Labour's farm tax is a mistake, blasts party grandee Blunkett
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By CLAIRE ELLICOTT
Published: | Updated:
Labour veteran Lord Blunkett has admitted his party's family farm tax was a 'mistake'.
Addressing a Countryside Alliance event, the former home secretary backed calls for Andy Burnham to oversee a 'rural reset' to undo the damage done by his party's first two years in power.
Farmers were left furious after then-chancellor Rachel Reeves announced plans to levy a 20 per cent inheritance charge on assets worth more than £1million, ending a waiver in place since the 1980s.
But after protests by rural communities, ministers raised the threshold to £2.5million so most farms would not have to pay. Campaigners say it will still hit ordinary working family farms.
Lord Blunkett blamed 'Treasury economic orthodoxy' for the hated plan.
'I think the family tax, the family farm imposition, was a mistake – a mistake made in the Treasury represented by my own party,' he said, adding it had 'touched a nerve'.
He later told the BBC: 'We've never won so many rural seats since 1945 – around 135 Labour MPs are either rural or semi-rural – and their voices need to be heard much more clearly.
'If you're an urban dweller all your life and you've got Treasury economic orthodoxy in your soul, you won't understand that family farms are only family because they are passed down from one generation to another.'
Labour veteran Lord Blunkett has admitted this week that his party's family farm tax was a 'mistake'
Blunkett backed calls for new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to oversee a a 'rural reset'
The peer also called for the ban on trail hunting set out in the 2024 manifesto to be scrapped.
He was speaking alongside former prime minister David Cameron, who criticised Labour's 'attack on shooting'.
'It's not just the shoots that suffer if they get attacked. It's the pubs, it's the restaurants, it's the places where people stay, it's the people that work in the shoots,' Lord Cameron added.
Meanwhile, Minette Batters, the former president of the National Farmers' Union, said it was 'time for a rural reset'.
Tim Bonner, the Countryside Alliance chief executive, listed 27 Government policies that his organisation opposed.
These included the extension of inheritance tax to farms, plans to ban trail hunting, changes in betting rules and the tighter shooting regulations.
The Prime Minister's spokesman said Mr Burnham wanted to 'rebuild trust' with farmers and rural communities.
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