Here is the News.

I started to, honestly, got maybe 7 paragraphs in then had to go make dinner. His analysis seems sensible and suggestions too.

In case you hadn't noticed the way we have fucked the planet is starting to deal with that.

Will the kids of the super wealthy sell, though? Or will they hold the asset and just take the income from renting it out? They’re the kids of the super wealthy, after all. Maybe the cash out if the land gets zoned for development… by which time the IHT is a rounding error anyway. Otherwise why not just wait the ten years?

Generally I am all for people being able to defer things like IHT (or land tax, my fave bane of the ‘cash poor’ millionaires) but not if it’s on the never-never or it times-out. That’s just another loophole waiting to be exploited. ‘Oh ok, here’s £20m for a ten year rental of your farm plus an option to buy for 50p at the end’.

Well, to be honest the current way doesn't stop that anyway. A 1,000 year lease on a peppercorn rent, then the land is worthless anyway for IHT.

But it may well stop the people who buy 50 to 100 acres.

Is the answer to this not something to do with price of their food, spending more collectively on our food, and buying more locally, moving away from supermarkets towards localised production and sales? The first line above suggests so.

Where do the 12m or so that live in London get their local food from in this model?

Actually I've missed the point haven't I, thats how the population gets back to levels that the local model can cope with.

The rest of the UK? I mean, for me, you cockney bastards can grow your own food, but anything has to be better than flying it halfway round the world.

I thought so but I think the consensus is "naaar, fuck um."

Having a trade deal with your nearest neighbours makes more sense than one with Aussie and NZ, you'd think.

The doing away with supermarkets suggested everyone was popping to good old Farmer Giles down the road to get half a dozen eggs and a pint of milk.

I agree flying stuff around isn't great. Can the collective Farmer Giles's actually produce enough food to feed our population? I've no idea if it's feasible.

So your point is that farmers are earning barely enough to get by, so they should be exempt from inheritance tax?

Yeah, but if you do it before death then the proceeds are subject to IHT, right?

What proceeds? And you could do it into trust

Isn’t the point of making it worthless for IHT to actually extract the value by some other means? Not just simply to make it worthless.

And don’t get me started on Trusts… because I don’t know what I’m talking about At All. Pretty sure they’re bad though.

You want it to be worthless so there is no IHT, but you can continue to farm it.

If you are super rich then 20% is probably fine, cheaper than most other assets

But you are right, it would probably make selling it harder.

Actually thinking about this wouldn't you just be swapping inheritance tax for income tax?

Supermarkets run a model based on cheap and choice. It drives bonkers moves like importing and exporting roughly the same quantities of butter. It puts a ludicrous number of varieties of the same thing on the shelves. It forces prices down for farmers and throws away good food because it doesn't look attractive enough. It wraps everything in plastic.

Obviously we can't produce all our own food, especially at the moment as we aren't geared up for it, but more people intensive farming of legumes rather than cereals is likely to be a better option in changing conditions and likely very unstable geo-politics.

The general denial that our lives are going to change dramatically is crazy. We are going to need to change the way we do things and it makes sense to start doing that rather than wait for things to get really bad to realise we can't get what we need.

I pretty much agree with your sentiment I think, pissing about with net zero targets whilst changing nothing is pointless, the world needs wholesale dramatic changes.

Where we differ is I see no way people will change until really really bad shit has happened.

Possibly yes. Also, I assume that Cap Gains tax involves itself in all of this too. I guess my point is that if you put in a rule that means IHT can be extinguished in certain well-meaning circumstances, the tax planning industry will absolutely find a way to game it.

So I’d prefer the proposal if the tax crystallised on the death of the owner but payment could be deferred until sale of the land.. whenever that happens. It lives on a an immovable charge on the land, accruing interest, until that point. That way, the next generation can farm it unhindered by the cashflow impact if it so chooses (accepting that after a few generations a sale would likely be forced… but, really, let’s not set policy on the basis that a child born twenty years from now might want to run his great grandpop’s farm).