It was early in the morning when Jonathan Charlesworth got a call from his uncle, who could not get hold of Charlesworth’s father. The brothers had never missed their 7am virtual Scrabble match, but on October 29 last year, the retired farmer failed to log on.
Charlesworth, 47, was not alarmed. He saw his children playing in the barn and almost called out to ask them to “find Grandpa”. “For some reason I didn’t — and I’m so glad,” Charlesworth recalled. “Instead, I walked around back and saw him hanging.”
The day before Rachel Reeves was set to announce changes to inheritance tax for farmers in her autumn statement, John Charlesworth, who went by his middle name of Philip, took his own life. He died aged 78 where he had lived since age 11, on Bank House Farm in Silkstone, near Barnsley. He had inherited the land from his own father, also called John.
John Philip Charlesworth had left a suicide note, underneath which he included calculations related to the farm’s finances
PA
The timing, his son had always maintained, “was no coincidence” — a conclusion also drawn by a coroner last week who found that Charlesworth had killed himself while “worried about implications of new regulations around inheritance tax”. The media had been briefed in the run-up to the budget that the chancellor was poised to announce a raid on landowners by restricting tax relief on agricultural and business property. However, the full details were only announced on October 30.
“There was so much talk about it, but no information anywhere,” Charlesworth explained. “We didn’t know when it would come in. We didn’t know how much it would be. We didn’t know what the threshold would be. I think every farmer was worried about it but my dad got really worried. It was all we talked about.
“He must have just wound himself up so much about it that the day before the budget, he took his own life. He had got in his head that if this is implemented, and it’s in from tomorrow, we’re stuffed. So he decided he was going to beat it.”
Philip, who loved bell-ringing on a Sunday and teaching his grandchildren the tricks of the farming trade, had no known mental health problems, although he had struggled as the full-time carer for his wife, a former English teacher and lecturer, who was suffering from severe dementia and cancer. The father of two had left the family a short suicide note, underneath which he included some calculations related to the farm’s finances.
Sitting in the farmhouse kitchen, only metres from where he had found his father, Charlesworth said he spent weeks waiting to wake up from what felt like a nightmare. “I blamed myself that I didn’t see it coming, that I didn’t talk him out of it,” he said. “But he was very much like that, my dad. Once he had made a decision, he’d stick to it.”
In the end, changes to inheritance tax relief were less drastic than the family had feared: farms worth less than £1 million were exempt and the tax rate above that was capped at 20 per cent, rather than the standard 40 per cent. Yet Charlesworth, who reared cattle and sheep on his 75-acre farm, still estimated that under the new rules, his family would be hit with a bill of up to £200,000.
• MPs urge ministers to delay inheritance tax reforms for farmers
That was not money that Charlesworth, who estimated that he paid himself an hourly wage of about £5, could easily find. The farm had only stayed afloat since they opened a campsite during the pandemic. “The average farm size will be three to four times ours and they will be hit really hard,” he said.
“Farmers feel persecuted,” Charlesworth added. “There is an argument for inheritance tax on land because people are using it as a tax dodge but those people aren’t farmers. For us, it’s our factory floor. Those others will just put that money somewhere else, where it’s more tax-efficient.”
Charlesworth fears more suicides next March if the tax changes are not reversed
MARK WAUGH/MANCHESTER PRESS PHOTOGRAPHY
Any property passed on more than seven years before death falls outside the scope of inheritance tax. Charlesworth is calling on the government to “at the very least” push back the implementation date of the new rules for landowners, to give farming families enough time to transfer their assets. Otherwise, he fears, others could come to the same terrible conclusion as his father.
Darren Millar, leader of the Welsh Conservatives, described the case of one farmer who died after declining cancer treatment as he was “so concerned about the implications of the inheritance tax changes” that he wanted to ensure he passed on his land before they came into effect next April.
“If you’ve got farmers in their eighties [or] nineties, or farmers with health problems who aren’t sure if they are going to live another five years, they might think they can’t risk it,” Charlesworth said. “If Labour don’t push the date back, March next year will be like National Suicide Month.”
A government spokesperson said: “Our sympathies are with the loved ones of Mr Charlesworth.”
