last year’s budget came as a huge shock to the farming community. Until that moment, the best tax planning advice was to hold on to your farm until death and pass it on to the next generation who could continue to run a viable farming, food producing business.
The original changes to APR and BPR, contained within the finance bill, resulted in a pernicious and cruel tax, trapping the most elderly and vulnerable people and their families in the eye of the storm. The NFU and its members have stood strong for what we believed in.
I am thankful common sense has prevailed and government has listened.
I have had two very constructive meetings with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and dozens of conversations with Defra Secretary of State Emma Reynolds. She has played a key role underlining the human impact of this tax.
These conversations have led to today’s changes which were so desperately needed.
From the start, the government said it was trying to protect the family farm and the change announced today brings this much closer to reality for many.
This statement is notable for the fact that Bradshaw is suggesting that Starmer and Reynolds led to the government changing its mind on the inheritance tax threshold. He does not mention Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, or Steve Reed, Reynolds’ predecessor as environment secretary, who were seen by the NFU as more implacable on this issue.
The Treasury has published this explainer setting out in detail how the inheritance tax rules will apply to farms after today’s announcement.
Government claims it will still get most of planned £500m per year from farm inheritance tax, despite U-turn over threshold
When the government first announced its plan to extend inheritance tax to farms, it said that this would raise around £520m a year from 2028-29.
The government has not said today how much its U-turn will cost, or where the extra money will come from, but it claims it will still be able to make “the majority” of the savings orginally planned. It says:
The changes we are implementing reflects the concerns that have been raised while preserving the majority of the revenue from reform to help cut debt and borrowing and fund public services. The costings for today’s announcement will be incorporated into the next OBR forecast.
Announcing the inheritance tax change (or U-turn – although she is not calling it that), Emma Reynolds, the environment secretary, says:
Farmers are at the heart of our food security and environmental stewardship, and I am determined to work with them to secure a profitable future for British farming.
We have listened closely to farmers across the country and we are making changes today to protect more ordinary family farms. We are increasing the individual threshold from £1m to £2.5m which means couples with estates of up to £5m will now pay no inheritance tax on their estates.
It’s only right that larger estates contribute more, while we back the farms and trading businesses that are the backbone of Britain’s rural communities.
Defra says 85% of farms will be protected from higher inheritance tax following today's U-turn
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has taken the lead in announcing today’s farm inheritance tax U-turn, not the Treasury, which pushed the policy in the first place. One reason why it was particular controversial was because Steve Reed, the former environment secretary, told farms when he was shadow environment secretary before the election that their farms would be safe from inheritance tax.
Defra says today’s change will “significantly reduce” the number of farms affected by higher inheritance tax bills.
Summing up the impact, it says:
-The number of estates claiming agricultural property relief (including those also claiming business property relief) affected by the reforms in 2026-27 halves from 375 to 185.
-Most estates will benefit, with inheritance tax cut by hundreds of thousands of pounds for many families.
-The number of estates affected by the reforms claiming only business property relief – excluding those holding only AIM shares – will fall by a third, reducing complexity and ensuring support goes where it’s needed most.
-Around 85% of estates claiming agricultural property relief in 2026-27, including those that also claim for business property relief, are forecast to pay no more inheritance tax on their estates.
Inheritance tax for farmers to kick in at £2.5m, not £1m as planned, in government U-turn to help farming community
The government has just announced a significant concession in its proposal to extend inheritance tax to farms.
The policy, originally announced in the budget last year, provoked a furious backlash from farmers, who said it would prevent many of them from being able to pass on their farms to their children. Under the plan, inheritance tax would have been due on the value of farms over £1m.
The new rules are due to come into force in April 2026, and at a Commons commitee hearing last week Keir Starmer conceded that he has been told of farmers with a terminal illness planning to kill themselves before that point to avoid the tax.
The government has today announced that the threshold will lifted from £1m to £2.5m.
In a new release, it says:
The government has today announced that the level of the agricultural and business property reliefs threshold will be increased from £1m to £2.5m when it is introduced in April 2026. This allows spouses or civil partners to pass on up to £5m in qualifying agricultural or business assets between them before paying inheritance tax, on top of existing allowances.
Following the reforms to agricultural and business property reliefs announced at budget 2024, the government has listened to concerns of the farming community and businesses about the reforms.
Having carefully considered this feedback, the government is going further to protect more farms and businesses, while maintaining the core principle that the most valuable agricultural and business assets should not receive unlimited relief. The change will be introduced to the Finance Bill in January and will apply from 6 April.
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The Treasury’s next big fiscal event, the spring statement, will take place on Tuesday 3 March, the government has announced. But Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, says she only wants one budget a year and that means, while previous spring statements have turned into mini-budgets, this one is unlikely to contain any significant fiscal announcements.
Alongside the spring statement, the Office for Budget Responsibility will produce an updated forecast. But it won’t produce a new assessement as to whether or not the chancellor is on course to meet her fiscal targets, because the OBR has now been told to do that only once a year, at the budget, not twice a year.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has written an article for the Daily Mirror explaining the reasons for the announcement today that young people leaving care in England will receive free prescriptions, and dental and eye services up to their 25th birthday. He says:
Too many vulnerable children in care fall through the cracks because the right information doesn’t reach the right people at the right time – meaning issues can go unnoticed.
That’s why we’re introducing new safeguarding measures so that GPs are automatically alerted when young patients are in care, so they understand what their patient is going through and work alongside social workers, teachers, to keep these children happy, safe and healthy.
These aren’t just policy changes. They’re about recognising that children in care deserve the same opportunities as everyone else and sometimes need more support to achieve them. This government was elected to break down barriers to opportunity and give every child the best start in life. That means action, not warm words.
Four-day week may be considered a sign of failure, England councils told
Steve Reed, the secretary of state for housing, communities and local government, has written to all councils to warn that adopting a four-day week for staff puts them at risk of being declared a failing authority, Jamie Grierson reports.
As Jamie reports, 25 councils have discussed a four-day week policy and one, South Cambridgeshire district council, has already moved to the pattern.
This is quite a shift from Labour. At the time of the 2019 general election, when Jeremy Corbyn was leader, Labour was committed to the goal of reducing average working hours over the course of a decade so as to in effect introduce a four-day working week for everyone.
Lib Dems call for creation of fly tipping hotline to improve reporting of 'mountain of rubbish' problems
Last month Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, raised an incident of fly tipping in Oxfordshire at PMQs. That is not the sort of topic that normally comes up at PMQs, although anyone who has seen the pictures will know why Davey, and his party, felt this had to be raised at the highest level.
Not letting go, the Lib Dems have today released some polling that suggests this is a widespread problem, and that it is getting worse. According to the poll by Savanta, commissioned by the party and carried out last month, 20% of people say they have seen ‘mountain of rubbish’ fly tipping in their area, on a scale similar to the Kidlington incident raised at PMQs.
Among the 1 in 5 who did say fly tipping was a problem for them locally, 66% of them thought organised criminal gangs were involved, and 64% of them said they thought the problem had got worse in the past 12 months.
Tim Farron, the Lib Dem environment spokespeson, said:
These figures show that the scandalous mountain of filth in Oxfordshire is just the tip of the iceberg. From our riversides to our rural lanes, criminal gangs are turning this country into an environmental wild west.
What’s worse - we don’t even know the true scale of the problem. Communities are being left to deal with filthy waste whilst criminal operations run rings around a system that all but looks the other way.
We cannot go on like this. Liberal Democrats are calling on the government to urgently clean up illegal waste sites and set up a new fly-tipping hotline to improve public reporting and detection of large-scale waste sites across the country.
In a thread on social media yesterday, Calum Miller, the Lib Dem MP for Bicester and Woodstock, recalled how he was first alerted to the problem at Kidlington and how he got the Environment Agency to respond.
Non-crime hate incident recording system for police ‘not fit for purpose’ and must be replaced, expert body to tell Home Office
Good morning. With Christmas just two days away, the Westminster tap of news, which normally gushes strongly, is down to a dribble. There is not much on the government’s grid today, apart from an announcement about a plan to ensure young people leaving care in England will receive free prescriptions, and dental and eye services up to their 25th birthday, which we’ve written up here …
… and also confirmation that some former mineworkers are getting a £100-a-week boost to their pensions as a result of a change to the British Coal Staff Superannuation Scheme announced in the budget.
Josh MacAlister, the children’s minister, has been giving interviews this morning about the care leavers announcement.
We’re in one of those weeks where, even more than usual, news organisations have to find their own stories. In politics we’ve got a report from Peter Walker about Reform UK’s plan to slash aid spending (or, rather, slash it even more than it has been slashed already).
“Plans by Reform UK to slash the aid budget by 90% would not cover existing contributions to global bodies such as the UN and World Bank, shredding Britain’s international influence and risking its standing within those organisations, charities and other parties have warned,” Peter writes.
The Telegraph is splashing on a story by Charles Hymas, its home affairs editor, saying that “non-crime hate incidents [NCHIs] are to be scrapped under plans that police chiefs will present to the home secretary next month”. This sounds like something pencilled in for the 2026 No 10 news grid, but Hymas has spoken to Lord Herbert, the former Tory policing minister who is now chair of the College of Policing, an organisation that works with the Home Office on policing policy, and he has confirmed that NCHIs are for the chop. He told the paper:
NCHIs will go as a concept. That system will be scrapped and replaced with a completely different system.
There will be no recording of anything like it on crime databases. Instead, only the most serious category of what will be treated as anti-social behaviour will be recorded. It’s a sea change.
The police started recording NCHIs following a recommendation in William Macpherson’s 1999 report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Macpherson said the police should create “a comprehensive system of reporting and recording of all racist incidents and crimes”.
Herbert told the Telegraph that the system was no longer “fit for purpose” because of the growth in social media and the advent of smartphones. He said:
It’s drawn police into an area that I don’t believe they wanted to be in. Police have been caricatured that they wanted to be involved in this, but I haven’t met a copper who does.
While some police officers argue that recording NCHIs is a useful way of recording behaviour that will escalate into criminality, the system has also generated countless stories (not least in the Telegraph) about police forces becoming over-preoccupied with offensive tweets.
According to the Telegraph, under the new system officers will not log hate speech incidents on crime databases, and will instead treat them as intelligence reports. They will also be given a “common sense” checklist so that they only intervene in cases of serious anti-social behaviour. Herbert told the paper the police had to be careful “not to throw the baby out with the bathwater”.
Ministers, including Keir Starmer and Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, have repeatedly said (normally in response to press reports about alleged excessive police responses to NCHIs) that they want the police to focus on what matters to the public and the Telegraph says the College of Policing plans are likely to be accepted by the Home Office. Mahmood is on record as saying that the police should be able to distinguish between “content [on social media] that is offensive, rude, ill-mannered, and incitement to violence, incitement to hatred”.
There is nothing much in the diary for today. But we’ll find some news somewhere.
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