Gripping his lectern on stage in Birmingham, Keir Starmer was attempting to win over the ever-sceptical delegates at the National Farmers’ Union congress.
The then-leader of the opposition told attendees of the 2023 iteration of the annual jamboree that he understood their pain, and promised to reset government relations with farming were he fortunate enough to be elected.
“Every day seems to bring a new existential risk to British farming,” he told delegates, in front of an idyllic rural vista of rolling green hills, hedgerows and villages.
“Losing a farm is not like losing any other business,” he went on. “It can’t come back. That’s why the lack of urgency from the government. The lack of attention to detail. The lack of long-term planning. It’s not on. You deserve better than that.”
Just two short two years on – and little more than six months into his party’s long-awaited return to government – and Starmer’s serenade felt like a lifetime ago for the attendees of this year’s conference which took place in London on Tuesday.
Indeed, so sour have relations become that NFU president Tom Bradshaw even felt emboldened enough to call Rachel Reeves a “coward” for not attending.
Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, speaks at the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) conference in Birmingham, UK, on Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023 (Photograph: Darren Staples/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Despite agenda items ranging from a wonkish panel on trade to the science and technological developments that could boost production and reduce environmental tolls – there was just one topic of conversation.
“We recognise that these are still early days for a new government,” NFU president Tom Bradshaw told delegates – sleeves rolled up – in a barnstorming opening address. “But ministers had hardly found their way to their new desks when they broke their first promise.
“And it’s the one which overshadows all else. Wiping out our ability to plan, to invest and, often, to hope. It hangs over our farms, our families, our future: the Family Farm Tax.”
The ‘tax’ to which Bradshaw referred was the changes announced in Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s inaugural Budget to remove an inheritance tax (IHT) carve out for farmland owners known as the Agricultural Property Relief (APR).
In its place, the government announced a new, less generous IHT provision, that would levy a 20 per cent tax on agricultural estates worth more than £1m.
Reforming the APR, which the government argued had been abused by the wealthy asset owners as a means of avoiding inheritance tax, had long been viewed by highly regarded economists like Dr Arun Advani and respected fiscal think tanks the Institute for Fiscal Studies as one of the more palatable revenue raisers at the new government’s disposal.
But that hasn’t stopped it causing fury among the UK’s farming community, many of whom have engaged in months of protests across London and rest of the UK.
NFU President Tom Bradshaw introduction and opening speech. NFU Annual Conference 2025 at the QEII Conference Centre, London, England, United Kingdom.
Credit: Simon Hadley/NFU
“If they go through unchanged, the changes will bury the farm I work on,” Paul Whiffen, a sixth-generation arable farmer from Oxfordshire told City AM outside the NFU conference centre. “We’re going to have to sell big chunks off to justify it and lose two of our five farmers.”
“All it’s done is install uncertainty,” added Roger Denton, another multi-generation farmer who along with his father has been in “non-stop” conversation with their tax advisor since the Budget.
A hit to investment
And despite the policy not taking effect until April 2026, Denton is not alone in seeking advice from tax specialists and adjusting the running of his farm in response to the looming change.
“It’s already affecting our investment decisions,” David Waters, a third-generation arable and cattle farmer from Oxfordshire, said. “You could invest, but you’re investing and you know full well you’re making your farm more and more valuable, meaning the government could take more.”
“No farmer can go out and buy new bits of kit anymore, they just can’t justify it,” added Whiffen. “We’re scared to invest in machinery, in labour, and getting qualified labour.”
In the run-up to the conference, environment secretary Steve Reed sought to assuage farmers’ consternation by announcing the government would make state-owned institutions like the NHS and prisons buy local food. And he followed it up with another sweetener on the day; promising to extend the Seasonal Worker Scheme for five years.
But NFU president Bradshaw poured cold water on the former policy in a press conference, telling reporters that “all too often [those contracts] weren’t profitable”.
They also did little to stop Reed from getting an unsurprisingly frosty reception from delegates in the conference hall when he took to the stage to deliver his keynote and face a grilling from the audience.
Interrupted by protestors and castigated by an NFU member who told him that older farmers were “wishing their life away” in order to avoid the tax, Reed struggled to win over a hostile room.
One of the core reasons for him doing so is that many of those in attendance were sceptical that the very people that the APR reforms targeted would end up having to foot a greater inheritance bill.
Denton, whose farm is surrounded by land owned by the Sackler family – a notorious pharmaceutical dynasty – and a Swedish billionaire, says the super-rich land owners will find ways around it.
“They all have it in trusts anyway,” he said. “So they’ll just be able to keep swallowing and swallowing bigger and bigger amounts of our land as we’re forced to sell it to pay inheritance tax.”
It has been a brutal fall from grace since the sweet nothings that Starmer delivered in his 2023 address. But – as far as Paul Whiffen is concerned – the situation is a salvageable one; and the first step eminently doable.
“They just need to meet with us,” he told City AM. “They need to get out to the country and actually listen to what we’re trying to say.
“We don’t want to be here protesting. We want to be back on our farms, making good, cheap food for people.”