Angela Rayner has resigned from government after admitting to underpaying stamp duty on her £800,000 second dwelling in Hove.
She has stepped down as housing secretary, Deputy Prime Minister and as deputy chief of the Labour Party, a place to which she was elected by occasion members.
The Ashton-under-Lyne MP referred herself to the Prime Minister’s requirements adviser earlier this week, after she had underpaid taxes on her flat, which led to opposition calls that she ought to resign.
Rayner claimed she had been badly suggested when making the acquisition.
Last yr, the government elevated the stamp duty surcharge on second properties and funding properties from 3% to five% with rapid impact.
The Prime Minister’s requirements adviser, Sir Laurie Magnus, says in his report into the matter to Keir Starmer: “It is extremely unlucky that Ms Rayner didn’t pay the right charge of stamp duty on this buy, significantly given her standing and tasks because the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and as Deputy Prime Minister.”
“She believed that she relied on the authorized recommendation she had acquired, however sadly didn’t heed the warning contained inside it, which acknowledged that it didn’t represent skilled tax recommendation and which recommended that skilled recommendation be sought.”
Magnus provides that “the accountability of any taxpayer for reporting their tax returns and settling their liabilities rests in the end on themselves alone”.
The requirements adviser concludes: “Accordingly, it’s with deep remorse that I have to advise you that in these circumstances, I take into account the Code to have been breached.”
Rayner, in her resignation letter to Starmer, says: “I deeply remorse my choice to not search further specialist tax recommendation given each my place as Housing Secretary and my complicated household preparations.
“I take full accountability for this error. I want to take this chance to repeat that it was by no means my intention to do something aside from pay the correct amount.”
The Prime Minister, in a handwritten reply, accepted her resignation, including that it was “very unhappy that your time as deputy prime minister, secretary of state and deputy chief of the Labour Party has ended on this method”.
Starmer additionally says that Rayner was “proper” to refer herself to the impartial adviser on ministerial requirements and “proper to behave on his conclusion”.
The Prime Minister is now understood to be making his first main reshuffle since taking workplace in July final yr.
Months earlier than the Hove buy in May, Rayner had put her stake in one other dwelling in Ashton right into a belief that was arrange in 2020 to handle a cost to certainly one of her sons.
