Give farm owners a £20m tax threshold, PM advised

The "tractor tax" row has taken a dramatic new turn after a pro-labour tax expert used by Sir Keir Starmer to support the move called on him to reverse his decision.

- DAVID MADDOX

Labour-supporting tax campaigner Dan Neidle says the Budget decision to charge death tax on family farms worth more than £1m should be dumped in favour of a £20m threshold.

It would remove at a stroke the threat of farmers who want to pass on their farms to their children being forced to sell up to pay a massive tax bill, said Mr Neidle. Instead, the government should target rich landowners who use the current inheritance tax (IHT) exemption on farms as a tax dodge, he argued.

Insisting that his “dramatic and simple” blueprint to end the row is “workable”, he said it was time for all concerned to do some “proper thinking” and ignore “the political noise”.

Mr Neidle’s intervention was hailed as a breakthrough by farmers outraged by the levy announced by chancellor Rachel Reeves last month. National Farmers’ Union (NFU) president Tom Bradshaw told The Independent: “Having seen one of the staunchest advocates for her tax change his mind, it would be nice to think the chancellor and those who came up with this mess will look again.”

Mr Bradshaw praised Mr Neidle for his “willingness to look again at the impacts of this tax”, adding: “Having done so, he saw that the policy is badly thought out, cripples family farms not tax avoiders, and will have a devastating impact.”

Influential Mr Neidle was dragged into the fiasco last month when he backed the government in a dispute over how many farmers would be hit by the new tax, due to take effect in 2026.

In an article for the BBC, Mr Neidle said Ms Reeves’s claim that few farmers would be affected was “likely” to be true. Sir Keir controversially seized on it as evidence that farmers who claimed far more would be affected were wrong.

Amid claims of political bias, the BBC was forced to drop its description of Mr Neidle in the article as an “independent tax expert”.