Can Labour get anything right? If it’s not freebie fiascos, or tax affair slip-ups, it’s Chancellor Rachel Reeves coming under fire over her illegal letting palaver. On Wednesday, the Daily Mail revealed that Reeves had been letting out her family home without a licence. Defending herself, the Chancellor claimed she and her husband were not aware that they were required to secure a selective rental licence. Yet unearthed emails appear to contradict this story…
Email exchanges released by No. 10 on Thursday night showed that conversations between Reeves’s husband and the couple’s letting agent about the need for a licence were had. The discovery of the cache of emails led the Chancellor to write to Sir Keir Starmer, admitting to the Prime Minister that it was her responsibility to secure the licence. In the letter sent on Thursday, Reeves conceded:
Today the letting agency and my husband have found correspondence confirming that on 17 July 2024, the letting agent said to my husband that a selective licence would be required and agreed that the agency would apply for the licence on our behalf. They have also confirmed today they did not take the application forward, in part due to a member of staff leaving. Nevertheless, as I said yesterday, I accept it was our responsibility to secure the licence. I also take responsibility for not finding this information yesterday and bringing it to your attention.
The Chancellor put her four-bedroom detached house on the rental market last year after she moved into No. 11 Downing Street, but failed to obtain a landlord licence – a criminal offence – as per Southwark Council’s rules. For their part, letting agency Harvey & Wheeler said the property manager in charge of applying for the licence on Reeves’s behalf had ‘suddenly resigned’, which led to the ‘oversight’ – but it hasn’t stopped new calls for ethics adviser Sir Laurie Magnus to probe the issue again. On Thursday, the ethics chief said that it was ‘regrettable’ that Reeves had not secured the licence – but added that it was an ‘unfortunate but inadvertent error’ and he had found ‘no evidence of bad faith’. It is not quite clear, however, what evidence Reeves had provided to Magnus in the first place to support her insistence that she had not previously been made aware of the licensing requirement.
Starmer himself wrote a rather scathing letter back to his Chancellor, noting shortly: ‘It would clearly have been better if you and your husband had conducted a full trawl through all email correspondence with the estate agency before writing to me yesterday’. Ouch. The Prime Minister did go on to say that the matter was an ‘inadvertent failure’ and he would not be taking further action – although No. 10 has refused to say whether Reeves’s actions – and change in story – were in breach of the ministerial code. In a statement, the PM’s spokesperson said: ‘The ministerial code makes clear that in certain circumstances, in consultation with the independent adviser, an apology is a sufficient resolution.’ How convenient…
Comments