The president of the National Farmers’ Union (NFU) has said that farmers in England and Wales feel “betrayed” by changes to inheritance tax rules, while saying his organisation does not condone mooted plans to stop food reaching supermarket shelves.
Tom Bradshaw, the NFU president, said anger among farmers about the changes announced in last month’s budget over inheritance tax and farms was unprecedented, and that he understood why many members wanted to take action.
A number of farmers protested in Llandudno on Saturday as Keir Starmer addressed the Welsh Labour conference. The prime minister did not talk directly about the inheritance tax changes in his speech, but did say he “would defend our decisions in the budget all-day long”.
NFU members are due to protest in London on Tuesday, with Bradshaw telling Sky’s Sunday with Trevor Phillips show that many hoped to meet their MPs “to tell them from the heart what this means for them, their family, their farm, their future”.
“I have never seen the united sense of anger that there is in this industry today,” Bradshaw said. “The industry is feeling betrayed, feeling angry. The government said that this wouldn’t happen.”
Previously, farmland had not been subject to inheritance tax, with ministers saying this has often been used as a tax loophole by wealthy people who buy up agricultural plots. Under the plans announced in the budget, from April 2026, farmland worth more than £1m will be taxed at 20%, half the usual inheritance tax rate.
The government has said that little more than a quarter of farmers will be affected by the new rules, while the NFU says the real figure is about two-thirds.
Bradshaw said farming families who were liable would often be unable to raise the money because of the need to reinvest any profits in production, which would be undermined, harming long-term food security.
There was also, he said, the effect on farmers, particularly older farmers who would struggle to adapt to the new regime: “Unfortunately, there are many who already have lost a spouse, that are in the twilight of their careers, that have given everything to producing this country’s food, and they have absolutely no way to plan through that. That is the betrayal that I’m talking about. The human impact of this is simply not acceptable.”
Some farmers have raised the prospect of refusing to supply supermarkets in protest, which Bradshaw said his union did not agree with.
“That is not an NFU tactic,” he said. “We do not support emptying supermarket shelves. But I do completely understand the strength of feeling that there is amongst farmers. They feel helpless today and they’re trying to think of what they can do to try and demonstrate what this means to them. I understand their strength of feeling, but we are not supporting that action.”
Speaking earlier on the same show, Louise Haigh, the transport secretary, defended the budget changes. She said: “Look, none of us came into politics in order to leverage tax on the farming community, but we were left with a very difficult fiscal inheritance.”
She said wider changes to farming set out by the environment department would benefit the industry overall.
