Now, the Conservative Environment Network (CEN) is urging the Chancellor to overhaul the system in next month’s Budget.
In a farming manifesto to be published this week, the group said the UK’s exit from the EU has provided a “once in a generation opportunity” to improve food security and tackle climate change.
It proposed this could be achieved by developing policies “tailored to our own national circumstances and priorities” that “fairly reward farmers, encourage innovation and restore our natural world”.
The network also warned that inheritance tax was hampering adoption of the Government’s post-Brexit “Environmental Land Management” (ELM) scheme, a series of reforms designed to reward farmers using environmentally-conscious production methods.
Addressing this in the manifesto, CEN called for the abolition of “inheritance tax on farmland which is delivering benefits for nature as part of the ELM schemes or private nature markets to equalise the treatment with land used to grow crops and rear animals”.