Inheritance tax changes will hurt farmers like me - I've never seen so much anger
Yahoo News – Insights speaks directly to the people with an inside track on the big issues. Here, farmer Rob Sluggett warns of 'crippling' inheritance tax reforms.
Rob Sluggett is a 29-year-old sheep and cattle farmer who lives near Bude, North Cornwall. He will attend a farmers' protest on 19 November, and says Jeremy Clarkson, who is expected to attend the rally, makes farmers 'feel like they have a voice'
He warns that the government's decision to scrap the inheritance tax exemption for farms worth over £1m will be "crippling" for farmers, who have an average return on investment of 0.5%
Farms are worth everything and nothing at the same time – they’re worth what you can produce from them, and if you have no-one else to carry it on you sell it and pay your capital gains.
The problem with the new rules introduced by Labour is having to pay a bill for your family member dying while dealing with low returns. Farms have on average a 0.5% return on their investment. So, it's now going to be really hard to service that kind of debt every time a generation passes on.
I think that this will make us better at succession planning and that farmers are resilient, but this debt will be too much for many.
My nan is still part of the business – she and my dad together – and when she passes on, there’ll be a big tax bill, and if he passes before her there'll be a big tax bill.
It’s going to be crippling, really, for a lot of farmers. I believe the government says that it's only going to be a small percentage of farmers affected, but even Defra is saying it’s going to be more like 66% of us.
It's going to hurt a lot, but the thing is, I can understand where a lot of the public are coming from – they think we have multi-million-pound assets.
But they might as well be worth £1. In the stock market, you don’t have any money until you sell it. You don’t actually have anything until you’ve sold that stock and have it in the bank.
There is a lot more discontent now - you hear it at the market, you hear it all around. I do think this tax is going to cause a lot more damage than what the government will gain from it.
I think Labour thought it would only hurt the big farms... I just think they need to reevaluate what they've done. It seems like it’s just going to hurt the smaller farms too because they won’t have the finances to pay the tax, and they won’t be small enough to be under the threshold – they’re caught in the middle, basically.
I know we all need to pay our share, especially when the country is in a difficult place, but I can't see how strapping people down with generational debt will encourage growth and encourage people to invest.
I'm already hearing things about farmers not going ahead with infrastructure because they're afraid of adding too much value to their farm. It’s all just a bit counterproductive.
I've only been farming for 11 years fully with my dad since I left school – but I don't think there's been anger like this for a long time.
I've never seen such anger actually, and there are so many people who are coming to march in London on 19 November. I didn’t think so many would.
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I’ve seen farmers say 'we should go stage blockades of ports and distribution centres', but it's individuals, there's no organisations calling for it, and the National Farmers' Union (NFU) is not saying to do it.
I just think blockades would be counterintuitive; we’d be upsetting the people that we want on our side. The public are not our enemy, it’s the people putting the tax rules in place.
We're going to do, hopefully, the largest food bank donation in history, as a collective, then march peacefully to Westminster and then go home.
None of us can afford to get in trouble, none of us want to cause any problems or upset the public because at the end of the day we need them as much as they need us. We can't survive without the public buying our food.
And farmers are quite hard to organise you know. We all disagree about everything – but we're quite easy to keep happy if you just don’t treat us poorly.
I think the frustration comes when a lot of farmers feel like the public has forgotten that they need food as well. It takes a lot to produce – it takes a lot of effort, a lot of time, a lot of money.
I think this we've lost the relationship with the public a bit you know, which is a shame. I think we are partly to blame, as we just want to get on with it.
We are better than we were interacting with the public, but I think historically we just wanted to get on with the job and produce food.
And people have so many problems in their life – rent and council tax has gone up, mortgages are high, wages aren’t that good. So, getting food has to be cheap, doesn’t it?
People have got more things on their mind than where their food has come from, which is fair enough, but sometimes it’d be nice if they did think more about it.
The relationships between farmers and Defra and the government was repairing. Farmers were doing biodiversity; they were signing up to the government programmes to increase carbon sequestration.
It was looking positive, and this will have set back the government’s relationship with agriculture by years I believe.
And our own secretary [environment secretary Steve Reed] has come out saying farmers need to ‘learn to do more with less’. Personally, I think that's an absolutely horrendous thing for your own secretary of state to say about farming – it’s dreadful.
You see a lot of it online with the tax experts – I do get the impression that they think farmers are stupid – or that we don’t know what we’re talking about. A lot have been accused of being led by the far right.
We all have accountants, we all have financial advisers – we run businesses after all. It’s not like us all just getting upset and pedalling some narrative that some crazy account has put on Twitter. It’s real and it’s going to hurt farms.
I think Jeremy Clarkson has farming's interest at heart. There are worse people that could have a voice for us. His reach does more good for us than harm. I feel farmers finally feel like they have a voice, and he's done more to raise our profile than anything else in the last twenty years.
I think the cameras will be there if he is there on the 19th, and as they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
It will be good for people to see we’re not there to cause chaos, we’re not there to riot or spray paint anything or cut down telephone poles – we're there just to march and go and give back to our farms.
We just want to show people how upset we are. It’s not just millionaires protecting their bank accounts, it's real families that have been on the land for generations.
