Plus they may be able to pick up extra land on the cheap if the big landowners are selling off.

There’s an argument to say that putting IHT up to a higher rate would help farmers even more (although probably with a higher threshold to encourage the really big landowners to sell).

That would benefit genuine family farmers - the artificially inflated valuations of their farms would drop, they would be much less likely to hit the IHT threshold, etc.

The IHT change is likely to make some of them look at selling the land, which will hopefully cause prices to drop back to a more reasonable level that actually reflects the value of the farm.

The reason these farms are “worth” so much is because the price of agricultural land has been pushed up by people with no interest in farming buying it up because of the IHT advantage.

Queued behind Hugh Dennis in a fish and chip shop in Ambleside.