The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has launched a nationwide campaign to defend Britain’s family farms and rural businesses, calling for a mass mobilisation to “fight back” against the government’s recent Autumn Budget.
This comes in response to Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s proposed changes to agricultural property relief and business property relief, which critics warn could drag thousands of small farms into paying crippling inheritance tax bills.
The CLA, representing landowners and rural firms, says the government’s measures – claiming to shield smaller farms – will have a “catastrophic” effect on Britain’s agricultural heartland. The proposed budget would push around 70,000 farms into paying inheritance tax, hitting diversified family farms and estates with a hefty financial burden.
In real terms, a family-owned farm with 250 acres could be forced to pay over £250,000 in inheritance tax when passed to the next generation. The CLA warns this will create an “immense drain on resources” for family-owned farms struggling to adapt to fluctuating costs and market uncertainties.
In a public call-to-action, the CLA urges people to sign an online letter addressed to MPs, pressing the government to reconsider.
The CLA letter states:
We write as farmers and business owners in your constituency to express our anger at the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s budget.
Far from setting out an ambitious agenda for economic growth for the entire country, the Chancellor instead chose to announce measures she must surely know would inflict permanent damage on the rural economy.
Proposed changes to Agricultural Property Relief and Business Property Relief will pull some 70,000 farm businesses across the UK, and many other multigenerational businesses, into paying inheritance tax. Despite saying that she is protecting small family farms, and even with the combined threshold of £1m and the 50% relief, the inheritance tax burden will affect hard-working family farms up and down the country. For example, a diversified farm with 250 acres of land would have to find more than £250,000 to pay death duties. That is a catastrophic drain on business resources.
And this isn’t all that the farming community will be facing. The real term cut to the agriculture budget in England will mean that the UK Government’s own ambitions and targets for nature will be impossible to deliver. Environmental Land Management schemes and programmes designed to improve farming productivity will make a big difference, but the funding won’t match the challenge ahead. More alarming still, the accelerated reduction in delinked payments will impact all farm businesses.
The delinked payment in 2025 in England is much lower than could be expected or planned for in cash flow projections. This will hamper our ability to grow our businesses, deliver for food and the environment, and it undermines the stability of our rural communities. To enable farmers and rural business owners to invest for the long term, the government needs to give us certainty that it will uphold its end of the bargain.
The announced devolution deals concentrate on urban areas and there is no vision or ambition for how a reduced UK Shared Prosperity Fund will help support entrepreneurship in the countryside. The rural economy is 14% less productive than the national average. Closing this gap would add an estimated £40bn in GVA. We need rural economic growth plans, backed by funding schemes like the Rural England Prosperity Fund and the creation of a Welsh equivalent.
We ask you to press the Chancellor to change course and instead build a rural economy that can feed the nation, improve the environment, create good jobs and generate economic growth.
The campaign is gathering momentum in rural communities, with farmers across the UK planning to descend on London later this month. Organised by the National Farmers’ Union (NFU), a mass rally and lobby of MPs will be held at the Church House conference centre in Westminster on Tuesday, November 19, with hundreds of British farmers expected to join in opposition to the budget’s “devastating” impact.
The NFU has echoed the CLA’s call for policy change, with NFU President Tom Bradshaw branding the current budget measures as a threat to the survival of family farms. The NFU believes the recent tax policies will force many families to consider selling land, which could lead to widespread farmland loss and harm to rural communities.
With rural Britain on edge, the CLA and NFU rally represents a growing movement, demanding that the government rethink its approach. The CLA concludes its call-to-arms with a direct plea to MPs: “We ask you to press the chancellor to change course and instead build a rural economy that can feed the nation, improve the environment, create good jobs, and generate economic growth.”
Join the CLA’s campaign to defend family farms and rural businesses following the Chancellor’s autumn budget. Sign the CLA’s online letter here.
