Tories making a lot of noise about Angela Rayner and capital gains tax are less vocal when it comes to the profits their own MPs have made from selling second homes.
Four who have raked in £5.4million between them from flogging houses funded by the public have repeatedly declined to reveal if they paid any tax on the profits they made. The Tories were accused of hypocrisy after pushing for police to probe deputy Labour leader Ms Rayner over a £48,000 profit she made selling a former council house before she became an MP and an alleged capital gains tax bill of a mere £1,500.
The party did not respond to Mirror requests to comment on our investigation into whether David Tredinnick, Eleanor Laing, Shailesh Vara and Maria Miller paid capital gains tax on second homes they sold. Labour’s Jess Phillips said: “The sheer hypocrisy is off the scale.
“It beggars belief for the Tories to demand a witch-hunt over a decade-old ex-council house sale. Yet they’re refusing to say if several of their own MPs paid tax on the profits from selling taxpayer-funded homes, while they were actually sitting in Parliament.”
Under parliamentary rules MPs are entitled to keep the money they made flogging second homes. Former Bosworth MP Mr Tredinnick, 69, sold his property in London for £2.8m, when he was still in the Commons, making an estimated profit of £2m. He bought it in 1988, a year after he was elected.
It is not known when he designated the property as his second home but between 2004 and 2009 he claimed £106,745 in mortgage interest payments.
When Mr Tredinnick sold it in 2009, he was on the electoral register at that house as well as a second one in Billingshurst, West Sussex, which he still jointly owns. After he quit as an MP in 2019, we asked if he had paid capital gains tax on the London home and his spokesman told us that it was a “private matter”.
The Mirror contacted him several times through his accountants in recent days but got no response.
Ms Laing, the MP for Epping Forest and Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, made around £1.6m selling three taxpayer-funded London apartments. In 2009 she revealed she had not paid capital gains tax when she reportedly made a more than £1m profit selling the first two, adjacent apartments which she had designated her second home.
Ms Laing said at the time her solicitors told her “it would be wrong to pay capital gains tax on my London flat” because “under HMRC rules, the flat was my principal private residence”. She used the proceeds from the sale of the flats to buy another mortgage free in the same block for £900,000. We can reveal Ms Laing made a £575,000 profit when she sold it for £1.5m in 2016.
The previous year she was on the electoral roll at both the apartment and a cottage she owns in Theydon Bois in her Essex constituency. The Mirror has contacted Ms Laing four times in recent weeks to ask if she paid any capital gains tax but got no response.
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North West Cambridgeshire MP Mr Vara made £1.6m profit selling the townhouse taxpayers helped him buy in Pimlico, Central London. He paid £1.2m for the home and sold it for £2.8m. We also contacted Mr Vara four times but got no answer.
Basingstoke MP and former Culture Secretary Ms Miller made a £1.2m gross profit selling her home in Wimbledon, South London, which and her husband bought for £234,000 in 1995. She designated it her second home when she was elected in 2005.
The 55-year-old nominated for her main home a rented property in her constituency where she said she spent most of her time, until she became a minister in 2010. In 2014 Ms Miller sold the Wimbledon home for £1.47m and now claims for hotels when in the capital. Asked whether she paid any capital gains tax on the £1.2m profit, she said: “As you know, there is a longstanding practice for MPs to deal with questions about their personal tax affairs in the way I did 10 years ago, when this issue was raised.
“I am reluctant to depart from this practice, but I can confirm I took tax advice at the time and the matter was dealt with in my tax return in the relevant year. This answers the central basis of your question. I do not propose to provide any further details of my tax affairs.”
Our investigations comes 15 years after the expenses scandal in which MPs were found to have been claiming for a whole range of items, including a duck house for a moat.
Ms Rayner has been hounded for weeks over the sale of her home and the possible capital gains tax bill. The party’s deputy chairman James Daly successfully pressured Greater Manchester Police to open an investigation into the matter.
Last month he called on Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer to “show some leadership and open a full, transparent and independent investigation into the Rayner scandal”. He added that Ms Rayner should “stop dismissing and distracting and come clean now”.
Protesters who followed Ms Rayner on a visit to Yorkshire with a “Tax Dodger” banner were later revealed to be local Tory councillors. Rishi Sunak told Mr Starmer at PMQs he should spend “a bit more time reading the deputy leader’s tax advice”. The PM later said: “When it comes to me or my affairs, people are very happy to ask lots of questions, including Angela Rayner herself... I think there are very clear questions for her to answer about this.”
When Oliver Dowden faced Ms Rayner in the House of Commons last month, for the fifth time in a year, he joked: “Any more of these and she will be claiming it as her principal residence.”
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Angela: 'It's just a Tory smear'
Angela Rayner says accusations of wrongdoing over her house are manufactured smears. And she has said she will stand down as deputy Labour leader if she is found to have broken the law.
In an unauthorised biography by ex-Tory deputy chairman Lord Ashcroft, neighbours claimed she had been living at her husband’s house while remaining registered on the electoral roll at her house. Tory MPs claim it was a second home and have asked her to explain why she did not pay capital gains tax of up to £1,500 on the sale in 2015.
She had bought the former council house in Stockport, Gtr Manchester, eight years earlier under right-to-buy rules with a 25% discount. Ms Rayner said on BBC Newsnight: “I’ve been very clear there’s no rules broken. They [the Tories] tried to manufacture a police investigation … I got tax advice which says there was no capital gains tax. It’s a non-story manufactured to try and smear me.”
Critics have also demanded she be investigated for breaking electoral law claiming she provided false information on where she was living.
Police originally decided not to investigate but last month agreed to a review after pressure from the Conservatives. Detectives have made contact to arrange a meeting date. Ms Rayner insists the house was her home and she “lived there, paid the bills there and was registered to vote there”.