Angela Rayner has paid “the correct duty owed” and is “in line with all relevant requirements”. That is the message the Government wants us to keep in mind. And it is an important one, though not for the reasons Labour thinks: when the stoutest defence made of a minister under scrutiny is that he or she has not done anything which breaks a rule or law, things are not going well.
Health minister Stephen Kinnock presumably thought he was helping when, during an interview on LBC, he came tentatively to Rayner’s defence: “My understanding in the statement from the Prime Minister’s office is that she’s done nothing wrong.”
Let us take a step back. The Deputy Prime Minister, who is also Housing, Communities and Local Government Secretary, found herself in the headlines when it was revealed recently that she had bought a flat in Hove on the south coast for between £700,000 and £800,000. That in itself is no cause for criticism or reproach: as a Cabinet minister, Rayner earns a comfortable but hardly outlandish salary and may, up to a point, spend her money as she pleases.
The devil, however, is in the detail. The Daily Telegraph, a whiff of blood in its collective nostrils, has plunged into the intricacies of Rayner’s living arrangements, and the facts seem to be as follows.
A few weeks before buying the property in Hove, Rayner removed her name from the deeds of the house she owns in her constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne and designated the new flat as her main home for the purposes of paying stamp duty. That means she should have been liable for £30,000, rather than £70,000 if it had been a second home, a surcharge introduced by then chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne in 2016 and increased by Rachel Reeves last year.
However, it is also reported that Rayner informed the local authority in which her constituency is located, Tameside Council, that her house in Ashton-under-Lyne was her “primary residence” for council tax purposes.
That means that she is not liable for council tax on the official residence she uses in London – a flat in Admiralty House used by previous deputy prime ministers. Instead the charge is met by the taxpayer. A supposed defence of Rayner is that she does seem to pay a council-tax premium for a second home on her new residence in Hove.
She is registered to vote in all three locations: Ashton-under-Lyne, London and Hove, which is not specifically prohibited so long as she only actually votes in one jurisdiction.
The Deputy Prime Minister’s spokesman may have been entirely accurate in saying she “paid the correct duty owed on the purchase, entirely properly and in line with all relevant requirements”, but anyone who thinks that is the point is dangerously naïve. The question is whether she deliberately arranged her various registrations in order to minimise the amount of money for which she was liable.
Let us be honest, the arrangements set out in The Telegraph do not have the air of a random series of events. At best, they seem cleverly prudent and presumably the result of canny financial advice. They do not simply happen.
Even that would not be a grievous sin in all circumstances. The average taxpayer is in no way obliged to maximise his or her financial obligations to the Government. But this is all about context. For more than four years, as deputy leader of the opposition, Rayner harangued Conservative MPs and ministers for any hint of impropriety or sharp practice, a task she undertook with glee.
Rayner, whose support in certain sections of the Labour Party and the trades union movement has been invaluable to Sir Keir Starmer, came to power as part of a Government which relentlessly promised change, which declared in its manifesto that “politics should be driven by a sense of service”, dedicated to “the service of working people”.
square ANDREW FISHER Angela Rayner’s holiday home highlights the moral vacuum at the heart of Labour
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“Over the last 14 years, trust in politics has been shattered… The behaviour of the Conservatives has understandably led to a widespread belief that many politicians are in it for themselves.”
This was expressly an invitation to hold Labour to a higher standard than the Conservatives, yet it has mixed with a toxic assumption of a priori moral superiority which makes ministers impatient every time they are questioned on matters of conduct or integrity.
Labour was right that “trust in politics has been shattered”, though the convenient starting point of 2010 is partisan nonsense. Angela Rayner has to understand that one factor which causes intense public anger is a perception that politicians say one thing and do another. You can be cynical and permissive, or you can be piously crusading — but you cannot be both to suit your own financial arrangements.
The Government claims Rayner’s actions are “not an issue”. That is not for ministers to decide. This is not some technical matter of duties and taxation but a fundamental attitudinal stance towards transparency and propriety.
In opposition, Rayner rarely fought shy of calling for resignations at the slightest hint of wrongdoing. Labour prepared these scaffolds: incumbent ministers are not immune from political execution.
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