How often can you say a gift is truly unique? When you gift a loved one an Ancestry DNA test, you're giving them the keys to unlock their own personal journey of discovery. And with our festive sale now on, you can save on a truly meaningful gift. Help them discover their heritage, learn about their ancestors and make new family connections this Christmas. Visit ancestry.co.uk to give them a gift that is truly unique. Terms apply.
We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients.
Mike Allward is a dairy farmer from Cheshire who supplies organic milk to McDonald's in the UK for its teas, coffees and porridge through Arla. We're involved in a network which has been set up by Arla to look at the possibilities for farming regeneratively. One of the things we're doing here is moving our cattle and giving them a fresh piece of grass every day to help regenerate the soil.
We're very lucky that we've had a long-term relationship with McDonald's. And I think often people don't realise how seriously McDonald's take their relationships with farmers. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website. From the Times and the Sunday Times, this is the story. I'm Manvee Rana.
A few weeks ago, to much fanfare, Rachel Reeves stood up in Parliament to deliver the first budget from a female Chancellor of the Exchequer and the first from a Labour Government in 14 years. I call the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.
Amid the cheers and heckles of an excitable chamber, some of the policies she was announcing came as a bit of a surprise. Having said that they wouldn't change the tax rules for farmers, that's exactly what the government did.
We will reform agricultural property relief and business property relief. From April 2026, the first £1 million of combined business and agricultural assets will continue to attract no inheritance tax at all. But for assets over £1 million, inheritance tax will apply with a 50% relief at an effective rate of 20%.
Farmers across the country were caught off guard. The NFU, the National Farmers Union, began planning a campaign and 200 miles away from the House of Commons on a farm in Merseyside, a series of conversations were taking place that would eventually shut down the centre of London. The day after the budget, a friend of mine set up a WhatsApp group,
We were like, what are we going to do? This is terrible. And we were thinking of different strategies that might work to get the government to notice. The NFU had said that they were going to have this mass lobby event on the 19th. Of course, all farmers got excited and said that they were going to London. And then the NFU quickly realised they couldn't fit them all in and tried to say, don't come, don't come.
Of course, everyone was still wanting to go because he was so angry. So our angle per guy, you know, he does stuff for the Met and explain the situation, saying we've got all these farmers heading to London with nowhere to go and we don't want them all in weather spoons and then paddling out of there, causing trouble. So he put us in touch with the Met and we said, well, where would we have it? And we talked about different locations and we looked at Trafalgar Square at first, but we realised that wasn't going to be big enough.
They said, what if we wanted to sort of like walk or have a bit of a march? It's like, yeah, it's fine. We'll just shut Whitehall and you can just, and then Parliament Square, and we're like, what? You'll just shut like Central London for us. Wow. Well, if we need to, yeah. So we come off this Zoom meeting and I don't know if you've ever seen Only Fills and Horses when Delboy and Rod needs all that clock or that watch and they walk out the auction room. We're a bit like that, walking out of this factory going, we actually just closed London for a day.
On Tuesday, it happened. Over 10,000 farmers marched on Westminster. The story today. The farmer influences threatening to strike.
Yeah, I'm Ollie Harrison. I'm a farmer from near Liverpool, an arable farmer, so I grow all cereals and combinable crops. Wheat, barley, beans, and oil seeds. And Ollie, what made you want to be a farmer? Tractors. Yeah, just grew up on a farm and just loved the machinery and the tractors and it's that simple. That's an obsession for every little boy, tractors. Where is your farm? Just describe it for us.
It's right by a motor I did build when I was when I was little and it's it's not the idyllic place you'd get a lot of farms and it's very urban fringe and you just get this sort of road noise all day. And then we have some lunch right on the banks of the River Mersey and underneath the runway for Liverpool Airport as well. What's your favourite spot on the farm? I like it when I'm by the river because you can't hear the motorway and there's no one really around you other than a big wide expanse of the water I suppose.
And then there's a little bit sort of behind me mum and dad's house. You can go up on a hill and you can say a hill. It's pretty flat where we are, but you know, you go up about 30 or 40 feet. You've got a bit of view around. But yeah, all this bit of the land, really. And you grew up on this farm. Your parents still live there. How many generations has it been in the family? I'm the fifth in Tarbeck where we are now.
And obviously, during the course of those five generations, farming has changed. A huge amount. What is it like being a farmer today? I'll be honest, it's not very fun. Five out the last four years, we've had some awful weather patterns that have meant that we've lost a lot of money and questioned exactly what we're doing really. It sounds like it's quite tough being a farmer right now. Is it a profession you want to be able to pass on to your children?
Yeah, I'd love to, you know, I was given the opportunity and I'd like to, you know, my legacy, I'd like to be the same, you know, no one owns a farm, you just pass it on to the next generation. It's devastating at the moment now, you know, we don't do it for the money, because there isn't any, you don't do it for your children. And I don't want to swear, but just thinking what we've been doing for the last hour, many years, you know, what's me dad done for the last 76 years.
You've been brilliant though, you know, despite the bad weather and farming being really tough, you've sort of diversified a bit in that you've also become an internet sensation. You've become a farming influencer. In your Twitter handle, I know you describe yourself as an accidental YouTuber. Just describe how that happened, how that came about. I get a term, is it farm flow influencer? Is it farm influencer mixed together? Farm influencer, I think we should make that a thing.
Today's video has literally just been about mucking out. I've still got about half of it to go. I'm just going to stop some lunch now and get that done after lunch. Yeah, no, it literally by accident. I was doing some filming about some weather we'd had the winter of 2020 with the BBC and it happened to coincide with the first day of National Lockdown because they couldn't get too close in the tractor cab to film. I filmed some bits on my phone for them.
She's around here somewhere. There she is. She was in the trough earlier, in the cattle trough. She was just having a little swim in there for some reason. Don't know why. She's probably a bit hot. Those are all the bales over there. So they used some of my footage in their piece that evening on the news and I just shared it on my socials and loads of people watched it because they were bored and then the next day is a joke.
Put another video out and then a few weeks had passed and I was still doing it because I thought it was funny.
showing people what was going on and letting them learn a bit. And I started calling it lockdown learning at the beginning. And then I had a few teachers asking, could they use the videos? So I thought I'd put it on YouTube and send them the link as a place to put it. And then the neighbor of mine, I said, it was going to stop it a year. And he said, oh, don't be stupid. You could earn a fortune. I didn't believe him. Anyway, I had a video that went pretty viral after we'd rescued a guy out with a flood with a fire brigade. So yeah, he just carried on and it kept growing.
And only partly because you're a farming influencer, you're able to organize the protests that we saw taking place earlier this week. But just take us back a step. What did you and your friends who are farmers? What did you all make of the changes to inheritance tax when you heard them in the budget? Just stunned. I mean, I'd heard a rumor about three days before the budget that they might make some changes.
never thought it'd be what it was. And I was watching the budget immediately run up. My solicitor and said, are you watching? And he's like, yeah, I said, that's the end of family farm, doesn't it? And he said, it looks like, yeah. And I'd literally put something on Twitter and that pretty went viral and when everyone realized, and then, you know, the government like, Oh, calm down, you've overreacted, you know, you, you, you, it's this, this and this.
And at all the neighbors ringing, everyone knew going, oh, have you seen it? I was like, yeah, no, I saw it live. I'm just trying to get my head round it. And then as the days passed, it become more apparent. It was very serious. Only a lot of people listening who aren't in agriculture, who aren't farmers, who don't know farmers, will want to know why they should care, I guess. Just outline why it's so important that we have a healthy farming industry in this country.
There's a few points really. First, not everyone pays inheritance tax. Only 3.6% of the population pay inheritance tax. The rest fall under exemptions. This that's just come in would probably mean nearly 100% of farms would. So it's why should they and why should we not? That nails that argument straight away. The next one is no other business other than farming. Can't set their price.
If you make cars and your prices go up, you then put the price of your car up to compensate, so you still make a margin. In agriculture, that doesn't happen. It also produces a lot of food that we eat. Now, if farming suddenly becomes unsustainable in the UK, then that means that there won't be any food produced in the UK. It will all be imported.
And we know our fragile supply chains are, we saw in COVID, everyone believed that there might be a food shortage. So panic board and the shops were bare for a nation to be stable. It needs a good food supply because it's something you need every day.
I'm Will Humphreys, I'm the southwest and countryside correspondent for The Times. And as part of your job, you must speak to farmers all the time. What sort of problems have they been dealing with before the budget popped up?
Yeah, I mean, this has been described by farming leaders and many farmers as the straw that broke the camel's back. It's been a buildup for decades, really, of farming policy and the market forces that affect them. They are price takers, which means supermarkets dictate the prices that
that farmers, most farmers, have to sell at. And we live in a society now that has incredibly cheap food. And all those prices gets pushed down until you get to the original supplier, which is the farmer who make a tiny return on their capital investment each year. Average farm makes about 0.5% to 1% return each year in profits. So they are working on incredibly tight margins anyway.
And then you've had the huge upheaval of Brexit and the changing subsidy structure. So subsidies that hasn't been replaced like for like yet by the new schemes. The other pressure on farmers in the last couple of years is post the war in Ukraine. Prices of energy, fertilizer have absolutely skyrocketed.
So they are seeing huge inflationary costs on farms, and it's not matching with the sort of money that's coming into these farms. And then we get the budget, just in a line or two, explain why it exasperated so many farmers.
So what was announced in the budget is that from April 2026, all agricultural estates will be hit with a 20% inheritance tax on anything over 1 million pounds. That is combined agricultural property relief and business property relief. So any farm, if it's passed down to direct descendants,
they will have to pay inheritance tax of 20%, which is 50% off what the normal person in the street has to pay. But because of the unique situation of farmers being incredibly asset rich in many cases, they own land that is
that has very high values, they own farm buildings, farm houses, machinery with eye watering costs, combine harvesters can cost half a million pounds on their own. All that is then assessed for inheritance tax and these become multi-million pound assets.
The problem is that farmers are raising is, yes, on paper, they are millionaires, but most of them are earning minimum wage for a 300-acre beef farm in Gloucestershire, a farmer I spoke to recently. He makes about 30 grand a year.
And he thinks he's going to be hit with an £800,000 inheritance tax if he died. So that's why farmers say it's not doable. You can't pay these tax bills without selling off large chunks of land, which then make your farm unviable. And they weren't expecting any of this. So the budget came in and it
took of agricultural industry completely by surprise. They had been expressly promised by Sir Keir Starmer and by Steve Reed. Last year, the NFU conference that they had no plans to change inheritance tax policies for farmers. I know there's a sense that decisions which affect communities are taken miles away.
by people with little empathy for their challenges. Every day seems to bring a new existential risk to British farming. You deserve a government that listens.
then Labour get into government and Labour say we then found out the true state of the nation's finances and we have to find money to fill this black hole and one of the places they are trying to get it from is from these changes to inheritance tax laws.
Ultimately, they hope it will raise around £520 million a year by sort of 2029, which when you look at things like the NHS budget, it's an absolute pissens. Well, many of the problems that you've laid out are very peculiarly British, that policies that have come in here, that things that are affecting the farming landscape,
And yet, over the past year, we have seen farmers protesting across Europe. It sort of feels like it's Britain's turn. Yes, and in many cases, it's leading farmers to feel that they are being pushed to the point where they cannot be profitable and their way of life and their businesses can't carry on. Farmers
Despite being, you know, price takers being at the bottom of the sort of food chain, they do still, if they want to cause a lot of problems, have a huge amount of power to do so. They have a lot of machinery that can block roads. They have the power to withhold produce from suppliers that will hurt them financially, the farmers, but will also, you know, hurt the retailers and the general public.
I think national security planning is three days of food shortages as we quickly lead to a crisis. And so farmers have things at their disposal that inextremists they could deploy to cause real havoc. We'll just talk us through the figures, who will actually be affected by the new policy?
So this is still hugely up contention. The government's position is that treasury figures show that around 500 farms a year should be affected by their new inheritance tax policies.
The problem is, Defra's own figures show that around 66%, around two thirds of farms in England are worth more than a million pounds. That shows that there will be way more farms affected by the inheritance tax than the treasury figures make out. The problem is that the new plans
combine agricultural property relief and business property relief. And the NFU says that when you combine APR and BPR together and take a farm as its whole asset value, then they are unintentionally swallowing up huge amounts of sort of medium sized and smaller family farms and not hitting their intended target, which is very wealthy investors and clients buying up agricultural land to avoid inheritance tax.
That's who the tax was aimed at, but who are the farmers who will actually be affected? We'll have more in just a moment.
How often can you say a gift is truly unique? When you gift a loved one an Ancestry DNA test, you're giving them the keys to unlock their own personal journey of discovery. And with our festive sale now on, you can save on a truly meaningful gift. Help them discover their heritage, learn about their ancestors, and make new family connections this Christmas. Visit ancestry.co.uk to give them a gift that is truly unique. Terms apply.
We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly, but it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients. Becky Berry is a beef farmer in the Wiltshire countryside who supplies beef to McDonald's for its iconic burgers.
I'm part of a group of farmers and we've been on a journey that McDonald's have sponsored to help us with learning more about regenerative practices and how that can benefit us, our farms, the people and the animals that we're producing.
It's a way of McDonald's giving back to the whole industry. What we're trying to do now is move the cows from where they've eaten and they're moving into a longer, luscious pasture. And part of that reason is to help the biodiversity. As you can see here in the long grass, we've got moths and butterflies that have just hatched out. We can hear in the hedge rows around the outside of the field the birdsong. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website.
And just talk us through some of the calculations that have been made. I've heard some people saying this affects everyone over the price of a million pounds. Are they saying three million? How do they get to those alternative figures?
So the starting point is that you would have the first million pounds under this inheritance tax, then you begin layering on top the existing exemptions from inheritance tax that you have as just an ordinary citizen.
If you layer those on top, nil band rates and other reliefs, it means that a individual who owns a farm can get around 1.5 million tax-free before inheritance tax kicks in. If you are a couple who owns the farm as a couple, as either a married couple or a civil partnership,
you can get up to around £3 million tax-free before the inheritance tax sort of kicks in on your assets. But those sound like large amounts, but the value of a farm quickly racks up and farmers feel like the government's lines are all on best scenario. It's the married couple who have £3 million tax-free before their hit.
The reality is that marriages end almost 50% end in divorce. You've got many elderly farmers who are widowed or widowers and who own the farm and their children help them run it. So there are all these complicated factors that make the governments, if you're a married couple, you get three million pounds. A vast majority of farmers are not going to fit that mold.
And are there any other ways out for these small family farms who are really struggling? Is the government offering any hope?
So when farmers say, what am I going to do about these enormous tax bills that I could be landed with, or my children could be landed with, the government and the Secretary of State keep saying, well, if you hand it down to your children and use the seven-year rule, the seven-year rule is if you gift your estates to a direct descendant, if you then live for the next seven years,
you then don't have to pay any inheritance tax on that gift. Sounds very straightforward and it sounds like a perfect solution for farmers. However, if you do gift your farm to a direct descendant, you can't benefit financially from that gift. So you've got a position where farmers have not built up pension pots because they haven't had to. They were told, you know, keep it till death and then pass it on. Now suddenly farmers in their 60s,
70s, 80s are being told, pass on your farm, but you can't draw a pension from it. If you lived in the farmhouse, you have to pay market rate rent to your descendants if you wanted to continue living on the farm. It says all these complications that mean actually simply handing it down to your children and then continuing to live off the farm is not a solution.
It really is a complicated mess, especially for these family farms who are just about managing. What is the Treasury's argument in doing this? Who is it they're trying to target? So the Treasury have said that what they want to do is close a loophole, as they see it, that wealthy people can invest in agricultural land and avoid paying inheritance tax. There are undoubtedly very wealthy people doing this.
agricultural land prices have risen very sharply in the last 20 years because there are competing pressures of people wanting to buy up land either for housing development. You have big corporations buying up land to grow trees to offset their carbon, there are solar farms, there are huge amounts of competing
reasons why people want to buy farmland these days. And most of those people want to see a return of investment or save them from inheritance tax.
Ollie, you've staged this protest in London, but that's not the end of it. There might be more. Could the next stage of the plan be a farming strike, a food strike? We've had this rally. We'd like it to be the end. We'd like them to listen. But I think, here's quite a uniest. I think it's the only language you probably understand. That starts to
upset the public, but this is why we need to get the public to understand the seriousness of this, that it will affect them, it will affect their food prices down the line, it will affect their food supply. And just explain how a farming food strike, how it would work. We just don't deliver any produce or load any trucks for a few days or a week or whatever it might take to
You know, for shelves to be empty, suppose. And then, you know, if you've got empty shelves, you've then got voters telling their MPs, you need to sort this out. Do you think at this stage, I mean, you've just had the rally in London, do you think that that farming strike will go ahead? Yeah. And how soon? I can't tell you that. I mean, we don't want to wreck Christmas. But it could happen after that. Possibly.
And Will, is there any chance they'll change their plans given all the protests and all the arguments that this might bankrupt some family farms?
The government is sticking resolutely to its line. It's whether enough pressure is put on Labour MPs and the government to find some wiggle room in this. I don't think they were ever going to completely u-turn and scrap their policy. But whether they find that they can raise the thresholds so that fewer family farms are hit with such large tax bills, whether they
give a longer grace period so that elderly farmers can sort of work around the sort of seven year gifting rules. Those could be possibilities where the government could sort of slightly climb down from their position but still say that they've retained their policy. If none of those changes happen, it's hard to see how farmers who are so united it seems at the moment, how they don't sort of continue with stronger actions.
And only if these changes go ahead, how will they affect you and your farm? If anything happened to me father, we've got a little bit of trust. We've got a little bit in my mum's name and a little bit of my name. And we would have a tax bill. It'd probably be a few hundred thousand, but equally I've probably lost 300,000 quid growing corn this year. And the fact that I've spent 30 odd years working now trying to build
build a business in a farm to think that I'm going to end up spending another 30 years for it to just be unsustainable at the point of my death. You just think what's the point? Do you really think it would be unsustainable by the end of your lifetime? It's pretty much unsustainable at the moment if we have another bad.
bad season. It's how far the bank will let me borrow to keep going. The banks will be shaking now because this has seriously shook the land price market. When you think you can only borrow against your asset, that now is on the threat. It's not a good place at all. For you, if nothing changes, will you be able to keep your farm?
I wouldn't see the point. A man's purpose in life is to provide for his family. And if a government takes that ability away from them, why would you want to carry on? It's devastating. I mean, you know, my dad's in ill health as it is. And he's aged about 10 years in the last three weeks. You know, it's him. It's affecting the most because he can see, you know, if
The best thing he could do is die in the next 18 months to fulfill his life ambition of providing for his family and that is a sad state.
That was Ollie Harrison, the farm fluencer who runs a Narable Farm and Will Humphries, Southwestern countryside correspondent for The Times. The producer today was at Livia Case, the executive producer was Fiona Leach. Sound design and theme composition were by Mahler Seto. If you can, please do leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. And if you'd like to get in touch with us about this subject or any others, do drop us a line to thestoryathetimes.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back tomorrow.
How often can you say a gift is truly unique? When you gift a loved one an Ancestry DNA test, you're giving them the keys to unlock their own personal journey of discovery. And with our festive sale now on, you can save on a truly meaningful gift. Help them discover their heritage, learn about their ancestors, and make new family connections this Christmas. Visit ancestry.co.uk to give them a gift that is truly unique. Terms apply.
We all want to enjoy food that tastes great and is sourced responsibly. But it's not always easy to know where your favourite foods come from. McDonald's works with more than 23,000 British and Irish farmers to source quality ingredients.
Mike Allward is a dairy farmer from Cheshire who supplies organic milk to McDonald's in the UK for its teas, coffees and porridge through Arla. We're involved in a network which has been set up by Arla to look at the possibilities for farming regeneratively.
One of the things we're doing here is moving our cattle and giving them a fresh piece of grass every day to help regenerate the soil. We're very lucky that we've had a long-term relationship with McDonald's. And I think often people don't realise how seriously McDonald's take their relationships with farmers. Change a little, change a lot. Find out more about McDonald's plan for change on the McDonald's website.
![A Very British Scandal: How Captain Tom's charity got caught up in controversy [REPLAY]](https://www.podcastworld.io/podcast-images/stories-of-our-times-8qz620ey.webp){kind=small}
