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.
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Why is Arun Advani of Centax influencing tax policies? Who elected him?