On Tuesday evening just after 8pm MPs voted on the so-called "family farms tax", with dozens of Labour MPs appearing to have abstained, and one backbencher – Penrith and Solway MP Markus Campbell-Savours - voting against the government, alongside Conservative members.

Markus Campbell-Savours MP voted against the Government’s proposed changes to inheritance tax for family farms. He was the only Labour MP to do so. 

Earlier on Tuesday the National Farmers Union had urged Labour MPs to abstain from the vote during Division: Budget Resolutions, Motion 50: Inheritance Tax.

Many of Markus’s farming constituents emailed the MP ahead of the vote urging him to abstain.

Markus went a step further than abstaining and delivered a speech in the House of Commons before the vote:

 

“I welcome the positive steps taken in this Budget to support our NHS — commitments to cut waiting lists, investing in technology, and deliver up to 250 new Neighbourhood Health Centres across the country.  

Measures like this matter, and they matter especially in rural areas like Cumbria, where our health services have struggled for years. 

Yet while many of the measures in this Budget are of benefit to my constituents, there remain deep concerns about the proposed changes to agricultural property relief. 

In last year’s Opposition Day Debate on Farming and Inheritance Tax, I set out my concerns. Over the course of a debate that has raged for more than a year, members across the House have made the case against these changes. Changes which leave many — not least elderly farmers yet to make arrangements to transfer assets — devastated at the impact on their family farms. 

Before the election, many farmers feared this was coming. Some transferred in advance. Others contacted Labour candidates, who reassured them based on public commitments from the then Shadow Secretary of State for DEFRA that APR would not be touched.   

I was one of those Labour candidates. And it is for that reason I will be voting against the budget resolution enabling these changes. 

Colleagues will agree it is the privilege of a lifetime to be elected to this place. Perhaps more so for those of us representing the communities we are from. And when the good people of Penrith & Solway decide my time here is up, I intend to walk around my community knowing I did all I could for them. 

But I cannot do that knowing that my constituencies 1,665 farms, the farm workers, and the supply chains that depend on them were let down. Knowing that I broke my word.   

I am not yet clear on the budget resolution grouping, but I would be grateful to be given the opportunity to vote specifically on Resolution 50.

I gave my word, and I intend to keep it.”

Despite the opposition the government won the vote with 327 for and 182 against.