Environment Secretary Gives Farmers Advice on How to Avoid His Own New Tax – Guido Fawkes

LISTEN: Environment Secretary Gives Farmers Advice on How to Avoid His Own New Tax

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Defra secretary Steve Reed has been taking calls from punters on LBC just now. One asked him why his department chose to “out of hand reject the NFU and CLA’s clawback proposal on inheritance tax.” That imperfect proposal would broadly exempt generational active farms from IHT and claw back the exemption in the case of a future sale…

Reed rattled off the usual Labour line about finding “£22 billion missing” when it came into government and had to “make some changes to taxation” to fund the NHS. The Farm Tax will collect £500 million by 20230 at the optimistic projections. One sixtieth of the cost of the Chagos Surrender…

The environment secretary then justified removing APR and BPR: “They’re not having to pay it in one go of course – that’s after a farmer’s death and this is the person who inherits the farm not the actual farmer at the time.” That being how a death tax works…

Then comes the kicker – Reed tells farmers to avoid IHT by handing heirs assets early – which makes sense seeing as Defra was blindsided by Reeves with the tax at the budget: “With any you know business or big asset like a farm if you pass it on, you know, at normal retirement age – you don’t have to pay anything so I think most farms will not be hit by this.“ Pssst – this also works if you’ve acquired a farm to avoid IHT…