Northern Ireland’s Agriculture Minister Andrew Muir has expressed “serious concerns” about the figures the UK government used to defend its new inheritance tax policy.

The controversial changes to Agricultural Property Relief (APR) for inheritance tax were announced last month and are due to come into effect across the UK from April 2026.

It will see a tax-free threshold of £1m (€1.2m) for agricultural properties, with a 20% tax rate applying to the value of assets after that.

The UK government has used APR claims for 2021/22 to argue that only 500 estates in the UK will be affected each year by the new inheritance tax rules.

However, in a letter to the UK government which has been seen by the Irish Farmers Journal, Minister Muir questioned the accuracy of these figures.

He points out that, as there was no limit on APR claims in 2021/22, declaring accurate figures for farmland values did not matter when calculating inheritance tax bills.

“This would give rise to the possibility that in the past, either agricultural land was given a low value or was not included in estates at all or a combination of both, in the knowledge that it made no difference to inheritance tax calculations,” he said.

Minister Muir has suggested that agricultural estates will have to be given much higher valuations once the new £1m APR limit comes into effect.

“It will be a very different situation post 6 April 2026 and hence it does not appear to be valid to use the Treasury figures on APR claims in the past to assess the potential impact,” he said.