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Thousands of farmers have taken to the streets of London in an attempt to overturn the government’s changes to inheritance tax rules that they warn will kill off family farms and threaten food security.
Landowners joined a rally near Parliament Square on Tuesday, holding banners with slogans that read “no farmers, no food, no future” and “save family farms”, in a demonstration against what the sector has dubbed a “family farm tax”.
Under reforms to agricultural property and business property relief, announced in the Budget, farmers will be liable to pay a tax rate of 20 per cent on inherited agricultural and business assets valued at more than £1mn, which were previously exempt. The changes will apply from April 2026.
The government has sought to reassure farmers that most of them will be unaffected by the reforms. But the sector has warned the changes will force them to sell off land in order to pay for the duties, saddling the next generation with huge bills when margins are already dangerously thin.
David Corp, a dairy, beef and arable farmer from Somerset, said he was in severe debt and that his family would not be able to afford the hit from death duties.
“I’m absolutely livid,” Corp said. “They say they’re going after landed industrialists who employ people like me to farm their land. But [the industrialists] have already sewn it all up in offshore funds and trusts.”
Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told the rally she would reverse the changes at the “very first opportunity”. “Farming in this country is absolutely critical for growth,” she said.
Sir Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat leader, attended the protest, telling farmers “you deserve so much better”. Celebrity farmer and television presenter Jeremy Clarkson also addressed the crowd, saying he understood farming and how “unbelievably difficult it is, and dangerous, and cold”.
Labour has said the aim of the tax increase has been to help restore the country’s public services and to prevent wealthy landowners from non-farming backgrounds exploiting the loophole.
The government has highlighted that married couples or those in a civil partnership will be able to pass on a farm worth up to £3mn without paying inheritance tax, when other benefits including an existing £1mn tax-free allowance were taken into account.
At the demonstration, Richard Barker and James Millbank, farmers from Richmond, North Yorkshire, said the value of agricultural assets was “irrelevant” because most businesses used their land assets as collateral, passing them on to the next generation rather than selling.
Millbank, a contract farmer, said he was concerned that without the protection of IHT relief, landowners would be more likely to sell land and extract that value, leaving tenant and contract farmers without work.
“I look after other people’s pigs and other people’s arable land. My business relies on them having pigs and arable land for me to farm,” he said.
Speaking to a gathering of National Farmers’ Union members, NFU president Tom Bradshaw called the policy “the straw that broke the camel’s back” for the sector.
Farmers were facing a long list of worries including the accelerated phaseout of government subsidies, new taxes on fertiliser and increasingly volatile weather, he noted.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen the industry this angry, this disillusioned and this upset,” he said. “The Budget has been a kick in the teeth.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Tuesday said he understood the concerns of farmers, but argued richer landowners should pay more to help fund better schools and hospitals in rural areas.
“We need really good schools, really good hospitals, and we need houses that people could afford to live in,” he said on the margins of the G20 summit in Rio de Janeiro. “They were the measures in which we invested heavily in the Budget.”
Additional reporting by Jim Pickard
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