Help the CLA save your family business

Rachel Reeves’s 2024 Autumn Budget has the potential to be deeply damaging for British farming, land management, food security and environmental recovery. You can help us fight back.

Please note: the below campaign has now ended and we have begun sending co-signed letters to local MPs.

We recommend that those who are affected by announcements in the budget write to their local MP to campaign for change.

Thousands of individuals have added theirs names to letters sent to local MPs. This letter can be read at the bottom of this page and has been co-signed by other fellow members and constituents - acting as a powerful lobbying tool.

We write as farmers and business owners in your constituency to express our anger at the Chancellor of the Exchequer's budget.

Far from setting out an ambitious agenda for economic growth for the entire country, the Chancellor instead chose to announce measures she must surely know would inflict permanent damage on the rural economy.

Proposed changes to Agricultural Property Relief and Business Property Relief will pull some 70,000 farm businesses across the UK, and many other multigenerational businesses, into paying inheritance tax. Despite saying that she is protecting small family farms, and even with the combined threshold of £1m and the 50% relief, the inheritance tax burden will affect hard-working family farms up and down the country.  For example, a diversified farm with 250 acres of land would have to find more than £250,000 to pay death duties. That is a catastrophic drain on business resources.

And this isn’t all that the farming community will be facing. The real term cut to the agriculture budget in England will mean that the UK Government's own ambitions and targets for nature will be impossible to deliver. Environmental Land Management schemes and programmes designed to improve farming productivity will make a big difference, but the funding won’t match the challenge ahead. More alarming still, the accelerated reduction in delinked payments will impact all farm businesses.

The delinked payment in 2025 in England is much lower than could be expected or planned for in cash flow projections. This will hamper our ability to grow our businesses, deliver for food and the environment, and it undermines the stability of our rural communities. To enable farmers and rural business owners to invest for the long term, the government needs to give us certainty that it will uphold its end of the bargain.

The announced devolution deals concentrate on urban areas and there is no vision or ambition for how a reduced UK Shared Prosperity Fund will help support entrepreneurship in the countryside. The rural economy is 14% less productive than the national average.  Closing this gap would add an estimated £40bn in GVA.  We need rural economic growth plans, backed by funding schemes like the Rural England Prosperity Fund and the creation of a Welsh equivalent.

We ask you to press the Chancellor to change course and instead build a rural economy that can feed the nation, improve the environment, create good jobs and generate economic growth.

The CLA represents members in England and Wales. Concerned landowners and rural business owners in Scotland and Northern Ireland should contact their relevant industry representatives for support.