Durham farmer calls for inheritance tax changes on budget day
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is due to give her budget announcement
It's budget day today and farmers across the North East are hoping for changes to inheritance tax.
A new report has found up to 50 percent of those in agriculture are looking at walking away from the industry for good.
It's following changes announced to inheritance tax on agricultural properties last year - which is set to come into force next April.
Richard Laing, a farmer at East Grange Farm in Durham, said: "Ideally we'd like to see them readdress the inheritance tax. I think there's been quite a few suggestions from different tax advisors, advisors for the Government, who've given different options that would still raise a lot of money from inheritance tax but would save actual working farms from paying it, so we'd quite like it if that could be looked at.
"Any more costs that have to go onto the farm would be the end of a lot of farms. They won't be able to afford it. Input costs have gone up, the same as it has for everyone, and I know food prices have gone up in the shops but that hasn't translated into an increase in what we receive for our produce.
"To free up the money to pay the inheritance tax farmers will have to sell land. The land doesn't generate the money to pay for itself, that's why it's a generational business. There's a lot of problems in farming that cause land prices to go up but this isn't going to address those problems. It's going to make the smaller farmers suffer and have to sell up.
"Ideally with the inheritance tax, if they could either raise the threshold or make it so that the non-farmers who are banking the land as a form of avoidance are the ones who pay it and they pay it fully. With the budget this year, if they just mention agriculture in a positive light that would be quite good.
"As it stands now, it seems very much that farming, the countryside, and agriculture are just not getting thought about. It just seems to be very, dare I say, London centric and they don't really care about anything that's out of that little bubble and we're just a second thought.
"Fertiliser, diesel, tractors and everything is just continuously increasing and there just isn't the money there to pay for it. If they could just listen to the farmers, listen to the NFU, and just show that they've taken on board something then that would just be interesting."