I’m a farmer facing £1m bill under Labour tax raid – it’s not fair on my 18-month-old son.l
James Mills says if Rachel Reeves U-turned on her decision to axe inheritance tax relief for farmers it would put his business back in his hands.
A farmer facing a £1million inheritance tax bill said the Chancellor’s “’unfair’ decision (Image: GETTY)
A farmer facing a £1million inheritance tax (IHT) bill said the Chancellor’s “unfair” decision to target his family “really hurts”.
James Mills works on a family-owned 500-acre sheep and arable farm with his father near York.
The 37-year-old now fears he will be forced to saddle his 18-month-old son with “hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of debt” to pay a fresh IHT bill when his parents die.
It would be a huge relief for James if Rachel Reeves listened to this newspaper’s demand for her to reverse the decision to burden him with a 20% IHT bill.
He said: “A complete reversal would be a relief, to put it mildly.
“It would take an awful lot of pressure off. It would mean that we are not relying on good fortune and people’s health remaining well at the moment.
“And it would put our farming business back in our hands.”
James on the farm (Image: SUPPLIED)
He added: “There is a risk that our livelihood will be taken away from us.
“There is a risk that we would face an approximately £1million tax bill on the passing of my parents.
“With the farm revenue returns as they currently are that would take me about 20 years to pay off and currently that would not be possible.
“You would have to consider selling land to pay the tax bill which, given the size of our farm, would probably make us unviable as a business.
“Or I would have to saddle my 18-month-old son with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of debt for the early part of his life, which does not seem particularly fair to me.”
James went on to say Labour appeared to think he was not a working person – and that “really stung”.
He said: “There has been much wrangling over the definition of a working person.
“But the calluses on my and my dad’s hands and the muck under our fingernails, tell me that both of us do work for a living.
“It really stung. Everyone works hard. But for it to be questioned is the bit that really hurts.
“I do not wake up in the morning and expect recognition from the Chancellor – but I do expect her to not wake up in the morning and tell me that I do not work for a living.
“It feels like they are very disconnected from the countryside and the jobs we do.
“Everyone from vets to machinery dealers are all reliant on family farming businesses carrying on.
“And this puts at risk those farming businesses and therefore puts at risk the wider supply chain as well.”
He also hit out at the carbon border adjustment tax announcement in the Budget – which will see the cost of high-polluting imports increase and therefore have a knock-on effect on fertiliser prices.
He said: “We use fertiliser in our arable enterprise. And this could add anywhere upwards of £50-£100 a tonne to prices, which will be an erosion on our ability to compete.
“Grains are traded on a global market. It is very principled of a government to do this.
“But will they apply the same tariffs on grains imported from Eastern Europe?
“And the answer at the moment is no. So once again we tie the hands of our domestic producers while increasing our reliance on imports.”
James also said the Chancellor had announced plans to phase out subsidy payments for farmers “with no warning”, saying it had forced them to “reevaluate their businesses”.
He said: “Businesses like mine up and down the country recognised that these subsidies were going to have to be phased out.
“It is not a surprise but the speed at which Labour has decided to do it has meant that people have factored in these payments into their cashflows for the next four or five years.”
On the overall Defra Budget being frozen, he said: “If the Labour wants us to deliver against their environmental targets, that is fine but they are going to have to pay for them because we live in a free market world.”
