A group of MPs have urged the Chancellor Rachel Reeves to delay her farmers death tax by a year. MPs on the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee urged the government to look once more at plans to introduce inheritance tax payments for farmers as they called for implementation to be pushed back from April 2026 to April 2027.
In a report released today, the cross-party group of MPs said the pause “would allow for better formulation of tax policy and provide the Government with an opportunity to convey a positive long-term vision for farming”. They added that it would also protect vulnerable farmers who would have “more time to seek appropriate professional advice”. So what do you think? Vote in our poll and join the debate in the comments section. Can’t see the poll below? Click here.
The government has come in for fierce criticism over its controversial plan announced in Rachel Reeves’s first budget in October last year.
Under the plans, farmers would no longer be allowed to claim inheritance tax relief for farms worth more than £1m from April 2026.
The move prompted fury across the nations, with farmers staging several high-profile demonstrations calling on the government to reverse the plans, under a slogan of “no farmers, no food.”
Lib Dem MP Alistair Carmichael, who chairs the committee, said: “There is an opportunity here to rebuild trust and confidence in the farming sector and I hope that the Government will take our recommendations seriously.
“The way in which the Government has behaved over recent months has clearly negatively affected the confidence and wellbeing of farmers.
“The Government, however, seems to be dismissing farmers’ concerns and ignoring the strength of feeling evidenced in the months of protests that saw tractors converge on Westminster and up and down the country.
“Policies affecting farmers have been announced without due consideration or explanation of their impact or their rationale.
“Farmers ought to be the essential element in the Government’s plans both to achieve food security and to restore and protect the environment. When they make decisions for their businesses, farmers have to plan for the long term – but the landscape they are operating in currently is unclear. Farmers urgently need clarity, certainty and advance notice of changes – they cannot be expected to rethink their businesses on a whim. It is essential that Defra focuses on rebuilding trust through good-faith communications with the sector.”
Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband’s hypocrisy threatening to tear Labour apart
Rayner can’t be pleased at Ed Miliband’s wife’s objections to building new houses
Angela Rayner vowed to take on the nimbys stopping new homes being built, so Cabinet pal Ed Miliband must be number one on her hit list. Windy Mili, who wants to cover the countryside in turbines, is against luxury flats being built in his leafy neighbourhood. Or, to be specific, wife Dame Justine Thornton, a Labour campaigner and High Court judge, has written a letter of objection to the development.
She said the five-storey block of flats was “too tall, too bulky and too dense given the context of the surrounding houses and the wider conservation area”. Maybe there is a genuine split on the issue in the Miliband household over whether it should or should not go ahead. It’s hardly unheard of for husbands and wives to disagree. But it comes to something when a Cabinet minister who has vowed to take on the “blockers” cannot persuade his nearest and dearest that a tiny local development is a good thing.
Rayner cannot be best pleased. She has made it her mission to deliver 1.5 million new homes by the next election. Apparently so serious and urgent is the need for new housing and infrastructure that some of the nation’s green belt must be sacrificed.
It was only back in March that the Communities Secretary pleaded with MPs to “back the builders” rather than the nimbys when she introduced the legislation in the Commons. Surely she must have had a quiet word in Miliband’s ear, telling him his family should back off.
But Rayner can’t really argue with earnest Ed. She objected twice to 200 new homes being built in her constituency.
It must fall, then, to the boss Sir Keir Starmer to tell Miliband it’s not a good look to stop new families moving into the beautiful conservation area in North London that he is lucky enough to live in.
Room for two kitchens, don’t forget. When Miliband and his wife were pictured in a tiny, austere-looking cupboard with little more than an oven and a plastic laundry basket during his campaign to be leader, it emerged that they had another, much larger, one that they had kept the cameras away from.
Starmer has promised to “bulldoze” through the opposition to new developments and insisted he is a yimby – “yes in my backyard”. But sadly, Starmer will also struggle to deliver the message to the Miliband household because he has also objected to development – in the form of HS2.
When he arrived in Parliament, he told MPs he opposed the high speed rail link “on cost and on merit”, saying: “The impact of HS2 on my constituency – on residents, businesses and the environment – will be devastating.” It turns out Miliband joins 13 of his Cabinet colleagues in wanting to stop the diggers turning up near their drive.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper objected to 400 new homes in her West Yorkshire constituency. Foreign Secretary David Lammy opposed plans for new luxury flats in Tottenham.
Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy tried to stop thousands of new houses being built in Wigan. And Environment Secretary Steve Reed went against a plan to turn a disused bungalow into flats in London.
The list goes on and shows that, as always with Labour, it’s “do as I say, not as I do”. It’s what makes the Left generally so unlikeable.
Each of the planning objections made by members of the Cabinet may have merit, but so do most planning objections. Who wants an ugly block of flats thrown up in their leafy street of multi-million pound houses? No one.
Neither do they want a HMO forced on their suburban cul-de-sac – nor pylons strewn across the local beauty spot.
But we are being told to suck it up, get over your fuddy-duddy objections, think of the young people. And that would be almost bearable if the people at the top weren’t such hypocrites about it all. They have good reasons for objecting. You are a nimby and a blocker.
There is a reason why Nigel Farage is flying high in the polls and why Boris Johnson tempted Labour voters over to the Tories for the first time. It’s the same reason Donald Trump is back in the White House. They understand the world hates a hypocrite.
From day one, Labour were stuffing their wardrobes with freebie clothes, while taking winter fuel payments off pensioners. Now they call ordinary people “blockers” from their ivory towers, while trying to stop new homes being built.
Voters can smell hypocrisy a mile off and the Labour Government reeks of it.
