Publish and be damned (well, aside from MPs' tax returns)

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.

- JOHN RENTOUL

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.