Sarah Smith

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Roger. I grew up in a rural community as well, and I know how hard farmers work. I know how long it takes for generations to pass on the expertise involved in managing and cultivating the land. It is not like any normal apprenticeship or training programme; children learn over decades how to get the most out of the land, how to get the best yield and how to manage the ever-unpredictable set of circumstances that any year on a farm may bring. However, I suggest that the last thing farmers need right now is the scaremongering that has been undertaken by the Opposition parties; they are protecting the vested interests of wealthy landowners. It is not just a minority of these people who are buying up the land; 50% of our farmland is being bought up by them, and they are on record saying that they are seeking it to avoid inheritance tax. That is the issue we are taking on. The average farmer in my constituency in Hyndburn has nothing to fear. When we look at the numbers in detail—unfortunately, I do not have the time to offer them—they show that those farmers are protected from the tax. The average farmer, even when we look at arable land values and some of the higher-value land, will not be impacted by the tax. We have to acknowledge the challenges that some farmers face and the rural poverty in this country—we talk about it a lot and it is very real. But that is not the fault of the current policy; it is the result of decades of failure, and particularly of what happened in recent years under the previous Government, who failed to grasp how to support farmers to be more productive, so that they can earn the money they ought to be earning.