Debate contribution: Inheritance Tax Changes: Impact on Family Farms

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 11 February 2025.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

11 February 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Inheritance Tax Changes: Impact on Family Farms

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4793758

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I will begin by clarifying some figures before outlining why I oppose the motion. The proposed changes will mean that farmers pay inheritance tax at half the normal rate on property transfers above £1 million. Two people with farmland, depending on the circumstances, can pass on £2 million and, in some cases, up to £3 million without paying any inheritance tax. Those are huge figures that we are talking about. Fewer than a quarter of farms in the North have an agricultural and business property value of more than £2 million. That means that less than 25% — less than 25% — of farms will have to pay half the normal rate of inheritance tax on their land valued above £2 million. It is important to keep that in mind during the debate. The fact is that most family farms across the North will not be affected by the changes. An organisation that is often quoted in this Building, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, notes that the changes, if implemented, would still mean that farmland is much more lightly taxed than most other assets. Land is an asset and it is wealth. The pushback against changes to agricultural property relief across the North and in Britain has been led — I emphasise the word "led" — by the political right and massively profitable agri-food businesses and their lobbyists. That is the exact opposite of a grassroots movement, as the proposer of the motion described it. The fact that protests in England were led by the likes of Jeremy Clarkson, a TV presenter and hobbyist farmer who bought his farm for the stated purposes of dodging tax, should tell us everything that we need to know about who is setting the political agenda in this debate. Clarkson, Farage and others leading that charge are nothing more than multimillion-pound opportunists, desperately trying to cling on to their obscene wealth. They have also used this debate to peddle myths about climate change. The interests of large landowners and big agribusiness are entirely opposed to the interests of small farmers, and that includes most family farms across the North. Big farm landowners speculate on land value. They buy farmland with the clear purpose of raising prices to accumulate wealth or as a vehicle to avoid inheritance tax. Those are the people and the businesses hiking up land value, threatening the sustainability of family farms and the livelihoods of tenant farmers. We also need to talk about why small farmers have been drawn to those protests in the first place. They do have genuine fears and struggles — nobody is doubting that — including the control that multinational companies have over prices paid to farmers and large supermarkets forcing down prices as low as possible to fuel their own profiteering, but there has been nothing about that in today's debate so far. Too many farmers in the North balance unstable and insecure work on farmland alongside full- or part-time jobs in other industries just to make ends meet. Like everyone else, small farmers have been hit by the cost-of-living crisis. If the Government want to promote specific land uses for food production, tree planting and encouraging biodiversity, support must be targeted directly at those activities. That is how you support food sovereignty, climate action and biodiversity, not through inheritance tax relief that big landowners use as an income generator or, quite often, a tax loophole. Changes to agricultural property relief are a very small step in the right direction that will restrict opportunities for tax avoidance and will, hopefully, bring down massively inflated land value. However, the state must go much further to achieve real tax justice, including having a mass programme of wealth redistribution that would ensure sustainable, fairly paid work for small tenant farmers and rural workers. I suspect that most in the House may oppose that. I oppose the motion.

648 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:00 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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