Labour Under Fire Over Linking Farm Tax To Shoplifting Crackdown

A Labour minister has come under intense criticism after suggesting Rachel Reeves’s changes to inheritance tax on farmers will help fund efforts to tackle shoplifting.

Torsten Bell, Treasury and pensions minister, said the Chancellor’s tax reforms would allow more police officers to be deployed on the streets, reducing the need for shops to fund their own security. His remarks, made on BBC Radio 4's the Today programme and reported by the Telegraph, have drawn a sharp response from opposition parties, who accused the Government of showing disregard for farming families while failing to deal with record levels of retail crime.

Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “We wouldn’t expect Labour to understand the hurt offensive comments like this have. Labour are taxing family farms out of existence, but pretending it’s about tackling their spiralling shoplifting, when the real reason is their own economic mismanagement, is completely insulting.

“If people feel less safe today, it’s because Keir Starmer drained the police budget, flung open our borders, and waved in criminals.

“Under Labour, we have seen a 20 per cent surge in shoplifting, with more than half a million offences in the last year alone, a staggering 1,300 fewer police on our streets, and family farms go bust. This Labour government is destroying Britain – from farms to the high street.

“The real theft occurring is Rachel Reeves snatching the futures from young farmers.”

Lisa Smart, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, also condemned the move. She said: “Retailers have seen a shoplifting epidemic and the police simply don’t have the resources to deal with the scale of the problem.

“But raiding family farms through inheritance tax isn’t the answer. Farmers already face soaring costs, increased fly tipping, and financial uncertainty caused by heatwaves and poor harvests.”

Defending the policy, Mr Bell insisted the reforms were part of a broader effort to stabilise the economy and strengthen public services. Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, he said: “If you go back to the autumn Budget last year, which is when the big decisions this Government made were taken, yes, there were some tough decisions on tax.

“I understand why people affected by those would rather they hadn’t taken place. But if you look at the decisions we’ve had to make on inheritance tax, or capital gains tax, or on non-doms or on VAT on private schools, we’re doing the right thing to make sure that we can have sustainable public finances.

“But also that we can bring austerity to an end, so we can start to rebuild public services. And in the end, that is the pro-business choice just like it’s the pro-public services choice.

“Because we can’t have retail businesses having to deal with paying to put security guards on their door because there aren’t enough police on the beat. We can’t have people having to pay a health charge in effect because their workers aren’t able to turn up to work because waiting lists are too long in the NHS.”

Mr Bell’s remarks have added to the growing backlash over the Government’s decision to scale back agricultural property relief, which has been met with widespread anger across the farming community. Critics argue that linking tax reforms on farms to the fight against shop theft highlights a growing disconnect between ministers and rural Britain.

A record number of farms have already been forced to shut down this year, with the Government’s so-called “family farm tax” blamed for making the future of thousands of rural businesses unviable.

Until now, family farms were exempt from inheritance tax, receiving full relief from the standard 40 per cent rate. But at her first Budget last October, Rachel Reeves confirmed that inheritance tax would be applied at 20 per cent on assets above a £1m threshold.

The move has triggered a wave of condemnation. Sir David Davis, a former cabinet minister, said: “I’m afraid they are treating the public like fools, and the public will not like being treated like fools. This government is facing an unbelievably difficult medium-term future in financial terms and most of that is its own fault.

“If you force rich people to leave the country, if you basically say to farmers ‘stop investing because you’re going to be taxed on the investment’, if you destroy schools and force people in those schools into the state school system, all these things are massive miscalculations.

“They happen because people like Mr Torsten Bell look like everything through a heavily tinted ideological filter and they expect everybody else to be as gullible and as daft as they are. And the country’s going to pay the price, and eventually Labour will pay the price.”

Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform UK, went further: “The man’s either desperately naive or knowingly lying.

“The truth is all the retail stores had security guards before the Budget because the police under the Tories had basically been badly-led.

“Everybody knows that those dreadful Budget decisions were in order to pay for vast increases in wasteful, unproductive public sector spending, as we’ve seen.”

The scale of closures underlines the depth of the crisis. A total of 6,365 agriculture, forestry and fishing businesses shut their doors in the past year, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) — the highest number ever recorded.

Victoria Atkins, the shadow environment secretary, said the wave of closures was the direct result of “Labour’s disastrous tax policies”. Reform UK also warned that Ms Reeves’s policy, alongside the wider £40bn tax raid, was “pushing British farming to the brink”.

Farmers say they are being driven to sell off land to meet the new liabilities, as many businesses are cash-poor and operate on tight margins. Others have warned that the looming costs have created a dangerous “suicide window” for elderly owners with no viable route forward.