The son of a farmer who took his own life over fears of an inheritance tax hike in Labour’s Budget has said his father “didn’t want the tax man to ruin his farm” and threaten its future.
John Charlesworth was found dead on his farm near Barnsley last Tuesday, the day before the Budget, which imposed inheritance tax liabilities on farms.
Family members have said John was “distressed” at the prospect of losing his family farm to inheritance tax increases.
His son Jonathan wrote a social media post which was widely shared online, describing his father’s death as the “human cost of government policy or potential government policy”.
Jonathan Charlesworth Jr paid tribute to his ‘hard working’ father after he took his own life
PA / GB News
Speaking to GB News, Jonathan Charlesworth Jr told host Christopher Hope that his father was a “wonderful man” and spent “all of his life” farming and growing the family farm up until his death.
In tribute to his father, Charlesworth said: “He was born into farming, and spent all his life either working on the farm or in the farming industry one way or another. He took on the farm pretty much full time in the 80s from my grandfather, and built it up from what it was.
“Every generation tries to build the farm a little for the next, and he worked hard every day of his life, had very few days off and very few holidays.”
Noting his mother’s ongoing battle with dementia, Charlesworth recalled that in the last few weeks of his life, the conversation that dominated the family was “inheritance tax” and “how the farm will be passed on” to family members, in fear of the incoming Budget announcement by Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
John Charlesworth was found dead on his farm near Barnsley last Tuesday
GB News
Charlesworth claimed: “He had been suffering for a while. We’ve been caring for my mother for a number of years, who has severe dementia, and that had brought him down a lot because there’s a lot of stress involved in caring for anybody that’s got dementia.
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“But the last few weeks, the only topic of conversation has been inheritance tax. We’ve been looking at ways of passing the farm over, handing the land over before death and various other things. We were talking about it the night before, but we had no idea he was going to do this.”
Reflecting on his father’s death, Charlesworth suggested that his father “didn’t want the tax man to ruin what he’d worked on all his life”.
He added: “I think he basically woke up on the morning, realised my mum’s not got very long left, and thought I’ve worked all my life, I’m just not going to risk it. I’m not going to risk the taxman basically ruining the farm that both my grandfather and my father have built up.
“He saved all his life to build the farm up and pass it on to the next generation and hopefully the generation after that. So to see that potentially going down that path before the Budget, he must have thought that maybe there were some changes to how the way farmers were treated in what was coming up from Labour.”
Charlesworth told GB News that his mother also suffers from severe dementia
GB News
Claiming that it “wasn’t a secret” that the possible changes were coming, Charlesworth concluded that the lack of details of the policy could have been a “large cause” for why his father was so concerned.
Charlesworth said: “It wasn’t a secret that inheritance tax was pretty likely to come on to farms, but we didn’t have any details, there were no figures.
“I think that was probably a large cause. Nobody knew. I think there was talk at one point about it being a half a million as a possible threshold.
“And the we didn’t know whether it would be 20 per cent, 40 per cent, whatever tax on top of that. But we made £15,000 last year. So if you’re looking at a potential inheritance tax in the hundreds of thousands, that’s going to lend you that sort of money.”
