Hansard

I refer members to my entry in the register of members’ interests, which states that I am a farmer and a former land agent. Those interests are particularly relevant today as we talk about farming and the very future of the industry—the survival of family farms.

On 30 October, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that, from April 2026, Labour will reduce the agricultural property relief and business property relief for farms with combined business and agricultural assets worth more than £1 million. Those long-standing reliefs have been in place since 1992. To put it simply, those reliefs protected working farm businesses following the death of a member of the family and allowed the land to be passed to another family member to carry on working the unit. The change matters because it risks the very future of family farming units across Scotland and the United Kingdom, and, in so doing, it poses a serious risk to the future of our rural communities and national food security.

Today, Labour will—I have no doubt about it—repeat the Treasury’s claim that the changes will impact only a very small number of farms. Labour’s calculations are wrong. The National Farmers Union, along with other organisations, disputes Labour’s calculations, claiming that the move will hit capital-rich, cash-poor family farms. It is a tax raid that has been described as “disastrous”.

I call myself a farmer and I am proud to do so. I love working the land. However, I have always been a small-scale farmer with a few sheep here and there, and sometimes a bit of arable. The change will not affect me personally, but it will affect many people I know in the industry, and it is evident that Labour simply does not understand how the majority of farms work.

In one of my previous roles, I was a Quality Meat Scotland and Scottish Quality Crops farm assurance assessor. I imagine that some members will know the role of farm assurance voluntary schemes, which cover the majority of farmers in Scotland and put in place the highest possible standards for animal welfare, hygiene, transport and so on. Every year, each member of the scheme is visited on their farm by an assessor. The first part of the visit is spent outside, walking around the unit, and the second part often happens inside, over a coffee, looking at record keeping. I never calculated how many farms I visited, but I am pretty sure that it was more than 1,000 across the north-east and the Highlands. I do not remember a single unit that was a large business entity—a branded corporation with legal departments and accounts teams. No, I met fathers, mothers, sons and daughters—proud people running small-time businesses and just trying to get by.

My trick when inspecting was to find a positive quickly, whether it was by pointing out a bonnie cow or a healthy sheep or by complimenting the farmer on how good the crops looked. It would relax the farmer, who would proudly tell me of the years it had taken to get the flock just right for the farm or how one of the cows had been with him for 30 years and a calf had come second in the Royal Highland Show. They would recount stories of their grandfather putting up the now-old cattle shed and the days spent sweeping the grain lofts as children.

Many of these families have served for generations, growing food for us all. They provide a service to their country and they are custodians of the countryside. Years of hard work have gone into making farms what they are, but farming families are not just farmers. When the snow falls heavily in winter, it is the farmers who clear country lanes so that local people can get out and about, and, when the delivery driver gets stuck in the ditch, it is often the farmers who help them to get out. Family members connected to farming can often be found working as care workers, doctors, teachers, shop assistants and more.

Farming families are not just in our rural communities—they are our rural communities. They are the lifeblood of those areas. That is the key point that I want to make. The key reason why the changes made by Labour are devastating is that they will impact those very families. They will force the sale of land, which will make family farms economically unviable and lead to more depopulation in our rural areas.

It is all very well for Labour ministers and civil servants to talk about farmers handing over the farm early or using the inheritance tax allowances, but those suggestions fundamentally miss the point of how these units work. Often, children go away to work in other areas to gain experience before returning home to work the farm. With little profit, farmers tend not to retire but are an active part of the unit for a long time.

Although I would always urge farmers to consider early succession planning, having been part of such discussions with farmers and having monitored the books for them, I know that it is not that simple. Jim Walker, a former president of NFU Scotland, has calculated that a medium-sized, 500-acre farm worth around £5 million that previously had no inheritance tax liability could incur an £800,000 bill, which, if amortised over 25 years at 8 per cent, would mean an annual repayment of £75,000. He asks:

“Who’s going to break the news to the children that want to farm it?”

Farming is already a difficult business, but the changes risk the very future of our family farms. They risk breaking up viable units across Scotland and land being purchased for investment such as carbon credits, and they risk the future of communities and food security. We can talk about land reform, new entrants to farming, succession planning and innovation in farming, and we can put in place plans that would help farming to thrive, but all of that is undone by Labour’s damaging changes. Trust is now broken, because, during the election, Labour gave farmers a cast-iron guarantee that, if it won, it would not tinker with agricultural property relief, and it has broken that promise.

The Scottish Conservatives have launched a petition at stopthefarmtax.com, calling on people to send Rachel Reeves and the Labour Government a clear message that the changes could spell the end of family farms being passed down to future generations. I want rural communities to thrive. I want top-quality food production in Scotland that we are not ashamed to shout about. I do not want our unique family farms to be destroyed. Labour has underestimated how many farms this will affect, and it has underestimated the anger that the changes have created. The Scottish Conservatives urgently call for the family farm tax to be reversed.

I move,

That the Parliament calls on the UK Government to reverse its decision to impose a so-called family farm tax on agricultural businesses.