Angela Rayner has purchased an £800,000 seaside apartment in Hove, which will be a third home for the deputy prime minister.
Critics called on Ms Rayner to answer questions about the properties she owns and where she pays council tax after she purchased the property.
Shadow housing secretary James Cleverly said: “Angela Rayner is responsible for housing policy, yet she won’t even be straight about her own.”
“Time and again she’s been asked to declare exactly what properties she owns and where she pays council tax, and time and again she’s dodged those questions,” he told The Mail on Sunday.
He added: “We’ve done everything possible to get answers, but she still refuses to come clean. That matters, because this is the same deputy prime minister who’s hiked taxes on family homes across the country. If she’s not prepared to be open about her own affairs while taxing everyone else, the public will wonder what she has to hide.”
Ms Rayner divides her time between a £350,000 home in her constituency near Manchester and her central London grace-and-favour flat at Admiralty House in Whitehall.
The row over the purchase of her latest property comes as she prepares to levy an extra 100 per cent council tax charge on second homes.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice said: “Rayner is the Everest of hypocrisy. She laments a housing shortage, wants to soak the rich, whilst selfishly building her own property mountain.”
Ms Rayner has encountered scrutiny over the properties she owns on a number of occasions, and this latest episode follows a row in 2024 that centred on her living arrangements more than a decade ago.
The deputy Labour leader faced claims that she may have broken electoral law and dodged capital gains tax and council tax in relation to the 2015 sale of her council house in Stockport, and questions were raised as to whether she had provided false information about her main address during the 2010s.
HM Revenue and Customs said it would take no action against the deputy Labour leader, finding that she owed no capital gains tax for the sale.
Ms Rayner said the row about council tax was a “deliberate smear”, adding: “It was frustrating. There’s been a number of times where I felt that, whether it was misogyny or this, which I felt was difficult on a personal level.”
The Telegraph reported that Ms Rayner has been seen at the three-bedroom flat in Hove with her partner, former Labour MP Sam Tarry, since May.
