Farmers, is the NFU Really Worth £36 Million of Your Money Each Year?

I’m rather annoyed with the National Farmers Union (NFU). A week or so ago, I emailed two people in the NFU media department with details of a story which I first featured in a Daily Sceptic article. I have also emailed the story to three or four NFU regional offices.

In the article, I showed how the inheritance tax on farmers wasn’t really intended to raise much money to cover the supposed £22 billion black hole in the public finances which Starmer and Reeves apparently discovered about five minutes after Labour had been elected, forcing Labour to raise the taxes which five minutes earlier Labour had promised not to raise.

In the article, I explained how investment company Aberdeen (also known as the capital-letter-free, vowel-free ‘abrdn’) had launched its FLAG (Forestry, Land and Agriculture) strategy to spend hundreds of millions of pounds buying up forests and farmland. But Aberdeen had been frustrated in its attempts to buy agricultural land due to much of the land being owned by family farmers. So Aberdeen paid for a report on Britain’s tax system by Left-wing think tank Demos. Surprise surprise, one of the key recommendations of the Aberdeen-sponsored Demos report was to impose inheritance tax on farmers. Given that many farmers are ‘asset rich but cash poor’, this would have forced many farms to sell off land to pay the inheritance tax, thus allowing what Aberdeen called “purely financial owners” like Aberdeen to buy up the land. To help push through this policy, Aberdeen managed to get its head honcho onto a taskforce of business leaders invited in October 2023 to advise Rachel Reeves on what she should be doing when Labour inevitably won the July 2024 General Election.

I had imagined that the media geniuses at the NFU could pick up the story, get a few great quotes from outraged farmers – in particular Jeremy Clarkson – and launch a blitzkrieg on Reeves leading to widespread public fury and to her having to cancel the tax and possibly even resign.

I don’t consider myself anyone special. But, as I have had more than 10 current affairs books published covering such topics as politics, economics, charities, the psychology of selling, universities and non-existent anthropogenic climate change, the least I expected from the NFU media heroes was an acknowledgement of my email to them and of the story. But there has been nothing, zilch, no answer apart from two automated email responses informing me that the person I had contacted was on annual leave. The NFU gets an (astonishing to me) £36 million a year, or thereabouts, mostly from farmers. About £26 million of this goes on NFU staff costs. So I started to wonder whose interests the NFU actually serves – those of farmers, who pay almost £36 million a year to the NFU, or those of NFU employees whose lifestyles are supported by the apparent generosity of Britain’s farmers.

There are many wonderful theories about organisational behaviour. One very simplistic one I have developed is that in any non-commercial organisation – healthcare, charities, government departments, regulators, local councils etc – there are two main types of person:

the servers – those who see their role as providing whatever services that organisation is set up to provide
the self-servers – those who see the organisation as a way to advance their own careers, increasing their own importance, power and financial well-being

Given that the first group, the servers, will spend much of their time and effort delivering the service which the organisation should be delivering, this often means that the second group, the self-servers, the group using the organisation to advance its own interests, inevitably accrues power and influence. And the more power and influence the self-servers manage to appropriate, the less likely it is that the organisation will actually do what it was originally set up to do.

Here’s a nice picture of the NFU HQ:

It looks like quite a relaxing place to work. Though there aren’t many cars outside. Perhaps many of the 817 hard-working NFU employees are hard-working from home?

Working from home can be, I realise, quite challenging. By the time you’ve got the kids to school, walked the dogs, read a few emails, browsed some of your favourite websites, had lunch, walked the dogs again, answered a few emails, browsed a few more of your favourite websites, picked up the kids from school and taken them to their various after-school activities – well, there’s not much time left to do the job you’re paid to do. Of course, I have no idea if many or even any NFU staff do actually work from home. But I do know that any serious, professional organisation which understood its original purpose would have acknowledged my email, read the article on the Daily Sceptic website and sent me some form of reply. So my question for Britain’s farmers is: do you really think you’re getting good value for the almost £36 million you fork out to the NFU each year? Or is it time to do a Trump-Musk – admit the NFU is not fit for purpose and that it’s just a self-serving bureaucracy like so many other organisations in Britain today – civil service departments, police, charities, border control, NHS, regulators and so on – scrap the NFU, fire all its employees and start again building a new organisation costing you considerably less money and staffed by people who are genuinely interested in service rather than self-service? Then perhaps we could extend the Trump-Musk treatment to so many other useless, costly, ineffective British bureaucracies?

David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.