Angela Rayner‘s lawyers increased the price of her constituency home by over £150,000 after an ‘error was made’, new documents reveal.
The official value of the axed Deputy Prime Minister’s Ashton-under-Lyne house was increased by family lawyers from £487,500 to £650,000 last April, Land Registry papers show, as mystery continues to surround the property’s price.
Fresh doubts have been raised over the valuation under which she sold a stake to her disabled son’s trust to buy a seaside flat in Hove.
She bought the detached house in Greater Manchester for £375,000 in 2016 along with her then husband, Mark, but its £650,000 costing is significantly higher than similar properties in the area.
The documents, uncovered by The Sun, raise further questions about the former housing secretary’s property affairs, after she was forced to resign following a standards report that concluded she broke the ministerial code after underpaying £40,000 of stamp duty on her three-bedroom Hove home.
Ms Rayner’s Ashton property was originally valued at £487,500 in May 2023 but a new document, sent by Swiitch lawyers to the Land Registry, said an error had been made and it only accounted for 75 per cent of its worth.
The documents also contained an apology for the ‘original error’.
Swiitch, a conveyancing firm, said an ‘administrative error was made which bears no wider significance’ when lodging papers with the land registry.
Angela Rayner ‘s lawyers increased the price of her constituency home by over £150,000 after an ‘error was made’, new documents reveal
The former Deputy Prime Minister was axed after she was found to have broken the ministerial code
The new valuation meant the Ashton-under-Lyne MP could sell her 25 stake in the home for £162,500, using the money as a deposit towards an £800,000 flat, her third home, in Hove, East Sussex.
Ms Rayner, who until Friday had access to a lavish grace and favour Whitehall flat in Admiralty House, was under investigation by police over claims she did not pay enough pay Capital Gains Tax on the profit of a previous Stockport home, at the time of the new valuation.
The revelation piles further misery on Ms Rayner, who has faced calls to shun her £17,000 government payoff after quitting.
She could also struggle to pay the mortgage on her new £800,000 home in Hove after having her salary slashed following her departure from Sir Keir Starmer’s Cabinet, it has been reported.
Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake said ‘her resignation does not absolve her of responsibility.
He told The Sun: ‘With the tax authorities already investigating, now is the time for her to be completely transparent about this whole affair and put all the information in the public domain.’
Doubt has been cast on Ms Rayner’s house valuation after it emerged that out of 44 homes sold in the street in the last five years, the most expensive was a semi-detached property which fetched £265,000 – almost £400,000 less.
Meanwhile, the most recent sale of a four-bed detached house within a mile of her property was in May this year, when it fetched £425,000.
An infographic showing the houses prices over the last five years in Angela Rayner’s Ashton-under-Lyne constituency
Ms Rayner could be made to hand over £40,000 to HM Revenue & Customs after admitting she should have paid more stamp duty on her new seaside flat
No property at all outside of Rayner’s street within a one-mile radius has sold for more than £561,000, according to analysis of Rightmove data. Estimates of the four-bed detached house’s current value on property websites range from £565,000 to £637,000.
And a local estate agent told the Daily Mail it could now be worth between £527,000 and £620,000.
Ms Rayner was granted planning permission for an extension in 2021. Typical estimates say an extension could add up to 15 per cent in value.
If the property is worth less than the valuation used by Ms Rayner, it means that were it to be sold, her son risks getting less back than the trust in his name paid his mother.
The trust was set up after a compensation payout from the NHS following difficulties during his birth and subsequent care in 2008.
The red-brick house – described as ‘imposing’ in an estate agent’s brochure when it was marketed for £400,000 in 2016 – is larger than the mainly semi-detached and terraced homes in her street.
Ms Rayner resigned on Friday after it emerged that she bought the seaside Hove property for £800,000 but failed to pay the correct amount of stamp duty, underpaying HMRC by roughly £40,000.
As a result of her ‘carelessness’ she resigned when a report by the Government’s sleaze watchdog found she had broken the Ministerial Code.
Angela Rayner’s seaside property in Hove which she purchased for £800,000 but failed to pay the correct amount of stamp duty on
Sir Keir Starmer wrote Angela Rayner a farewell letter with his own fountain pen on Friday, as she resigned
The three-page handwritten letter from the Prime Minister to Angela Rayner was 268 words long
She also resigned as Housing and Communities Secretary and quit her elected role as Labour’s deputy leader, prompting Sir Keir Starmer to shake up his cabinet.
In a handwritten letter, Sir Keir hailed her as the ‘living embodiment of social mobility’ and told her he was ‘very sad to be losing you’.
The Labour MP will no longer be in receipt of her £161,409 annual salary and will instead be demoted to her basic MP’s pay.
Ms Rayner will now be taking home £93,904 and her £67,505 pay as Housing Secretary will instead be paid to her replacement Steve Reed, MP for Streatham and Croydon North.
She previously revealed she had used her life savings to cobble together a downpayment on her Hove flat.
She also sold her 25 per cent stake in the family home in Ashton-under-Lyne for £162,500 and funneled that in to the £150,000 deposit.
Official documents have revealed she has a £650,000 mortgage on the seaside flat through NatWest.
Her monthly mortgage payments may be as high as £4,000, while her monthly income after tax will only come to £5,400, according to The Telegraph.
The Labour deputy stood down after she was found to have underpaid £40,000 of stamp duty
While serving as Deputy Prime Minister, Ms Rayner also lived in a three-bedroom grace-and-favour flat in Admiralty House (pictured) – which used to be home to Winston Churchill
Ms Rayner referred herself to the independent adviser on ministerial standards, Sir Laurie Magnus, on Wednesday
In contrast her take home pay each month when she was Deputy PM was almost double that at £8,100.
Ms Rayner will now also have to factor in expensive travel costs as she will have to commute to London to appear in the Commons from either Hove or Manchester now she now longer has access to her flat in Admiralty House.
Ms Rayner referred herself to the independent adviser on ministerial standards, Sir Laurie Magnus, on Wednesday, who delivered his report to Starmer on Friday.
Though Magnus concluded that Rayner had ‘acted with integrity and with a dedicated and exemplary commitment to public service,’ he said that ‘with deep regret’ she had breached the ministers´ code of conduct.
He said Ms Rayner was guilty of an ‘unfortunate failure to settle her stamp duty liability’.
Sir Laurie said that although Ms Rayner took legal advice from two separate sources, neither was a tax expert. One warned her that she should seek specialist tax advice but she failed to do so.
As a result she paid around £30,000 in stamp duty on the flat in Hove, rather than the estimated £70,000 that was due if the property was treated as a second home.
Sir Laurie said he accepted Ms Rayner had acted in ‘good faith’. But he said her failure to seek the right advice, coupled with the fact that the truth only came out as a result of ‘intensive public scrutiny’ by the media, meant she had failed to conduct her affairs to the ‘highest possible standards’ required of ministers.
‘I take full responsibility for this error,’ she said in her resignation letter to the Prime Minister.
‘I would like to take this opportunity to repeat that it was never my intention to do anything other than pay the right amount.’
