SALE OF THREE VILLAGES

Taranaki Daily News, 17 July 1930, Page 3

SALE OF THREE VILLAGES

LORD MIDDLETON AND TAXES. Three Yorkshire villages—Birdsall, Wharram and North Grims ton—included in an estate of 10,150 acres belonging to' Lord Middleton are shortly to be sold. . ' With the Birdsall estate, which has belonged to the Willoughby family since about 1760, will also go Birdsall House, Lord Middleton’s present residence. He and Lady Middleton will probably make their home at Settington Hall, • the Dowager House on the estate. In an interview with a representative of the London Daily Telegraph, Lord Middleton explained his reasons for selling the property. “I hope to be able to dispose of the estate by private treaty,, without splitting it up,” he said, “but I. have not , yet advertised it. Under the present pressure of death duties and taxation, • it is now clearly impossible for, a landowner to keep possession of his property and manage it efficiently unless he has a considerable amount of outside capital to assist him. In these days an agricultural property of average farming value can rarely pay its way. Against the income from farm rents and the microscopic cottage rents must bo set rates and taxes, cost of management, repairs and upkeep, forestry and draining. The income is all swallowed up. “Some years back there began a practice of forming the estates into private companies in order to obtain capital for development and to avoid taxation which should never be levied on any business. This practice is now condemned as tax evasion by the wise and good who rule us. The result is the suffering of men who work on the roads and water supply and draining schemes, and who are now on the dole. “At the present day, if a landowner is io honour his traditional obligations, the only thing for him to do is to sell his property to a landowner who can afford to run it. If he docs not succeed in doing this there are two alternatives. The tenant may borrow the purchase price of his land and continue to carry on under a crushing burden of debt. There was another altrhative, continued Lord Middleton. When there was an estate in the last stage of dilapida- / tion and decay, under-populated and starved, it was a sign that the “wreckers” had been there—men who had bought the estate as a speculation, made what they could out of it, and passed on. > And this was tjoo often tho fato of estates which had been forced on the market by crippling taxation.