The chairman of the UK’s largest chicken supplier has claimed that Labour’s tax raid on farms is pushing thousands of British farmers to financial ruin.

Richard Pennycook, who heads up 2Sisters, which supplies poultry to Tesco, Sainsbury’s and M&S, said the Chancellor’s decision to slash inheritance tax relief for family farms meant many would simply “give up” on agriculture because it was no longer economical.

“There will inevitably be anxious conversations taking place around the kitchen table at a family level at thousands of farms up and down the country, and that has to be a concern to all of us”, he said, adding that anything that encouraged farmers to quit the industry was “crazy”.

“These people are the backbone of the country. We should be making them feel important”, he said.

2Sisters, founded by so-called “chicken king” Ranjit Singh Boparan, is responsible for one in every three poultry products eaten in Britain every year, churning out 10.4 million chickens a week. It owns more than 700 farms across the UK and employs 13,500 people.

The warning comes after recent figures revealed that a record number of farms were forced to close last year, with most following Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax change for rural businesses.

Currently, family farms do not incur inheritance tax, skipping the usual 40pc rate. However, from April 2026, inheritance tax will be charged at a rate of 20pc for family farms if they are worth more than £1m.

It has already meant that swathes of businesses have shut. More than 6,365 agriculture, forestry and fishing businesses closed over the past year, recent Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures showed.

Fears have been mounting that the exodus will force Britain to rely more on imported food. Steve Reed, the Environment Secretary, previously claimed that Labour was aiming to boost self-sufficiency, arguing “food security is national security”.

Mr Pennycook said there appeared to be a number of “conflicting priorities” within the Government.

“You would think that the Government would take food security really seriously and would want a higher proportion of our food being produced domestically, but the inheritance tax changes play against that. What we haven’t got is that starting point of saying, ‘Food security trumps almost everything.’”

Farmers and food companies are already grappling with higher costs. The Chancellor’s National Insurance changes earlier this year also pushed up their bills, making it more expensive to employ staff.

Mr Pennycook said it was shoppers who were having to “pick up the tab”, given the small margins in the food industry.

He said people would blame Labour, saying: “If politicians think that it’s somehow one step removed from them, that’s a dangerous assumption. The consumer knows that they’re being asked to pay more because, for example, corporate taxes have gone up.”

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