Jamie Blackett, 60, has a mixed dairy and arable farm of roughly 1,200 acres (Image: ANDY COMMINS)
A sixth-generation farmer has accused Labour of “siding with large multinationals against small family farms”.
Jamie Blackett, 60, has a mixed dairy and arable farm of roughly 1,200 acres in Dumfries and Galloway.
His son Oliver, 30, who is getting married, hopes to return to Scotland soon and help his father run the farm.
Jamie said: “We are wasting valuable time and money trying to assess the full impact of this policy.
“But it is likely that we will be liable for a lot of inheritance tax.
“Whether we can survive or not we do not know. But we are faced with costs that our competitors in the institutional sector do not have.
“We are a family farm and therefore we have to cope with a death in every generation.
“If we had many deaths in quick succession it would be terminal for our farm.”
He pointed out that if he were an organisation such as the RVPB or Wellcome Trust, he would be protected against the extra tax.
He said: “I hope Labour has misunderstood the rural community and that this is not just being done out of spite.
“I hope that they have just not done their research and not realised the impact this will have.
“Family farms are just a family business like any other and the effect of this will either be to break them up or to load costs onto them.”
Mr Blackett said there could be ways to mitigate against the tax by using life insurance products.
But he said: “It is certainly going to load a huge cost onto our industry.
“And it will become a huge distraction from the business of entrepreneurship.
“We are constantly going to be looking over our shoulders now and having to waste our energy on tax planning.
“It is not a level playing field any more. Labour sees the future as being with big corporate landowners and not with small family ones.
“They appear to want to see us sell up our farms so they can be bought up by huge institutional investors who will not be liable for inheritance tax because institutions do not die!”
He also highlighted the impact the policy could have on the wider community.
He said: “If farms have to be broken up the first thing to go is usually the cottages where workers or people in the community live.
“And those buildings will probably be sold off to retirees or second homeowners.
“The next thing to go will be pockets of land that will be used as pony paddocks.
“And, as a result, your actual food-producing farm gets smaller and you have to start laying people off.
“And all this money that we are now going to have to pay for tax planning and life insurance and tax planning and expensive lawyers is money that would have normally been spent paying working people in the countryside doing things like laying hedges and repairs dry stone walls. We would rather spend the money on that.”
He explained that small family farms used to get broken up and sold off before the APR policy came into effect and that this could happen again.
He said: “And you are going to lose that personal contact in the countryside.
“Families who have been there for generations are embedded into the community.
“The new farming landlord is going to be some hedge fund in the city with no connection to rural life.
“I cannot understand why Labour is siding with large multinationals against small family farms.”