House about this for Tory hypocrisy
Conservatives can’t stop banging on about Labour Angela’s home claims... but this lot won’t even say if they paid tax on the millions in profit on sales of property we helped them buy
FOUR Tories have declined to reveal whether they paid tax on a total £5million profit from the sale of public-funded homes.
It comes after Rishi Sunak’s party hounded Labour MP Angela Rayner claiming she owed capital gains tax on a house sale in 2015.
The quartet have now been accused of hypocrisy for pushing police to probe deputy Labour leader 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 £1500.
The party did not respond to requests for comment on the 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 Tredinnick, 69, sold his property in London for £2.8million, when he was still in the Commons, making an estimated profit of £2million. 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 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”. He was contacted several times through his accountants in recent days but gave no response. Laing, the MP for Epping Forest and Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, made about £1.6million selling three taxpayer-funded London apartments. In 2009, she revealed she had not paid capital gains tax when she reportedly made a more than £1million profit selling the first two, adjacent apartments which she had designated her second home. 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 Laing made a £575,000 profit when she sold it for £1.5million 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.
Laing was contacted four times in recent weeks and asked if she paid
The hypocrisy is off the scale. They refuse to say if their own Mps paid tax on profits jess phillips labour MP, right, on tory double standards
any capital gains tax but gave no response.
North West Cambridgeshire MP Vara made £1.6million profit selling the townhouse taxpayers helped him buy in Pimlico, London.
He paid £1.2million for the home and sold it for £2.8million. We also contacted Vara four times but got no answer.
Basingstoke MP and former Culture Secretary Miller made a £1.2million 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, Miller sold the Wimbledon home for £1.47million and now claims for hotels when in the capital. Asked whether she paid any capital gains tax on the £1.2million 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.” The investigation 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.
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 Rayner should “stop dismissing and distracting and come clean now”. Protesters who followed Rayner on a visit to Yorkshire with a “Tax Dodger” banner were later revealed to be local Tory councillors. Rishi Sunak told 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 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.”