What do the tax returns published by Starmer, Rayner and Reeves tell us?

Openness and transparency are good, aren’t they? Not necessarily, says John Rentoul

What did we learn from the tax summaries published on Monday by Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves? Almost nothing that we didn’t know already.

Their salaries as MPs were £77,000 in the 2023-24 tax year. In Starmer’s case, he received an extra £49,000 as leader of the opposition. These figures are already public.

The only new information was the amount of interest they each earned on their savings. In Rayner’s case, nothing. In Reeves’s case, £64, implying savings of about £2,000. Starmer, by contrast, reported £5,174 in interest. If that was from a National Savings Direct Saver account, it would mean he had about £150,000 in it.

Is that not the sort of amount that you might expect for someone who had been paid about £200,000 a year as director of public prosecutions for five years? And even that tells us little. He (and Rayner and Reeves) could have other savings in tax-free ISAs.

Some of my fellow journalists were interested in the declarations of “other benefits”. These were the donations of clothes that had already been made public in the register of MPs’ financial interests. It hadn’t occurred to me that these would be taxable, but of course they were.

And that is about it. Reeves received £12,000 for her book on female economists, some of which she wrote herself. Starmer had £500 in royalties, having written legal books more than two decades ago, including European Human Rights Law: The Human Rights Act 1998 and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Grateful as I am for having been prompted to look up Starmer’s author page on Amazon, I am doubtful that the public interest has been served by this use of the billable hours of the firm of chartered accountants hired by the prime minister, the deputy prime minister and the chancellor in preparing this information, or of the less-well-paid time of the civil servants who uploaded these summaries to the government website.

Dan Neidle, the Labour-supporting former tax lawyer, commented yesterday: “I wish politicians would stop publishing bowdlerised summaries of their tax returns and claiming they’ve published their tax returns. They haven’t.”

I disagree. I wish politicians would stop publishing their tax information altogether.

It is an American import that we can do without. In the United States, the focus on the character and biography of the candidates for the presidency is so intense that it became the convention that they must publish not only their tax returns but the results of a medical examination.

Until last year – when guess which candidate failed to publish either? In August 2024, Donald Trump said he would “gladly” share his medical records, but he did not do so. Neither he nor JD Vance published their tax returns, either, despite Kamala Harris publishing hers for the previous 20 years along with the results of her medical.

We British only ended up following the pre-Trump American precedent because Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone got into an on-air scrap in a TV debate in the London mayoral election campaign of 2012. Livingstone accused Johnson of avoiding tax by channelling his earnings from books through a company. It turned out, when they both published their tax summaries, that this was something Livingstone did and Johnson did not. It was one of the greatest own goals of election campaign history.

There was much interest at the time in the personal wealth of David Cameron and George Osborne, and later on in the even greater wealth of Rishi Sunak and his wife, after The Independent revealed Akshata Murty’s non-dom tax status.

But none of their tax returns (sorry, Dan Neidle, “summaries”) revealed anything relevant to their holding public office, which ought to have been declared separately in any case.

The demand for politicians to “publish their tax returns” is like the demand for public inquiries. They are both based on two assumptions: one, that damning secrets are being withheld; two, that publication (or an inquiry) will expose them. The first may or may not be true, but the second definitely isn’t.

Tax returns contain partial information or none at all about tax-free savings, trusts or funds held abroad. Ever since British politicians have been intermittently expected to publish them, they have contained nothing of interest. Anything embarrassing has been made public by journalists or by voluntary disclosure in registers of MPs’ or ministers’ interests.

My view remains that either everyone’s tax return should be published, as in Norway and Finland, or no one’s. Transparency for everyone is a bracing idea, although it is worth knowing that in Finland, where they are proud of their openness, the day when the previous year’s tax information is published is known as “National Envy Day”.