Drive round rural Britain in election season and your teeth are set on edge by political posters alongside the lanes. While normal citizens have only front windows, gateposts or the backs of cars from which to advertise their preference, farmers and landowners whack up enormous hoardings endorsing some smug-faced local candidate.
No need to spell out which two parties are usually the beneficiaries; but even if they happen to be your favourites there is something galling about it. It drills right down to atavistic feelings about land ownership. You start channelling the peasants’ revolt or muttering the 17th-century rhyme against the enclosures: “They hang the man and flog the woman/Who steals the goose from off the common,/But let the greater villain loose/Who steals the common from the goose”. How dare anybody own the actual earth? The dust we are born of and return to? This land is your land, this land is my land. . .
Of course all freehold householders do own a patch, or share it with a mortgagor. But this is generally on a smallish footprint, tied up with the acceptable idea of privacy and home. The idea of thousands upon thousands of acres, whole vistas and valleys, being held by one wealthy family or individual has always grated. You could argue that even the 17th-century enclosures had some merit, fostering benign farming, and that in any age a degree of protection is perfectly reasonable for growing crops or livestock. Yet really big estates stir up the revolting peasant in all of us. Who does not hate encountering a harsh “private” sign in what seems like the wild, finding a footpath closed or encountering the full “get orf my land” treatment?
“It’s not only old ducal families who sit on thousands of acres
Within reason and decorum I submit that this bolshieness, hyped up in election times, is a healthy instinct. Owning a landscape is not the same as owning a top hat, or indeed a house. So it was interesting to note remarks by the farmer and TV presenter Adam Henson at the Hay festival, regretting the buying up of farmland by “pop stars, film stars and hedge fund managers”. This land-grab, he points out, makes it very difficult for younger people to get securely into farming (the average age of active farmers is now 59).
It is not just old ducal families who sit on thousands of acres: alongside the pop stars and financiers, Henson cites Sir James Dyson, who owns over 25,000 acres of England (as much as the Dukes of Bedford and Marlborough put together) and is said to be looking for another 20,000. Big landowners do use tenant farmers to run their estates but often on short-term tenancies, so they have less incentive to care for soil quality or landscape in the long term. Sometimes, of course, the big owners are exemplary guardians of the environment (often because of country sports, but that’s another can of worms). Sometimes they are innovative farmers. Dyson at least has said he would look at experiments with robotics to improve the industry.
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“This is the rustic version of buy-to-let, only with a tax bonus
But the elephant in the room, the awkward pachyderm no urban-minded election manifesto ever mentions, is that people buying up farmland are often mere investors — and exceptionally pampered ones at that. Since the mid-2000s, prices have risen sharply: we bought a smallholding (40 acres) in 1990 for my husband’s quixotic and fascinating retro-farming experiment with horses and organics, and sold house and land at the millennium for the same price we paid originally. Fair enough. Since then, prices for arable land at least have shot up sixfold, and it would have been absurd for us to try it. But even in 1990 traditionally minded people would say “Always buy land if you can, they’re not making any more of it”. So agents and accountants smiled on farmland investments, and now these have indeed beaten the FTSE 100 index hollow.
But when I said that these investors are pampered, get this: whatever their status, wherever they actually live, however unspecked their designer wellies, they are allowed to pass it all on free of gift or inheritance tax (IHT).
That’s the golden ticket. If you have owned and occupied farmland for two years or rented it to others for seven, you escape IHT. As long as it has been growing crops or coppiced woodland, rearing animals (including racehorses), or locked in to a habitat scheme, it escapes that tax, as well as possibly earning subsidies. The attraction for wealthy investors is obvious, and so is the effect of their intervention on the dramatic rise in prices which excludes young people who want a career on the land. In parallel with their big-city cousins looking for flats, they can’t get a foot on the ladder because richer, older people are either sticking to absurdly large tracts or indulging in landlording: the rustic version of buy-to-let, only with a tax bonus.
The original reason for the law is obvious: if swingeing IHT was imposed every time an old farming couple died, some land would need to be sold each time and viable-sized farms would fragment into tiny units that don’t pay. But the universal privilege, lingering on unquestioned in an age of cynical investment and applied to immense acreages, is hard to justify. Certainly there are good landowners: generous and thoughtful, creative, environmentally responsible, public-spirited and treating the land as a sacred trust. But no difference is made between them and the artful tax-dodgers for whom a field is just another share certificate. Is that fair?