The Farmers' Union of Wales reflects on Labour's first year
While global tensions remain, domestic policy has been dominated by three contentious government measures that have sparked public and backbench unrest.
Initially, the government's plan to scrap the universal Winter Fuel Payment caused significant concern.
However, following considerable pressure, they've subsequently conducted a 75% u-turn, restoring the payment for most pensioners.
Similarly, proposed changes to welfare benefits, specifically Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment (PIP), faced a major backbench rebellion.
As a result, these reforms were significantly watered down last week - again buckling under public and political pressure.
However, the agricultural sector continues to grapple with the most contentious issue: drastic changes to Agricultural Property Relief (APR).
Despite the Prime Minister's earlier insistence that a "vast majority" of Welsh farmers would remain unaffected, analysis from the Farmers' Union of Wales (FUW) suggests up to 48% of Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) recipients in Wales could be subject to the new inheritance tax proposals.
If this reform remains unchanged the consequences for farmers, rural communities, and food production in Wales could be devastating.
Since these proposals first emerged, the FUW has consistently stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the sector, urging the government to reconsider this ill-conceived policy.
However, despite the industry's dire warnings and growing unease among many of the government's own backbenchers, these appeals appear to have fallen on deaf ears.
With the April 2026 implementation deadline now rapidly approaching, the mounting strain and uncertainty facing Welsh farmers is reaching critical levels, threatening their livelihoods and the very fabric of rural communities.
As the FUW has consistently argued, the aim is not to scrap the policy entirely, but to secure targeted adjustments that prevent hardworking family farms from being crippled by these changes.
Rather than an approach comparable to a sledgehammer cracking a nut, the FUW has sought the opportunity to design a policy with HM Treasury that genuinely works for family businesses and effectively closes the existing loopholes that allow non-farming investors to benefit disproportionately.
The old saying goes, "things come in threes."
Having buckled to public and political pressure and made adjustments on both the Winter Fuel Payment and broader welfare benefit reform, the government has shown it can listen and adapt.
Now is the time to apply that same pragmatic approach and revisit the changes to APR before irreversible damage is inflicted upon a sector vital to Wales and the wider UK.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
A year of Labour - how has Rachel Reeves fared with our finances? This is Money podcast
A year ago, Labour swept into power with the promise of change after more than a decade of Conservatives in charge. So, how have Keir Starmer and his Chancellor Rachel Reeves performed in the past year? This week, Simon Lambert, Lee Boyce and Georgie Frost discuss the first 365 days and run the rule over the financial decisions shaping the country. Have their been any hits? What mistakes have been made? And what happens next? It appears one change afoot is a tinkering with tax-free allowances. It's likely the Chancellor will confirm a cut to the £20,000 cash Isa limit on 15 July - but is it a wise move? This week, the IFS has warned those born in the 1990s might face a state pension retirement age of 74 if the triple lock remains - so what alternative options are there? And why does the influential independent economics research institute want want the Government to guarantee state pension will never be means tested? Lastly, what puts sellers off buying a home most? Is it bad smells, clutter, structural problems... or something else? The team discuss what could be stopping a sale, and tips for getting a property to shift.
Daily Mirror
2 hours ago
- Daily Mirror
Rayner slams Tories for spreading 'made-up nonsense' on so-called banter ban
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said Labour workers rights' reforms were designed to protect employees from harassment and abuse, and would not police free speech Angela Rayner has accused the Tories of 'spreading made-up nonsense' about a so-called banter ban in workplaces. The Deputy Prime Minister said Labour's workers' rights reforms were designed to protect employees from harassment and abuse, and would not police free speech. The Employment Rights Bill contains a duty on bosses to take 'reasonable steps' to prevent third parties from harassing their staff. Ms Rayner rubbished claims from top Tory Andrew Griffith that "innocent office banter will be spied on by wokerati thought police" and denied businesses forced to hire diversity officers to monitor speech. She told the Mirror: "Nobody should be abused while doing their job, but we've seen a horrific rise in violent abuse and harassment of shop workers and other public facing staff. 'The Tories can't defend their opposition to the action this Labour government is taking to protect workers, so they've resorted to spreading made-up nonsense. 'It's the same old Tories – they're on the side of bad bosses, zero-hours contracts and fire-and-rehire.' Right-wingers and big businesses have mounted a concerted push to resist the Government's plans for stronger protections for workers. But a recent poll of 5,000 people for the TUC found eight in ten (79%) people support the plans to protect workers from harassment. Only 14% of respondents said they did not support the idea. TUC General Secretary Paul Nowak told the Mirror: "This is truly desperate stuff from the Tories. 'They're insulting people's intelligence by pretending that protecting workers from harassment is the same as banning banter. 'Stopping harassment at work is one of the most popular policies in the government's Employment Rights Bill. 'But yet again the Conservatives are siding with bad bosses over working people and showing how woefully out of touch they are. This is about basic decency and common sense.' A Government spokesperson said: "No business would be required to hire staff to monitor speech or diversity under the Employment Rights Bill. "The Bill will not affect anyone's right to lawful free speech, which this government stands firmly behind. "Upsetting remarks do not fall within the definition of harassment. "We are strengthening workplace protections to tackle harassment and protect employees from intimidating and hostile abuse as well as sexual harassment."
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Have no sympathy for Labour's ‘grown-ups', they brought this on themselves
The pattern for life under Labour has been set. Ministers, hopelessly out of their depth, try to save money, fail, reverse, ending up spending more, and yet the Left calls them closet-Tories and swans off to Jeremy Corbyn. The excess of lefty MPs in the Commons hasn't brought order to Labour but, like an experiment involving overbred mice in a cage, they've started to eat each other. No 10 will try to make a virtue of this. They will say: 'Keir Starmer is where the public is. He is trying to fix the mess left by the Tories in a fair way – balance the books, control the borders – and opposition from both Corbyn and Reform proves he is the non-ideological man we need.' He's the human version of the BBC. Everyone hates it, so it must be good. Except no one watches the BBC anymore, just as dwindling numbers vote Labour, and the vision of Starmer as a man patrolling the middle-ground doesn't ring true. It's more accurate of Rachel Reeves. For all her sins, she's been saying the same things for over a decade (loudly, through a fixed smile). As shadow work and pensions minister, she promised to be tougher on benefits than George Osborne. She did not serve under Corbyn. She called for immigration to be curbed after Brexit. By contrast, Starmer's career is built on a series of U-turns he believes it is our patriotic duty to forget. Forget that he was a militant Remainer, that he knelt for Black Lives Matter or that he won the Labour leadership calling Corbyn's manifesto 'our foundational document' stuffed with 'radicalism and hope'. Starmer, who said 'the free market has failed', stood for a 'moral socialism' that 'opposes austerity'. Left-wing activists had spent the 2010s alleging that welfare reform amounted to murder; John McDonnell quoted someone saying they wished to 'lynch' Esther McVey. Starmer's Labour might have turned on the Corbynites, but it drew from the same pool of assumptions and resentments. Torsten Bell called the two-child benefit cap immoral. David Lammy said his constituents were 'ruined by austerity, left hungry by Universal Credit'. Angela Rayner apologised for calling Conservatives 'homophobic, racist, misogynistic… scum.' Starmer ran ads that suggested Rishi Sunak was soft on paedophiles and his wife was a tax dodger. He called Boris 'pathetic', a man who 'had no principles, no integrity' (I 'loathed' him, he later said). Having abandoned a coherent critique of Tory economics – which, to be fair, had no coherence anyway – Starmer reframed politics from Left v Right to Good v Evil, and this is what a new generation of MPs presumably believed when they won in 2024. Everything the Tories had done was wicked and unnecessary, a choice born of greed. So, what happened when Reeves took over the Treasury, found Rishi had in fact spent too much money, and announced that 'Dickensian choices' had morphed into Labour necessities? Hurt and panic. Akin to a Puritan discovering their mother is a lush and daddy frequents a drag bar. And so the children rebelled – and we should have no sympathy for the adults who once claimed to be back in charge. Why? Because their moral tone before entering office implied that any effort to limit the state was class violence. Another example from Torsten Bell (there are many): in 2021 he wrote that revising the Covid-era uplift to Universal Credit, worth £20 a week, might damage not only 'family finances' but people's 'mental health'.Tory policy could drive you mad. Of course, the Left has well established in the popular mind that mental health is as serious as physical, so must get PIPs; that Britain is a nation of immigrants and human rights, so we can't deport lawbreakers; and the Earth is on fire, so we can't use new sources of fossil fuel. Many of the problems Labour inherited are the by-products of assumptions Labour has helped embed within British institutions (including within the Tory Party, which is why it did little to reverse the trend). Why was Starmer shouted at when he laid a wreath for the victims of the Southport killer last year? Why has Reeves been derided for crying in the Commons? Because most voters do not see Labour as a change agent with Fairy-soft clean hands, but rather as the latest iteration of a grubby establishment that has run this country for decades, and which shares as much blame as the Conservatives for where we are – arguably, more. New Labour bound Westminster with legal restraints, such as the Human Rights Act or the Climate Change Act, while empowering quangos that operate as watchdogs against elected officials. Whoever you vote for, policy options are narrowed so far that we can really only travel in one direction. Thus the economy is in constant crisis because spending is axiomatic, frugality penalised and alternatives for growth shut off (ask Liz Truss). Reeves, in her first year, found herself testing what this political system would tolerate with her modest mix of tax hikes and savings. Last week's welfare rebellion rules out further cuts, while her fiscal rules render it harder to borrow, leaving only taxes on the table, which will kill the growth that grows the pie that makes progressive government feasible. Changing course will be difficult. Starmer and Corbyn have profound differences, but they share the psychological defect of seeing themselves as Very Good People – a condition that makes it easy to give criticism but hard to take it. Good People cannot accept they are wrong because their rightness, or righteousness, is the rock upon which they construct a life. Sitting in Westminster, it's fun to hear Labour MPs bitch about each other. The Starmerites truly loathe the Corbynites; they are 'professional activists 'who harm the people they're meant to help'. The Corbynites say the Starmerites will never fix a capitalist system they don't understand, and thus haven't learnt to hate. Out of power, this conflict was barely worth a column in the Morning Star, but as we enter Year Two of the revolution, journalists must study every nuance, unpack every conference motion, to see where this civil war is taking us. If you want a vision of the future, Winston, it is pro-Gaza activists glueing themselves to a truck at London's Pride parade on Saturday. Black flags v rainbow flags. A family row with consequence, because the entire country is stuck in the traffic behind, pumping the horn, waving our fists, but going nowhere.
