Thousands of UK farmers protest against inheritance tax hike

Thousands of UK farmers have gathered outside Parliament to protest against the government’s decision to increase inheritance tax in its latest budget.

The decision would see the end to a tax break dating from the 1990s that exempts agricultural property from the levy. 

This means that from April 2026, farms worth more than £1 million (€1,197 million) will face a 20% tax when the owner dies and they are passed on to the next generation.

British farmers say such a hike will deal a ‘hammer blow’ to family farms which are already struggling from the impact of climate change, global instability, and the upheaval caused by Brexit.

“Everyone’s mad,” said Olly Harrison, co-organiser of a protest surrounded Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Downing Street office. He said many “want to take to the streets and block roads and go full French.”

Children on toy tractors looped round Parliament Square after a rally addressed by speakers including TV host and celebrity farmer Jeremy Clarkson. Another 1,800 farmers were invited into Parliament for a ‘mass lobby’ organised by the National Farmers’ Union.

“The human impact of this policy is simply not acceptable, it’s wrong,” NFU President Tom Bradshaw said. “It’s kicking the legs out from under British food security.”

The last decade has been turbulent for farmers. Many British farmers backed Brexit as a chance to get out of the EU’s complex and much-criticised Common Agricultural Policy. Since then, the UK has brought in changes such as paying farmers to restore nature and promote biodiversity, as well as for producing food.

But many feel they were let down by previous Conservative governments as well as Starmer’s Labour administration, with delays caused by bureaucratic issues and a lack of subsidies to keep up with inflation and new trade deals with countries including Australia and New Zealand that have opened the door to cheap imports.

Many feel the Labour Party government’s tax change, part of an effort to raise billions of pounds to fund public services, is the last straw.

“Four out of the last five years, we’ve lost money,” said Harrison, a fifth-generation farmer who grows cereal crops near Liverpool in northwest England. “The only thing that’s kept me going is doing it for my kids. And maybe a little bit of appreciation on the land allows you to keep borrowing, to keep going. But now that’s just disappeared overnight.”

Starmer’s centre-left government says the “vast majority” of farms – about 75% – will not have to pay inheritance tax, and various loopholes mean that a farming couple can pass on an estate worth up to £3 million (€3,591 million) to their children tax-free. The 20% levy is half the 40% inheritance tax paid on other land and property in the UK.

Starmer’s spokeswoman Camilla Marshall said the tax decision had been “difficult” but was not being reconsidered.

Supporters of the tax say it will recoup money from wealthy people who have bought up agricultural land as an investment, driving up the cost of farmland.