Cooper defends Rayner as house row rumbles on

Cooper defends Rayner as house row rumbles on

A shadow cabinet minister has defended Angela Rayner, as the row over her living arrangements before she was an MP continues.

Yvette Cooper said Labour’s deputy leader was keen to “set out all of the facts” as a police inquiry gets going.

It comes after it emerged a former aide told police Ms Rayner lived with her husband, at a time when she was registered as living elsewhere.

Ms Rayner has said she is confident she followed the rules at all times.

Questions have been raised over where she was living before she sold her former house in 2015, and whether it meant she should have paid tax on the profits.

On Friday, Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said they were reopening an investigation into claims she may have falsely registered her address on the electoral roll.

It had previously decided not to investigate, but reversed its decision after reassessing information it had received from Conservative MP James Daly.

Ms Rayner has vowed to resign if she is found to have committed a criminal offence.

Ms Rayner bought her former council house in 2007 under the right-to-buy scheme, and is said to have made a £48,500 profit when she sold it eight years later.

She was registered as living at that house, on Vicarage Road, Stockport, in Greater Manchester, on the electoral roll until the sale in 2015.

But she appears to have given two different addresses when she re-registered the births of two of her children in 2010 following her marriage to Mark Rayner, listing her then-husband’s home on Lowndes Lane.

Which home was her main residence is at the heart of a row over whether she should have paid capital gains tax on the profits from the sale of her property.

Her former staffer Matt Finnegan has now given a statement to GMP claiming to have visited her at the Lowndes Lane property in the summer of 2014, around the time she became a parliamentary candidate.

“There was no doubt in my mind that this was Ms Rayner’s family home, where she lived with her then husband, Mark,” he added in the statement, reported by the Sunday Times.

‘Appropriate authorities’

A Labour spokesperson said she had “always made clear she also spent time at her husband’s property when they had children and got married, as he did at hers. The house she owned remained her main home.”

“Angela looks forward to sitting down with the appropriate authorities, including the police and HMRC, to set out the facts and draw a line under this matter”.

Mr Finnegan, who worked as an adviser to Ms Rayner, later lodged a claim for unfair dismissal, which he withdrew after receiving a payout from the party.

Ms Rayner has said she has received professional advice – commissioned after the row emerged earlier this year – that she owes no tax on the sale of her home.

However, she has resisted calls to publish the advice. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer says he has not seen it, although members of his team have.

Speaking to BBC One’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, shadow home secretary Ms Cooper defended Ms Rayner’s decision not to publish the advice, saying she would share the facts with “the appropriate authorities”.

“This is obviously about her family arrangements, her personal finances, and that’s really how it should be dealt with instead,” she added.

She added that Ms Rayner was “very keen” to speak to the police, and HMRC, because “it allows her to set out all of the facts”.

Speaking to Sky News, she added it was “perfectly reasonable” for Sir Keir not to have seen the advice himself, adding he had a “strong team around him”.