Yorkshire farmers support hospice charity

They have now been donated to the hospice to be distributed to their charity shops.

Money raised from sales of the toys will help St Gemma’s in its work to provide specialist palliative care for patients.

Thousands of toys were donated by NFU members and have been sent to charities around the country.

Among them were NFU West Riding chair Richard Pears, he said: “Several farmers across Yorkshire donated farm toys and it’s wonderful to see them being put to good use and also raising valuable funding for the Hospice.

“I hope, also, they spark an interest in farming and the countryside in some children who may never have been to a farm and seen a tractor in real life.”

St Gemma’s Hospice is in the Leeds West and Pudsey constituency of Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves and the NFU will continue to highlight to all political parties why the family farm tax policy must be scrapped.

The Stop the Family Farm Tax campaign is calling on the government to reconsider its planned changes to Agricultural Property Relief (APR) and Business Property Relief (BPR).

The NFU says the government is working off the wrong figures and has miscalculated the impact of the changes, with concerns they could force many small and medium-sized family farms out of business.

All the UK’s major supermarkets have publicly stated their concerns over the threat to national food security.

The NFU has put forward an alternative proposal to the government, worked on with tax experts, which calls on inheritance tax to only be applied to qualifying assets if they are disposed of within a seven-year period after death, and so tax is paid only when the finance is available to do so, in keeping with sound principles of taxation.

This proposal meets the government’s aims of raising revenue, avoids penalising elderly farm owners, breaking up family farms, and stifling investment in farm businesses and takes away the incentive to use APR and BPR solely as a way of avoiding tax.