sharefarming/agrement to stop care home taking land from older person

As always, use a good agent or you will end up in a pickle.

Keep looking then, but you don't want to be complicit with something less than legal.

wasted years said:

Keep looking then, but you don't want to be complicit with something less than legal.

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That arrangement isn't necessarily 'less than legal'. The family (i.e. mother and sons) are 'active farmers' (for IHT purposes) because they actively engaged in farming. The OP doesn't specify what the share farming arrangements are, but in a lot of cases is the landowners provide the land and the farmer provides the labour and they then share the profit and loss.

I went on a course recently run by a Government body in Wales regarding share farming. The majority of the 'providers' (i.e. landowners) on the course were people who were looking for ways to reduce their IHT liabilities by becoming 'share farmers'.

To get free care home fees the mother would have had to given away her savings and assets a number of years ago, otherwise the local authority could argue that the family have tried to deliberately reduce their assets (intentional deprivation of assets) in order to bypass paying care fees.

You can get security of tenure and they retain their active farmer status. I suggest getting in touch with an agent, freshstartlandenterprise.org.uk might have some advice too.

I thought this was a common solution, and allows people to actively farm. When we spoke to an agricultural solicitor I think you had to prove active farming for at least seven years, so we either set up our own books, or got someone else to farm it on our behalf.
You need a solicitor to give you advice.

I'm not sure where exactly you would find a template agreement but if they want to be actively farming they need to share the risk ie pay for inputs.