This week's opinion: 14 November 2024

It has been fascinating to see the reaction to the announcement about restrictions to agricultural property relief. I’ve no personal or professional association with farming and don’t have strong views one way or the other on the changes so I can take a disinterested position. So how do you go about assessing the impact? For a start how many farms will actually be affected? Do you look at the value of farmland and (morbid as it is) estimate the number of farmers who will die each year? Or do you take the total number of farmers who have valuable farmland? After all everybody will die at some point and every one of them might be affected.

Then how do you take into account the planning people might undertake? If every farmer were to gift their land to their children tomorrow and survive seven years the total raised by...