To think that surely Rayner has to go.

[Blankscreen]

Well well well.

So now it emerges that Rayner rearranged her property affairs and declared to HMRC that her new flat in Brighton is her main residence and saved £40k on the SDLT bill as a result.

She has then apparently declared to the local councils the complete opposite.

I'm sure slimeball Kier will defend and say it was perfectly legal blah blah blah.

Not to mention she has a grace and favour house funded by tax payers in London as her constituency office is so far away. Yet she 'lives' in Brighton - surely she could just commute that distance like may others do every day.

Surely she has to go.

Although, as she ostensibly has the use of three properties she should,per parliamentary rules, be paying for two. Now, of course, as she doesn’t own the house in the constituency she has no obligation to pay. But then whey claim it as her primary residence for council tax, if not so that we the tax payer pick up the tab for Admiralty House.

The thing that makes me chuckle is that, were this a Tory MP the the left would be throwing around the ‘loophole’, ‘evasion’ and ‘hypocrisy’ insults. But as it’s a Labour one then it’s all ‘nothing to see here’.

As I have said a few times on this thread, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. And, it’s not yet entirely clear that the parliamentary expenses rules allow what she has done.

And that’s before we look at the ‘loophole’ of IHT avoidance by transferring her share of a property into a trust. The use of trusts was berated by her in opposition. I believe she said that the public I were furious about it!

A couple of things. She hasn’t sold her stake in the constituency property, she’s transferred it into trust to avoid IHT.

And, if the flat in Brighton becomes her primary residence, which would make sense, she would have to pay council tax there and in London. Because parliamentary rules covering council tax are there to make sure that MPs do not have to pay council tax in London and their constituency. They are not there to cover council council tax on a holiday home. If one doesn’t have a constituency home then one should be paying the council tax in London. It’s difficult to claim that the flat in Brighton is a constituency home, surely? It would seem like a convenient bending of the rules to avoid council tax.

Again, just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

She did and also posted these

The irony of her putting a house into trust fund for her kids so they can inherit? Posters on here defending her whilst berating others on MN for doing the same. Several have previously said they want 100% IHT and no-one has the right to inherit. Surely they should apply the same principles to their own politicians?

If any one of us popped up to ask how to do that we would have shreds torn off us.

We see women protecting their kids’ interests all the time. It’s a way of protecting their inheritance in the event of her ex remarrying. It’s recommended here all the time. It’s like some people want special standards for Rayner - I wonder why that could be? 🤔

She could protect her children’s interests and pay IHT of course, given her views on the use of trusts to manage tax exposure.

Her IHT planning is not illegal, or evasion. But you can guarantee that when she was in opposition if this behaviour had been exposed about a Tory MP then she would have been very vocal in her opposition to it.

It seems as if the left are far more forgiving of the legitimate use of tax planning tools now they are in power than they were in opposition. I wonder why that could be? 🤔

Indeed. It's interesting how Labour are hard core socialists until they get a bit of money and then do exactly like those they critique .. using wealth protection firms, tax advisors .. to avoid tax and retain wealth. True colours of a hypocrite.

That's my issue with them. Phillipson even had a go at Sunak for the type of coffee he drinks when she was in opposition.

She doesn’t own any part of the constituency property so how is putting it in trust IHT planning? She’s just bought a flat costing £800k, there’d be about £160k IHT to pay on that if she dropped dead tomorrow.

Well no, she doesn’t own it now. Because her share was transferred into a trust for her children. Seems clear enough to me. It’s now owned by the trust. All legitimate IHT planning of course. But, in opposition she was against any sort of trusts when used by others…

Edited to add: and, while occupied by her ex husband, it still manages to be her primary residence for council tax.

You’re assuming that the trust isn’t to protect her kids’ inheritance. It’s perfectly normal to divide assets on divorce so why you think this is tax avoidance is beyond me. By nominating the constituency house as her main residence for council tax she’s paying 200% council tax in Hove - doesn’t look like very effective tax planning to me.

How can you put something in a trust if you didn’t own it? She must have owned part of it to put her part in a trust?

So when her kids get older if they want to buy a property for tax etc purposes they
can’t be classed as first time buyers
must pay second property tax
and
will have to pay capital gains tax for the period after they move out
Wonder what she’ll do to avoid her kids paying tax when that time comes around
Shes probably ready for that tax dodge too though

As I understand it she put part of her share of the equity into a trust for the children a year or 2 ago

Her remaining share of the equity was presumably then used as the deposit on the flat in Hove this year

Let me make it clearer.

Yes, splitting assets on divorce is normal. No one said it wasn’t.
The trust protects her children’s inheritance, and avoids IHT. The former could be achieved without the latter. But she chose the low tax option. Which is sensible, except
…She has been vocally anti tax avoidance in the past, even when using legitimate tax planning tools. She’s now using them. That’s legal, but hypocritical and she’s been called out on it. Labour supporters don’t like this for some reason…

You are correct about the flat in Brighton, she is paying what she’s obliged to pay.
Nominating a house she neither owns nor lives in as the primary residence for council tax seems, to say the least, unusual.
The rules around parliamentary expenses allow for us, the tax payer, to cover either the council tax in the London residence or the council tax for a constituency one. The MP can choose which.
By nominating a house she neither owns or lives in but that is in her constituency as her primary residence for council tax she is able to claim the council tax for the flat in London.
As she doesn’t have a house in her constituency, she should be paying the council tax in London, and in Brighton.
She’s avoiding the couple of £k a year on the London one.

Hopefully that’s clearer :)

And as a side note, the use of a trust is very good tax avoidance. Fiddling around with council tax is not. Especially given the amount of negative press it’s received. Hardly the mark of an astute politician, and forgive me but I’d rather have an astute politician than a grasping one. Your views may vary.

lets be honest I think there an enormous amount of of people who would find creative ways to avoid paying any more tax than the minimum

but the thing is Angela raynor has spent years very publicly slagging people of for avoiding tax and taking freebies calling them scum of the earth and she’s as bad as the rest of them well worse because of the hypocrisy

😂

Angela Rayner has built her career on this being very vocal about the unfairness of society that the wealthier become wealthier through such ways of dodging tax

all of which I agree with as so many people do

this is the issue if she was an MP that wasn’t so vocal about such issues yes it would have been in the press but she couldn’t be called out for hypocrisy just another MP who finds a way to

i doubt the left of the party will be supporting her they don’t take kindly to so called socialist taking advantage of such tax dodging

No because the Trust owns 50% of the property. They will be beneficiaries of the Trust.

What’s funny about that? Other than your aversion to facts?

The irony of her putting a house into trust fund for her kids so they can inherit? Posters on here defending her whilst berating others on MN for doing the same. Several have previously said they want 100% IHT and no-one has the right to inherit. Surely they should apply the same principles to their own politicians?

Of course. In the unlikely event that a 100% IHT rate were ever enacted, she would have to conform to it just like everyone else. That's not a reason why, in the absence of that, she should have to behave as if such a regime existed!

There are all kinds of laws I think should be different from the ones we have. But I don't go around obeying the imaginary laws in my head; I obey the actual laws that exist. This is a really ridiculous line of criticism.

I'm wondering how all this sort of stuff (edit) will tie the governments hands in terms of policy.

After all, if it is implementing stuff that ends up benefiting certain people significantly then it's going to end up as a PR disaster.

As someone said earlier, Tucker would go crazy.

Indeed. Her sensible tax avoidance helps her children avoid tax in the future. Never mind that those with the broadest shoulders should bear the highest burden. Castigating others for years while in opposition for using legitimate tax planning tools, only to start using them, or indeed, given that the trust in question appears to have been established in 2023, to have been using them at the, time stinks.

For a government that said it’d clean up politics they seem to have made little progress. Still of course, the hard working union supporter has made sure she’s alright ;)

I am also sure that the Labour shills will be along to wail that the questioning of this sort of behaviour is all a nasty, organised smear by the right. But the reality is that none of us of a centre-ist left or right persuasion like to see open hypocrisy in those that make the rules for us. Others might have different standards of course.

The whole thing about how she's obeyed the letter of the law but not the spirit is great because it means Tories can attack her no matter what, "spirit" being such an indefinable and subjective thing. We had exactly the same thing during Partygate. Johnson actually broke the law, was confirmed upon investigation as having done so, so was criticized for it. Starmer didn't, he just happened to be photographed drinking a beer in a context that was confirmed upon investigation to be within the law. Yet we had people on here swearing blind that it was "the same" - like Starmer should have known in advance exactly what their personal interpretation of the point behind the law would be, and made sure he obeyed that.

Laws exist for a reason, and there's a reason why they're drafted by highly trained and highly paid professionals in complex language to account for varieties of circumstance - because peoples' personal feelings about right and wrong are loose, contradictory and subject to being politically weaponised.

Imagine if our legal system actually worked that way: so being found guilty of murder was the same thing as being innocent but having a bunch of people feel that you'd done something just as bad anyway. 😆

Actually I'm not convinced she's broken the spirit of any law anyway. She's worked normally within the framework that applies to all MPs. If you don't like it, agitate to get it changed - for all MPs.

It’s not going to save her children tax on her Hove property. They’d have to pay £160k if she dropped dead tomorrow. And she’s paying 200% council tax on it too. That looks like pretty inept tax dodging to me.

Would her motivation more likely be that they were getting divorced, exh couldn’t easily afford to buy her out, she didn’t want to create loads of upheaval and stress for the kids by forcing her ex to move house, so this is a good compromise? Presumably the trust will have some rules that mean her ex can care for the kids in that house for a defined period. And effectively has she not gifted a huge sum of money to her kids at a pretty young age, so she will now not have access to that money? I think she sounds like a good mum and practical and thoughtful human being.

Ive no idea if this is the case but I like Angela Rayner a lot and this is a different perspective!

According to the "letter" of the law Rayner has not done anything wrong in the legal sense. Indeed if she were an ordinary individual I would probably think "good for her" for arranging her financial affairs so that she pays as little tax as possible. However she is a prominent putblic figure in a party whereby the PM gave an undertaking to end sleaze. In a time when many ordinary people are struggling it is the look of the thing which matters most. This is not a good look.