Rayner home row needs full inquiry, says former standards boss

A FORMER head of the standards watchdog has called for a full police investigation into the tax row surrounding the sale of Angela Rayner’s council house a decade ago.

Sir Alistair Graham, who chaired the committee for standards in public life between 2003 and 2007, welcomed the decision last week by Greater Manchester Police to look again at whether Ms Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, breached electoral law a decade ago.

The issue concerns the amount of tax Ms Rayner should have paid when she sold her home in Stockport, Greater Manchester, in 2015 and if she should have been liable for capital gains tax based on her primary residence at the time.

Police said in March that Ms Rayner would not face an investigation but James Daly, a deputy Conservative Party chairman, complained officers had not considered relevant documents or contacted witnesses.

Sir Alistair told the Mail on Sunday: “There clearly should be a full police investigation of the allegations.

“And of course if it’s found she has breached the law then her political position becomes pretty untenable, particularly as she’s continued to deny that she’s breached the law in any way.”

Dame Priti Patel, a senior Conservative MP and former home secretary, accused Ms Rayner of a “new level of double standards” in light of her regular previous calls for several scandal-hit Tory politicians to resign.

Ms Rayner has denied any wrongdoing, referring to the row as a “manufactured” attempt to “smear” her and insisting “there was no capital gains tax to pay” on her property.

At a press gallery lunch in Westminster last month, she said confusion around her supposed “two homes” had resulted from her family “trying to look out for each other” at a difficult time while she spent eight months in intensive care with her baby son.

And in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Ms Rayner said she had received tax and legal advice which made her “confident that I’ve done absolutely nothing wrong”.

She went on to say she would only yield to demands from her political opponents to publish the advice if the likes of Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, were to follow suit.

She said: “I don’t think we are going down the road of MPS, whenever somebody says, ‘Well, what is happening with your capital gains tax,’ we want to see all the information and detail.

“If we are, I’m happy. If we are all going to have a level playing field… You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” While Ms Rayner is understood to have handed the advice over to Labour and party officials have since examined it line by line, she has refused to publish it “because that’s my personal tax advice”.

Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, used a press conference at the party’s local election campaign launch to back her decision not to publish the advice.

The claim originated in Red Queen?, an unauthorised biography of the deputy Labour leader by Lord Ashcroft, a former Tory peer.