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Friday, November 8, 2024

‘Labour is ripping the heart out of our farming communities’

James Grindal, 54, a farmer from South Leicestershire. He has a small mixed farm where they grow wheat, barley and beans, and he also has cattle and lambs.

When my parents pass away, we will just not have the funds to keep hold of the land that we inherit and farm.

They own 240 acres of the 780 we farm, and its value is around £3.5m. So we may end up facing an inheritance tax bill of £500,000. So we’ll have to sell a lot of land to pay the tax bill.

My father is 83 and my mum is 81. They’re still relatively active but my father has worked hard all his life to provide for his children and pass on a bit of a legacy, and that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.

I’ve got two boys, aged 19 and 17, and hopefully my wife and I will have something to pass on to them. But as of today, that’s looking a little bit more unlikely.

I don’t really understand why the agricultural inheritance tax relief needs to be taken away. We’re struggling to make a living as it is. We haven’t got any spare money because we’ve invested it all in the farm and tried to keep it as modern as we can.

But it just rips your heart out a little bit. We’ve worked hard for 22 years. I worry hugely about the future.

I hope my sons feel like they can carry it on, like they can have a good standard of living with it. But we’re only a small farm, so if you keep taking money away from it then it’s going to get more and more difficult.

The last few years have been terrible as well with the weather, so that doesn’t encourage them either.

This is 100pc a time to support domestic farmers. We’re not going to maintain any food security if we don’t have family farms.

I’ve spoken to a few friends about it who are farmers. One of them said his mother said: “I should have died and then it wouldn’t be a problem to you”.

Imagine that. The politicians don’t understand that. We’re here to be a custodian of it until we pass it on to the next generation.

We haven’t made any preparations as of yet. Our succession plan, which we’ve done very well, we all knew exactly how things are going to be. All that succession had been planned. Now this bolt out the blue has happened.

I’ve been in contact with the Country Land and Business Association for eight months discussing and trying to plan our way forward.

Putting a trust in place would be one option for my children, but we may be too late for me and my parents. It depends on how long my parents live. It’s a bit gruesome to talk about but that’s the reality of it.

It doesn’t take much land to reach £1m, the threshold for the tax. They should have put the threshold up, really.

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