Robbie Moore

I absolutely wish that the Government would listen to the many concerns that are consistently raised by Family Business UK, which is doing an excellent job in the amount of data it seems to be providing to the Treasury, yet nobody in the Treasury seems to be listening. Indeed, just last week the Chancellor did not even have the courtesy to turn up to listen to many of our farming organisations. She is not even giving wider family business stakeholders the courtesy of listening to them. The point is that the associated implications of business property relief will have dire consequences for businesses that are wanting to invest and employ local people. They are now having to face the same challenges as wider farming businesses of how to pay a potential IHT liability coming down the line. They could look at disposing of a shareholding in their business, but many of them do not want to do that—why would they want to sell out to a larger corporate?—as they want to keep their family business in the wider family, or they could sell plant and machinery, which negatively impacts the productivity of their business. The Treasury is not looking at that. Those businesses are saying to me, “What is the point? Why would I want to invest not only my time but my energy in growing that business if there will be negative implications on the wider family structure and the wider people we are employing within that business?” This Budget is hostile to our family businesses and will have a hugely detrimental impact on them. Family Business UK has already said that the data it has presented to the Government shows that these changes will likely result in a gross value added loss of £9.4 billion and the potential loss of 125,000 full-time equivalent jobs during the period from April 2026 to April 2030 alone.