Angela Rayner purchased a four-bedroom property after she and her husband made almost £200,000 selling their former council houses.
The couple appear to have made around £182,500 after selling two homes they owned in the Stockport area of Greater Manchester in the mid 2010s.
Ms Rayner is facing scrutiny over whether she or Mark Rayner, her husband at the time, paid the right amount of capital gains tax when the two properties were sold.
Despite the couple both selling their homes, Ms Rayner was the sole owner of their new four-bedroom house, bought in 2016.
Ms Rayner sold her council house on Vicarage Road for a gain of £48,500 in March 2015 while Mr Rayner made £134,000, when he sold his in April 2016.
That same month, almost a year after Ms Rayner was elected MP, she purchased a £375,000 property in her new constituency of Ashton-under-Lyne.
The four-bedroom red brick house has three reception rooms, a large secluded garden and two detached garages, according to the Rightmove listing from the time.
The deputy Labour leader sold her house in Vicarage Road for £127,500 in 2015 and, according to official Land Registry documents, bought the property in Ashton-under-Lyme.
On the same day Ms Rayner bought the house, her husband sold his Lowndes Lane home for £145,250, according to Rightmove.
However, despite Mr Rayner being listed on the electoral roll for the property from 2017 along with Ms Rayner and her son Ryan Batty, she is the only proprietor named on official documents. The couple are understood to have separated in 2020.
In 2022, Mr Rayner applied for home rights under the Family Law Act, which prevents one person from being able to sell a house and leave the other homeless.
Greater Manchester Police is investigating whether any offences were committed, and is understood to have spoken to neighbours about Ms Rayner’s living arrangements.
Ms Rayner has repeatedly insisted she has done nothing wrong, but has declined to publish details of her tax affairs. She has said she will “do the right thing and step down” if she is found to have committed a criminal offence.
The Labour Party and Greater Manchester Police have been contacted for comment.
Estate agents would have to go back to school and finish higher education under Labour plans to rid the housing market of cowboys.
Labour’s shadow housing minister Matthew Pennycook has tabled an amendment to incoming housing reforms which would require all estate agents to have at least one A-level and all directors of estate agencies to have an undergraduate degree.
If passed, the rules would need to be enacted within 24 months of the bill becoming law. Some 102 pages of amendments to the 133-page “Leasehold and Freehold Reform Bill” are currently being debated by MPs.
Estate agency trade body Propertymark has long been calling for “a properly regulated industry” where agents can be “trusted and respected” by consumers.
Similar rules are already in place in Scotland. Overseas, countries have even stricter requirements. In Sweden, for example, all estate agents have to have a two-year university qualification. But successive UK governments have resisted calls to regulate England’s agents in the same way.
In 2017, Sajid Javid – then Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government – committed to regulate letting agents. This led to Lord Best’s review in 2019.
It is the recommendations in this review which Mr Pennycook, MP for Greenwich and Woolwich, is now trying to set in motion through the leasehold bill.
He first mentioned Labour’s plans to introduce the recommendations at his party’s annual conference last year.
Policy head at Propertymark, Timothy Douglas, said the rules would apply retroactively. This means all current agents could be forced to return to education if they do not already have the minimum level of qualifications and would likely be given a grace period in which to comply with the new entry requirements.
Mr Douglas said in England, it will work a lot like the transition which saw financial advisers become more qualified back in 2012 under the Financial Conduct Authority’s Retail Distribution Review.
He added: “We want a properly regulated industry where our professional knowledge and skills are trusted and respected. We want to level the playing field for the consumer.
“There really is no oversight by anybody and that’s the fundamental issue. It’s just wrong.”
Lord Best’s review also called for a new regulator to oversee the sales and lettings industry. Currently, estate agents have to be signed up to a redress scheme which mediates complaints between tenants and landlords. If they do not sign up, they face a fine of up to £5,000. Some experts think the fine is too low to incentivise take-up, leading to some rogue landlords sidestepping the regulation.
Reward limits in the schemes are also relatively low. The Property Redress Scheme, for example, does pay out more than £25,000 and it rarely hits that ceiling.
A new regulator would be armed with a new statutory code of practice which would be used to adjudicate against agents and could lead to much larger fines.
In the meantime, National Trading Standards has tightened its guidance for estate agents.
Late last year, it told firms that more details need to be included in property listings and disclosed upfront at viewings in order to avoid buyers discovering “nasty surprises” which can collapse deal chains.
James Munro, of National Trading Standards, said his team will be monitoring property portals such as Right Move, Zoopla and On The Market over the next 12 months to see if the guidance is taken onboard.
Labour will make Britain's housing market more unaffordable than ever
In fairness, Sir Keir grasps that there is a problem with the UK’s hopelessly inadequate rates of house building, and he might even mean it when he talks about relaxing planning restrictions.
The catch is that everything else his party is committed to will keep on driving prices up. First, a Labour government has failed to convince that it will bring down net migration levels. These reached 745,000 in 2022, and places significant pressure on the housing market.
It is hard to see how “safe and legal” routes for asylum seekers can do anything other than make the UK a more attractive destination for anyone fleeing persecution, or, as is too often the case, simply looking for better opportunities in a richer country. Concerns have also been raised about a returns deal with the EU which would involve the acceptance of migrant quotas from the EU in return.
It has kept quiet on student visas, perhaps because academia forms part of its core vote, whilst universities are now too dependent on the foreign applicant gravy train.
There can be little doubt, too, that it will support importing more foreign workers as it throws yet more cash at the health service, and if employers say they need more people then its ministers will instinctively give in. After all, this was the party that started ramping up immigration levels in the early 2000s.
Add it all up, and there is little chance of Labour cutting the number of annual net arrivals, and it would hardly be a great surprise if the figure went above 1 million. In 2022, only 178,000 new houses were completed. Starmer has promised to build 300,000 – still far short of what is necessary.
Next, it might tweak the planning rules, and even ease the restrictions on the green belt, given that very few of its voters live in the leafy suburbs that will be most impacted. But its ideological commitment to net zero targets could mean that it makes little practical difference.
You can’t build new estates when there is no electricity, or when there are not enough reservoirs. Developers will be tied up in red tape – consider, for instance, how Labour failed to support the Government in its plans to scrap nutrient neutrality rules. Yet the Home Builders Federation has estimated this environmental red tape has stopped at least 150,000 homes from being built.
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