Wealthy landowners who can afford expensive lawyers will find a way to escape inheritance tax but ordinary farmers will get hit, shadow environment secretary Victoria Atkins has warned.

Farmers are demanding a face-to-face meeting with Chancellor Rachel Reeves amid warnings that her plans to force families to pay 20 per cent inheritance tax on estates worth more than £1million risks “decimating” rural communities.

Ms Atkins told GB News: “The wealthiest landowners will be able to find expensive lawyers to work their way around through trusts. What is so worrying about this is that this literally rips the rug out from under the feet of farmers, who for generations have done nothing more than do the right thing, farm their land, bring their children up to understand how to run a farm, how to work with livestock, how to run an arable farm.”

The National Farmers’ Union has warned that the Treasury has “significantly underestimated the scale of the impact on British farming and British food production”. It claims “around 75 per cent of commercial family farms will be above the £1million threshold”.

Tom Bradshaw, the union’s president, said: “All I want to do is sit down with the Chancellor and discuss a way forward but, so far, she has refused. Rest assured, the NFU will continue to push hard to stop the family farm tax; it’s cruel, it’s wrong and it risks decimating our sector.”

A Government spokesman insisted: “Our commitment to our farmers is steadfast – we have committed £5billion to the farming budget over two years, including more money than ever for sustainable food production, and we are developing a 25-year farming roadmap, focusing on how to make the sector more profitable in the decades to come. We have been clear since this change was announced that around 500 claims of Agricultural and Business Property Relief each year will be impacted – this is based off actual claims data – and even when inheritance tax does kick in, it is effectively at half the rate paid by others.”