Government’s family farm tax fails to grasp the nuance evident on the ground - Andy Brown
Listening is a difficult skill. Particularly for a government with a huge majority. An inability to listen lay at the heart of the failures of the last set of people who tried to lead this country. Many people paid dearly in their mortgages for the arrogant refusal of Liz Truss to listen to advice.
Instead of watching and learning, the new government seems to have started out with a determination to push through resistance without listening properly to those who are pointing out the consequences of pig-headed determination to do the wrong thing. A little in the way of subtlety and adaptability might help them achieve rather more of their objectives.
Take, for example, the issue of winter fuel allowances. Few people would have argued if the decision had been to stop paying this money to top rate tax earners. If our country needs to make savings then not paying James Dyson a couple of hundred quid towards his fuel bill would be near the top of my list.
Denying the payment to people who earn a fraction above the limit to receive benefits is a different matter entirely. Instead of recognising that policy was rushed and needs to be moderated, this government is busy telling people that they should claim the right benefits. That isn’t going to heat the homes of people who have worked their whole life but have a low income that is just over the threshold. Many elderly people are too proud to claim.
The same reluctance to contemplate the possibility that a sensible policy has been pushed too far is exactly what is causing all the problems between the government and farmers.
I am fortunate enough to represent a lot of farmers in the Aire Valley. Few are going to cry bitter tears if people who have bought up land to avoid paying inheritance tax get asked to contribute a bit more. Yet the policy has been so clumsily designed that farmers who struggle to generate more than the minimum wage have been dragged into scope for paying hefty sums of inheritance tax.
It is important to be very accurate about what the policy means. A couple with a house, farm and land can leave £3m pounds in assets without the inheritors needing to pay a penny in tax. The tax is not on the £3m but on anything over that amount so if what is left is £1 over that limit then only 20p has to be paid.
All that must have sounded quite reasonable when it was discussed in back rooms within the Treasury. Unfortunately, there are farmers I know in the Aire Valley who work land worth more than £5m but are genuinely earning a pittance for a lot of hard toil. The extra taxation for them will be in the hundreds of thousands and no one can farm their upland fields and make a big enough surplus to pay off the tax. The land will have to be sold and could easily be lost to farming and become yet another housing estate.
It is hard to believe that any government would be callous enough to set out with the intent to punish small farmers. Unless this one starts listening, and raises the threshold to reflect their original intentions, they are going to face months of mounting protest. No amount of telling farmers that the government has put £5bn into the budget to help them is going to be listened to by people who are rightly angry that their real circumstances haven’t been understood.
The final area where a bit of subtlety would be very welcome is in housing targets. North Yorkshire has been told by the incoming government that it must build twice as many homes each year as was required under previous targets. Starting next year.
That is an impossible thing to do. Suitable land is hard to come by. There aren’t enough skilled building workers in the local area. Developers haven’t had time to come up with fresh proposals and submit applications. The local authority is certain to fail. When it does it will lose all meaningful control over what gets built and where. Decisions will be made by a Department based in Bristol and imposed from a distance.
What North Yorkshire needs is a serious supply of genuinely affordable homes such as council or housing association ones. Setting a target for raw numbers from above gets in the way of achieving this and does nothing for local affordability. It is a Soviet style top down command that is clumsy and ineffective.
The government is absolutely right to want to make housing in this country more affordable. Setting targets won’t do this. Taxing developers who sit on land that already has planning permission will. Taxing second homes will. Incentivising refurbishment will. Stopping all discounts on council house sales will.
Unless this government starts to listen and adapt it is going to find it increasingly difficult to deliver its agenda. It is one thing for the gentleman to be decisive and not for turning. It is a completely different thing to plough forward insensitively without listening to the communities you are trying to serve.
Andy Brown is the Green Party councillor for Aire Valley in North Yorkshire.