Labour’s family farm tax raid was flawed and ruined relations with the countryside, Sir Keir Starmer’s rural minister at the time, Daniel Zeichner, has said, as he blamed the Treasury for forcing it through. The Telegraph has the story.
Daniel Zeichner, who was the minister for the environment from 2024-2025, said the Treasury forced the policy through without considering the political fallout among rural voters.
He told the Telegraph that too many government officials with no knowledge of the countryside were responsible for scrapping the decades-long inheritance tax exemption for agricultural land in Labour’s 2024 Budget.
This initially left family farms facing a 20% levy on assets worth more than £1 million. Rachel Reeves, then chancellor, later increased the threshold to £2.5 million after a fierce backlash saw farmers drive their tractors through Westminster in protest.
Zeichner said: “I think the problem is that there probably weren’t people close enough to the discussion who knew enough about rural areas and farming to know what the response would be.
“They looked at it from a tax point of view, rather than understanding the politics.”
As the Labour MP for Cambridge, Zeichner claimed to have experienced farmers’ fury first-hand.
He said: “I wasn’t completely opposed from a policy perspective, but I knew that the emotional effect it would have would be huge, and that’s exactly what happened.
“I think, in hindsight, if people had known that that was going to be the consequence, they probably wouldn’t have done it. Labour should be careful about picking fights with the countryside.”
His comments echo similar criticism made by Lord Blunkett earlier this week, who called the inheritance tax on farms a “mistake”.
He said: “If you’re an urban dweller all your life and you’ve got Treasury economic orthodoxy in your soul, you won’t understand that family farms are only family because they are passed down from one generation to another.”
The Labour grandee called for a “rural reset” to undo a set of policies deemed to be treating the countryside “as the enemy”.
As well as imposing inheritance tax on family farms, Labour has unveiled plans to ban trail hunting and launched a review of game shooting.
Worth reading in full.
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Farmland let out has a yield of less than 1%. That means that at 20% IHT will take 30 years of pre-tax return to pay.
Err, who is supposed to be running the country. Elected representatives or the civil service.
if it is the civil service, then democracy is irrelevant and they should be honest and declare a dictatorship.
if not, then surely the representatives of the farming constituents should have enough local knowledge to inform the decision.
Yes? No? What do you mean, they don’t visit and have never lived in their constituency.
‘If people had known this was going to be a consequence …’ So there was no examination of what the result might be except a blind enthusuasm to stick it to land owners without considering where food comes from. Even worse than I thought.
Don’t you know that food comes from supermarkets?
If you live in rural England and are involved in farming, country sports, hospitality or tourism you’d have to have a serious desire for self-harm to vote Labour.
That also applies to anyone who is trying to run a small business; or who lives fairly near to a former military site at risk of being populated by 1000+ violent 3rd world criminal migrants; anyone whose council tax is about to be ramped up so that the Cock of the North can transfer extra funding to northern (Labour-run) Councils.
And if you don’t want the landscape of your rural area to be ruined by windmills and solar panels, voting Labour would be very stupid indeed.
I do believe Labour is slowly waking up to the fact they will be wiped out anywhere outside their oh-so-enriched cuties.
Ministers are responsible for policy. If they are daft enough to accept advice from ill informed, left leaning and ignorant officials then they are still responsible to Parliament and the people. Labour is now trying to excuse itself for two years of bad policies just as the Tories have done for their 14 years in government and the previous decade as HM Opposition when they failed to oppose.
They are all a disgrace and should be ejected if they won’t resign.
The inheritance tax on farmers was introduced to further the business interests of a financial company, abrdn, with which Reeves had very close connections. By forcing farmers off their land, because many will be unable to pay the new inheritance tax, Reeves seems to providing an excellent opportunity for her ‘friends’ at abrdn to buy up agricultural land at very attractive prices to add to abrdn’s FLAG (Forest, Land and Agriculture’) fund. I have offered documentation to prove this to the main newspapers and the NFU, but nobody is interested.
Disgusting bastards.
Could the information that you speak of be published? Here for example? [email protected]
Countryside Alliance are also likely to be very interested.
Also Rupert Lowe
He pipes up now that the political fallout has turned out more serious than hoped. Shut up and jog on.
Why is Arun Advani of Centax influencing tax policies? Who elected him?
Probably ‘cos he knows a little bit about how taxes work, and a certain Mr Healey doesn’t?
Chancellors don’t actually need to know the mechanics of tax as they have a lot of HMRC senior people to tell him. He can find them at home two days a week and off work another day a week plus lots of annual holidays and sickies.
That’s pretty much the point I was making. Swap out Chancellor for Minister for Education/Health/Net Zero or any other, and the same applies. They know virtually nothing. Therefore it is others, not the politicians, that are making government policy.
On the odd occassion I see one of HM Gov’s ministers on TV, obviously struggling to make sense of a policy that they’ve supposedly come up with, I always seem to get flashbacks of Karine Jean-Pierre trying to make sense of what her boss has just dribbled out….
I’m betting he does. Will the Adavni / Ramada hotel chain be paying a wealth tax?