Rayner’s husband expanded home before couple married and had their second child

ANGELA RAYNER’S husband expanded his home to three bedrooms just before the couple married and had their second child, documents show.

Ms Rayner has insisted that she lived primarily at a council house she owned on Vicarage Road, Stockport, and did not reside with her husband. The renovations add further weight to claims the Labour deputy leader was in fact living with her family at her husband’s house.

Police are investigating multiple allegations against Ms Rayner, with at least a dozen officers assigned to the case.

Ms Rayner is facing scrutiny over whether she or her husband paid the right amount of capital gains tax when the two properties they owned simultaneously during their marriage were sold. The question of where she was living is crucial to determining whether she owed any tax, and if she committed electoral fraud.

Building regulation applications seen by The Telegraph show that in February 2009, a loft conversion was completed at Mark Rayner’s Lowndes Lane address. Before the extension, the terraced house had been a two-bedroom property. By this time, Ms Rayner was only months away from giving birth to her third child, James, who was born in June of that year. The Rayners married in September 2010.

Neighbours have said that Ms Rayner’s eldest son, Ryan Batty, moved into the newly created bedroom in the loft and lived there, with the rest of the family, until the house was sold in 2016.

Sylvia Hampson, 83, recalled Ms Rayner living there with her husband and her three children “full-time from about 2009 or 2010”. She said she remembered Ryan “banging away like buggery on his drums that much that it drove me to tears”.

A Labour spokesman said: “Angela has always made clear she also spent time at her husband’s property when they had children and got married as he did at hers.

“They were both perfectly entitled to do so. Gossip and hearsay does not change the fact that the house Angela owned remained her main home.”