UK inheritance tax clampdown will not spark mass sale of family farms, study shows

Makes sense. As someone who’s family farm was gradually sliced up into into more and more increasingly worthless chunks every time someone died, families are perfectly capable of making farms worthless all by themselves 

Funny how all the economic doom mongering seems to have been wrong (see also the number of non-doms running away)

But inheritance tax only kicks in on estates over £1m in these cases, and first £1m is anyway disregarded. What is the issue then?

But we aren’t allowed to tax the rich or so I keep being told, keep the rich richer and they’ll eventually trickle some down to us, that’s right isn’t it?

Study says nothing about avoiding mass sales of family farms.

Just that 80% could afford it right now, this also leads to the issue of the next generation after having even more issues affording it as farming is notoriously unprofitable, which could lead to a cascading effect of only having a few mega farms in the entire country.

Feels like there could’ve been better workarounds such as only charging the tax to people’s who’s main income is not farming, or just make it so the inheritee has to pay inheritance tax on top of the regular tax if they sell the farm they inherited.

Inheritance tax just makes the people who have money and contribute to society move out the country before they die. Remember when you were a kid and you looked up at adults thinking how wise and clued up they were? Then you grow up and realise everyone is either mentally ill or low IQ but in high power roles.

TRANSLATION: Farms will have to sell the diversifications they have made to keep the food production side of the business afloat.

The title and article are extremely misleading. Let me explain.

The article says that the work shows that farms will not have to sell all of their assets to pay the tax.

Nobody was saying that we were.

We have been saying that we will have to sell some of the assets, permanently reducing the size of the business.

We have been saying that the hope value valuations used for farmland elevate the tax liability by about 20x and that it is unfair that other businesses are valued as a going concern.

Farms have diversified for decades to reduce the risk behind food production and effectively subsidise cheap food by doing other things. Often it is the diversifications that are keeping the entire enterprise afloat.

Selling off the part of the business that is most likely to get planning permission, and is making all of the money, would prevent the rest of the farm from having to be sold.

It would make the rest of the business go under though!

The report and the article is slightly disenenous.

>Some 86 per cent of affected farm estates will have an IHT liability that is less than the value of the non-farm assets in the estate, meaning they could avoid selling the family farm to cover the costs of the levy.

So basically if you can keep the farm by literally selling/liquidating everything else in the estate then the report/gov deems this as ok?

I’m not sure I think it is.

Ultimately the people who will get caught out by this change in IHT are those who die unexpectedly early or the kind of farming middleclass who’s farms dip into this territory but can’t afford the advice to avoid it.

I don’t think targetting either group should be a priority for labour but hey.

Take ever more money from everyone and fritter it away is Labour all over. Remember the last time? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/17/liam-byrne-note-successor

Course it won’t cause mass sell offs. Families will do all they can to hold on to their land to pass on to the the next generation. Even if it fecks them financially.

Tilted language used through out the report referenced. Largely won’t effect family farms, yet 40 + percent effected will be family farms. 70% odd of the farm incomes were low, before clobering them with more debt.

They identified a third of the estates affected where likely investors, yet they are largely unaffected, would only be paying 3% of the tax take.

Even if 10% of the affected family farms have to offload assets to cover the tax, is this not a bad long term? It just let’s more farms and land be hovered up by the Moy Parks and Dysons

To be fair, it does seem to hit the large estate owners hard, the ones that actually don’t farm the land they own, but geez would labour stop being such thick arrogant cunts and finally sit down with the actual farmers and iron out the minor details.

They have the chance to do something good

Who could have predicted that landowners opinions on them paying more tax and the consequences of that might be slightly biased.

At the moment farmers earn nowt, as they get their return via a saving on inheritance tax. Farming activity is influenced by these motivations. The big farmers having to now face up to the withdrawal of this tax benefit will not have to maximise their returns. It’s a start of a tougher time for the supermarkets.

This is nothing more than organised theft for land and farms to end up in the hands of corporations and shareholders.

And you all seal clap for it like good little people.

I thought the issue was it would damage the farmers (family’s) in the long run, not immediately.

Asset tax. But farmers are excluded. Lords and rich people have loads of land and don’t grow anything. Tax them.