Rayner admits she didn’t pay enough stamp duty on second home

To the Deputy Prime Minister, who has been in the spotlight over the last week over accusations she avoided tax on one of her properties. Angela Rayner has now given a rather revelatory interview in which she admits that she didn’t pay enough stamp duty on her Hove residence, she has referred herself to the independent adviser on ministerial standards and has even considered resigning over the whole affair. Crikey!

Speaking to Sky’s Beth Rigby, Rayner admitted that she underpaid stamp duty on her seaside flat in Hove, incorrectly paying the lower rate of tax on the residence after the ‘advice [she] relied upon’ misled her. The Deputy PM could owe as much as £40,000, according to experts.

Rayner’s revelation will do her no favours with voters increasingly turning away from Labour. The MP – who explained that she shares a family home with her former husband in order to look after her son while also having a flat in the south of England – said that she had applied to have a court order lifted so she could talk freely about her situation, and today admitted:

I took expert counsel advice on all of my affairs to ensure that everything was done proper and that expert counsel said that the advice that I received was inaccurate because of the trust. I don’t own the property. That is true. I only own one property that is mortgage like most people. But because of the nature of the trust that was set up by the court, that I would be liable to pay the additional stamp duty. 

Pushing her, Rigby asked: ‘So the accusations you didn’t pay stamp duty on Hove, they’re actually accurate?’ Rayner confessed: ‘They are accurate. Yes. There. Accurate in a different sense. I think the accusations were that I set up a trust and I flipped it to try and avoid paying it. But actually the complex area of the trust which the advice that I relied upon didn’t pick that up.’

The Deputy PM told Sky News that she has been ‘in shock’ over the news, adding: ‘It is devastating for me.’ But while she accepts she ‘made a mistake’, Rayner has hopes that people will go easy on her over her attempts to resolve the situation. Quizzed on whether she had considered resigning her position, however, the Deputy PM revealed she had discussed stepping down with her family:

I spoke to my family about it. I spoke to my ex-husband, who has been an incredibly supportive person because he knows that all I’ve done is try and support my family and help them… I think hopefully most people can see, if you take, if you rely on advice given to you by lawyers and you follow that process and then you find out that that process is wrong and that advice is wrong, I’m rectifying it at the earliest opportunity.

Will the public be so generous? Stay tuned…