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Finance Bill

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend the Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice). The change could not have happened at a worse time for the farming industry, which has gone through a funding revolution following the introduction of the single payment scheme. All sorts of new things are spinning out as a result of that. Farmers are advised to put their houses in order by farming for profit, not for subsidy. That requires structural changes to agricultural holdings, especially buildings. As we heard from the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew), farmers have recently been investing considerably in reorganising their buildings and structures. Such investment leads not to appreciating assets, but depreciating ones. It results in metal buildings that are designed for a particular purpose, and their time will expire over the next 20 or 30 years. That is why farmers who invested large sums of capital took into consideration the fact that they would benefit from the agricultural buildings allowance. In effect, the change will bring about retrospective taxation that will cause farmers considerable problems. Let me cite an example. A farmer in my constituency used to leave his cattle out for a large part of the winter because a disused quarry on his land was a particularly good place in which do so. Environmentalists discovered rare plants in that quarry and said that they would love him to move the cattle out of the quarry over the winter and put them in a building. Given that he was moving up to higher level stewardship, he invested some tens of thousands of pounds in new buildings. When he did so, he took account of the fact that he would receive the ABA, but now he will not. I urge the Chief Secretary to consider whether people who have made such investment should receive grandfather rights because the measure brings about unfair retrospective taxation.