Tories vow to scrap inheritance tax plan

The Conservative Party will scrap planned changes to Agricultural Property Relief (APR) if they win the next general election, the party’s agriculture spokesperson has insisted.

Shadow Farming Minister Robbie Moore dismissed suggestions that the Tories might keep new inheritance tax rules if public finances remain tight after the current Labour government.

“Who knows what the state of the economy will be in four years’ time, but the only promise that Kemi [Badenoch] has given as leader of the opposition is about the family farm tax.

“If we get back in power, we are scrapping the family farm tax. We have been very clear on that,” Moore said in an interview with the Irish Farmers Journal.

Speaking in his office in Westminster, Moore was extremely critical of Labour’s plans for a £1m limit for APR and Business Property Relief for inheritance tax from April 2026.

In particular, the Tory MP is dismissive of Labour’s argument that the changes will only affect a quarter of UK farms and will raise around £500m annually in tax revenue.

He said the datasets that the calculations are built on “are completely wrong” and the government should not be solely basing the policy on historic APR claims.

Instead, Moore wants the government to look at the current value of farm businesses so that an economic impact assessment of the planned changes can be carried out.

“If they are not willing to look at the value of farms, how do we know the true impact or where a proper landing zone is for the government to make any tweaks?” he said.

With a background in farming and rural valuing, Moore has an impressive knowledge about the changes to APR and how it could affect farmers in different parts of the UK.

“It is likely to have a more damaging impact in NI because the land values there are significantly higher, the tenancy structure is very different, and also the attachment of families to land is very strong within NI,” he said.

Challenges

Aside from the inheritance tax issue, Moore said there are “many challenges” contained within Labour’s Autumn Budget which will impact farm businesses across the UK.

Changes to national insurance contributions for employers, a rise in the national living wage, and tax relief for double cab pick-ups were all listed by the Tory MP.

Another important issue for farmers is the new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism which will effectively set a new tax on fertiliser from January 2027.

“The vast majority of estimates that we are getting on briefing notes is around £50 per tonne,” Moore said.

The Conservative Party has been vocal in campaigning against the planned changes to APR for inheritance tax since the policy was announced in October 2024.

However, when the Tories were in power prior to July 2024, many of their policies were not popular with farmers either, which led to a loss of support in rural areas of England.

“There was a lot of frustration with the governing party in the lead up to the last election,” acknowledged Tory MP Robbie Moore. A key area of criticism for the previous Conservative government was the roll out of new farm schemes in England which are replacing the Basic Payment Scheme (BPS).

In England, BPS will be phased out by 2027 and replacement schemes, such as the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI), are mainly focused on delivering environmental measures.

However, the new SFI scheme has been slow to be rolled out and it led to unspent funds totalling £358m in England over the past three years.

Huge upheaval

“We didn’t get everything right. I am not saying we did. There was a huge amount of upheaval from honouring that [Brexit referendum] vote in 2016,” Moore said. He argues that “the general common consensus” among farmers was BPS should be phased out because it distorted the land rental market and “led to a lack of innovation”.

On the underspend, Moore said it occurred when the government was trying to get a “huge transitional shift” with farm schemes in England, so a slow uptake was to be expected.

“We ensured the underspend was carried over to the next financial years and made more SFI options more financially attractive,” he said. Arguably, the biggest gripe that farmers had with the previous government was the trade deals with Australia and New Zealand which gave both countries full access to the UK market.

Trade deals

Moore points out that the two trade deals were agreed when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister and “there was definitely a shift in direction” when Rishi Sunak took office. “We stopped negotiations with Canada, because we did not feel that what Canada wanted was achieving the outcomes that we wanted for our domestic food security agenda and our primary producers,” he said.

Moore also suggests that the Australia and New Zealand trade deals could have a limited impact on UK farmers, as both countries have growing markets closer to home.

“The vast majority of the meat produced in Australia and New Zealand is going to the Asia Pacific corridor,” he added.

Robbie Moore is a Conservative Party MP for the constituency of Keighley and Ilkley in Yorkshire. He was first elected to parliament in 2019 and retained his seat in the 2024 general election.

Moore is from a farm in Lincolnshire which was previously a dairy unit but is now all arable. Before entering politics, he worked as a rural chartered surveyor and was involved in the family farm business. In 2017, Moore completed a Nuffield Farming Scholarship about the problems associated with short term land lease agreements.