Budget Resolutions

Markus Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Markus Campbell-Savours (Penrith and Solway) (Lab)]

I welcome the positive steps taken in this Budget to support our NHS, including commitments to cut waiting lists, investment in technology and the delivery of up to 250 new neighbourhood health centres across the country. Measures like that matter, especially in rural areas like Cumbria, where our health services have struggled for years.

Yet while many of the measures in the 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 from across the House have made the case against these changes. They are changes that 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 that the changes were coming. Some transferred in advance and others contacted Labour candidates who reassured them, based on public commitments from the then shadow Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, that APR would not be touched. I was one of those Labour candidates, and it is for that reason that I will be voting against the Budget resolution enabling these changes.

Colleagues will agree that it is the privilege of a lifetime to be elected to this place, perhaps more so for those of us who represent the communities that we are from. When the good people of Penrith and Solway decide my time here is up, I intend to walk around my community knowing that I did all I could for them, but I cannot do that knowing that my constituency’s 1,665 farms, the farm workers and the supply chains that depend on them were let down knowing that I broke my word. Madam Deputy Speaker, 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.