For a politician who prides herself on giving straight answers, unlike so many of her evasive colleagues, Angela Rayner has been unable to answer one simple question: where does she actually live?
We still don’t actually know if it is her constituency home in Greater Manchester, where her former husband and their children reside, or her grace-and-favour flat in Westminster or her (now infamous) £800,000 seaside apartment in Hove.
What we do know, however, is that her bewildering property affairs have resulted – finally – in her admission that she has not paid enough stamp duty on her new, swanky residence on the Sussex coast and, in the process, potentially avoided, deliberately or otherwise, inheritance tax.
Her silence, the result, she says, of a family court order to protect her special-needs son, has lasted ten tumultuous, revelation-filled days – and a week is supposed to be a long time in politics – when she has gone from heir apparent to the beleaguered Prime Minister (Labour’s approval ratings have slumped to a record low) to, potentially, dethroned Red Queen; the name was coined by Lord Ashcroft, the former Conservative Party deputy chairman, the author of an unauthorised biography of her last year which first raised questions about her dealings in the housing market.
There can’t be anyone who doesn’t have sympathy with Ms Rayner as the parent of a child with lifelong disabilities, but she has been merciless in her criticism of ‘Tory Toffs’ and called for the resignation of Nadhim Zahawi as party chairman in 2023 after news that his tax liabilities were under investigation by HMRC.
As the old saying goes, you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
The truth is Ms Rayner has been no stranger to controversy during her ascent up the housing ladder – made more complex by her private life.
Pregnant at 16, a grandmother by the age of 37, divorced in 2023 and with an on-off boyfriend, Ms Rayner’s property affairs have rarely seemed straightforward.
The latest saga began on the evening of August 23 when The Mail on Sunday revealed Ms Rayner, housing minister as well as Deputy Prime Minister, had added the Hove apartment to her portfolio at a time when her department is cracking down on second-home owners. As Deputy PM, Ms Rayner enjoys the use of a grace-and-favour flat at Admiralty House, once the Whitehall home of Winston Churchill.
That Saturday, she declined to say whether she was continuing to designate her Ashton property 200 miles away as her ‘primary residence’. That fuelled speculation about the rate of stamp duty she was paying on the Hove address.
If the £800,000 Hove home had been her primary residence, she would pay £30,000. But, if it was a second home, the stamp duty bill would have soared to £70,000. She saved, in other words, £40,000.
By Thursday last week, sources close to the DPM began offering a little more information. They said the Ashton home was indeed her primary residence, ‘as it has been for over ten years’, adding: ‘It’s where her children live and go to college, where she regularly returns and shares childcare’.
Ms Rayner was said to regularly visit them, although some neighbours say they never see her.
So that cleared things up, then? If only.
In fact, it transpired Ms Rayner no longer even owns a stake in this ‘primary residence’. Records revealed she received £162,500 by disposing of her 25 per cent stake in her constituency house, using the cash for the deposit on her flat in Hove.
There is no requirement to own any share of a property for it to the primary residence – yet to the public, this arrangement seemed unusual to say the least.
It has now emerged Ms Rayner sold her share of the house to a trust set up for her disabled son, who lives there.
The money is understood to have been part of NHS compensation awarded to 17-year-old Charlie after the Rayners sued the hospital where he was born.
Any proceeds from the future sale of the house, currently valued at £650,000, will go to Mr Rayner and a trust she said on Wednesday was set up to benefit her disabled son, who has life-long disabilities after a ‘distressing incident’ when he was a premature baby.
Tax experts said putting property into a discretionary trust is a common way to avoid inheritance tax. It was, observed experts, a ‘remarkable coincidence’ her Ashton home was valued at exactly £650,000 – above which, it would become liable for inheritance tax.
The trustees are Ms Rayner, her ex-husband and a solicitor specialising in property law who at the time worked for the firm Shoosmiths Trust Corporation.
Having claimed the Ashton home as her ‘main residence’, thus keeping its council tax down, Ms Rayner may also have avoided a capital gains tax bill at the same time. Capital gains tax is usually liable on the sale of a second home.
Aside from all this, is the thorny issue of council tax. Currently, Ms Rayner has told Tameside Council in Manchester that her constituency home is her primary residence for full council tax.
Yet it would be higher if she had said she mainly lived in London, at her Admiralty House flat. Then, the constituency home would be a ‘second home’ and liable for double tax. She is not required to pay the £2,034 council tax on Admiralty House because that is paid for by the Cabinet Office.
Why does she need a flat in Hove? Allies have suggested it was so she could be ‘nearer’ to Westminster, even though Hove is more than 50 miles from London. Given that she has the use of Admiralty House, this explanation did not pass what is colloquially known as the ‘sniff test’.
More likely is the fact her sometime boyfriend Sam Tarry, 43, has family links to the area where his former wife and their two sons live; until last year, at least, he rented a flat near them.
Rayner’s entry on the list of ministerial interests is, like many of the disclosures from her parliamentary colleagues (of all political stripes) very brief. It says ‘her partner is a public affairs consultant’.
There is no mention of the fact he advises lobby consultancy group Henham Strategy. One the firm’s many clients is Great South West, a group of councils and partnerships that was given £280,000 of funding last year by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) – which is, of course, Rayner’s department.
Henham stressed Tarry works ‘on a number of areas unrelated to that department to ensure no conflicts of interest arises’.
There is no suggestion he has acted improperly or broken the rules. But Henham’s website points out the firm ‘leverage’ the contacts of their team to ‘help clients engage and influence key decision makers’. Who might Tarry’s most high-profile contact be, do you think?
For Ms Rayner and property taxes, the questions go back a long way. She used the right-to-buy scheme to make a £48,500 profit selling her former council house – which she bought in 2007 – in 2015. As she had been a council tenant, she was given a 25 per cent discount worth £26,000 when she bought the two-bedroom home in Stockport in 2007 for £79,000. She sold it at market value in 2015 shortly before becoming an MP for £127,500.
For reasons never fully explained, having married Mark Rayner, a Unison official, in 2010, the couple were registered at different addresses. Ms Rayner kept herself on the electoral roll at her former council house on Vicarage Road.
Six weeks after her marriage, Ms Rayner re-registered the births of her two younger sons – and gave her husband’s home in nearby Lowndes Lane as her address.
This baffling state of affairs, which only emerged last year in the biography by Lord Ashcroft, prompted questions over whether she should have paid capital gains tax, normally due on profits of the sale of a second home.
Ms Rayner maintained even though her husband and children had lived in Lowndes Lane, it was Vicarage Road – the one she sold – that was ‘my home’. Those selling their ‘main residence’ typically don’t have to pay capital gains tax.
Police in Manchester and HMRC looked into whether Ms Rayner had paid the correct tax on a house sale, and if she was registered to vote at the right address. She was not found to have committed any offences. Labour sought to explain by saying Ms Rayner ‘spent time’ at her husband’s house – also a right-to-buy council home – but ‘the house she owned remained her main home’.
In March 2024, Ms Rayner refused to publish the ‘personal tax advice’ she had received on the council house sale. She told Radio 4 she was ‘confident’ she had done ‘absolutely nothing wrong’ over the sale. Asked why she would not put that legal advice in the public domain, she said: ‘Because that’s my personal tax advice.’
The furore over the two right-to-buy properties earned her the nickname ‘two homes Rayner’.
Now she is at the centre of another mess over her property dealings. For ten days, Ms Rayner’s allies have maintained an indignant air of ‘nothing to see here’. They insisted she had paid all her taxes and any suggestion to the contrary was a baseless smear which made her screeching U-turn in Wednesday’s mea culpa, after the court order was lifted, all the more astonishing.
It is surely true one thing may be said with certainty – without ten days of sustained questioning from the Press, the Deputy Prime Minister would not have admitted her tax mistake.
With her reputation tarnished, even Labour MPs were turning on her on Wednesday night. Specialist tax blogger Dan Neidle, who has advised the Labour Party, said there were probably only three possibilities: she ‘got the law wrong’, she ‘didn’t take the right advice’, or ‘she didn’t disclose all the facts to the law firm’. None of which will help Ms Rayner sleep at night – wherever her home actually may be.