Concerns amongst farmers about inheritance tax changes are misplaced - Yorkshire Post Letters

Your championing of a survey commissioned by a partisan organisation and carried out by a group whose chair is Etonian Rupert Soames is misplaced (Tax changes could cripple rural economy, editorial June 26).

There are many things wrong with the rural economy, not least ever more marginal returns for farmers and the domination of the food supply chain by a cartel of supermarkets, however, none of the problems are improved by land being owned by fewer and fewer people.

The lack of inheritance tax made farmland a must have for the extremely wealthy, who according to a survey by Farmers Weekly own 17 per cent of farmland in the UK.

James Dyson accounts for 35,000 acres himself. Nigel Farage, Jeremy Clarkson and Andrew Loyd Webber are other well known rich landowners. Some 30 per cent is owned by the aristocracy who benefit from being able to pass down their vast wealth down the generations without being troubled by the tax man.

These are the people the inheritance tax change is designed to hit. Powerful people, rich enough to commission reports which will come up with a conclusion which supports their narrative that it will adversely affect the rural economy.

The amount of farmland will be unchanged by this policy and that is a key limiting factor of our ability to grow food. Another is the availability of workers which will also probably be unaffected apart from farmers giving up because of diminishing margins.

Genuine family farms are unlikely to be affected, and if they are, there are mitigations that can be taken.

The scaremongering in your pages is similar to the initial furore over private schools having to pay VAT a few months ago. I suspect the outrage over this marginal change will also disappear over time.