From the BBC:
UK farmers are to receive the same level of subsidies they get from the EU for five years after Brexit, the environment secretary is to say. Michael Gove was due to tell farmers a new system prioritising the environment will start in 2024, instead of 2022.
The current subsidies - £3bn a year - are based on the land farmers own. Farmers will have an two extra years to prepare for the new payments, which would reward initiatives such as planting wildflower meadows and woods.
Mad, they get paid for doing nothing? I'm with Monbiot on this - scrap the subsidies and impose a flat £20* (or whatever low-ish figure gets the optimum balance) per acre LVT on them instead. Farmers will happily abandon the most marginal sites with the lowest yields and thus escape the LVT. As it happens, the nicest places to enjoy nature - near settlements, along river banks, on cliff edges and hill tops - are the worst places for farming, and vice versa - flat fields in the middle of East Anglia are the best for farming, but it's much fun tramping across them.
In case anybody thinks I am anti-farming (which I am not, it's tough work and I love food), we could and should just exempt farming from tax altogether as a quid pro quo - no VAT refunds, no income tax or corporation tax on profits (so no capital allowances either), which we already have with forestry, no Business Rates on farm buildings/greenhouses, no PAYE on farm wages (farm workers can pay voluntary NICs to keep up their pension entitlement if they wish). You can nail this down by continuing to tax farm rental income, meaning a net tax saving for owner-occupier farmers, so we could and should exempt purchases of farm land from SDLT as well.
That'd would be more or less a break even from the government's point of view. If there's a net saving, then by all means spend it on rural broadband or rural public transport etc.
As we know from the allotments vs commercial farms example, this would increase the amount of food grown per acre and rural employment.
Everybody wins!
... Meanwhile, a report warns Brexit trade deals could threaten UK food security.
Well, they would say that wouldn't they?
MPs and peers in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agroecology (AAPG) say ministers must ensure famers are not undermined by future trade deals which permit imports of food produced with lower welfare or environmental standards.
Aha, so they don't mean "food security" from the consumers' point of view (the important one), they mean "income security" from the landowners' point of view?
Here's the best bit - five minutes in a TV studio with a YPP candidate last year seems to have worked wonders:
Detailing how the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will be replaced after Brexit, Mr Gove will say taxpayers' money should be used to boost public access to the countryside, and be spent on infrastructure and supporting rural communities.
He will say the CAP is "unjust, inefficient and drives perverse outcomes".
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* OTOH asks: "Why should the LVT be flat? Shouldn't land with a higher value pay more land value tax?"
1. A flat rate serves as a cliff edge to encourage farmers to leave marginal land to be rewilded/for ramblers to enjoy.
2. Scrapping the subsidies (negative land value tax) wads will be a big enough shock for the big fat rent-seekers.
3. We do not know what farm rents will be once the subsidies are replaced with a blanket tax exemption.
4. Farmland is very difficult to value anyway. With urban land, it's all about location and little to do with the physical qualities of the soil or land itself, so is easy to value. With farmland, the physical qualities of the soil are - to a greater or lesser degree - dictated by how well farmers have looked after it in the past and are looking after it today, which we wouldn't want to discourage with higher taxes.
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