Angela Rayner has defended accepting a nearly £17,000 severance payment when she resigned from Government last year, after returning to Cabinet as Andy Burnham’s Housing Secretary.
Ms Rayner received the payment after resigning in September 2025 from her role as housing secretary, deputy prime minister, and deputy Labour Party leader over a row about her tax affairs. HMRC has since cleared her of wrongdoing, and she returned to Government on Monday to oversee housing once again.
In her first major broadcast interview since her return, Ms Rayner defended not returning the £16,876 severance payment she received when she resigned.
When in opposition, she was a fierce critic of Conservative ministers who received the lump sum – the equivalent of a quarter of an annual ministerial salary – for only a few weeks’ work during the chaotic period of multiple reshuffles between the premierships of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.
The Conservatives have urged Ms Rayner to now pay back her severance package, something she was asked about as she appeared on BBC 5 Live on Thursday.
Asked if she would heed the calls from the Tories, she told the broadcaster: “No, my severance payment was given to me at the time. I’d worked in Government for a period of time, and then I came out of Government for just under a year, I think is the timetable, and I’ll be delivering in Government again.
“But on the Conservatives who took their severance, we’re talking weeks. Some of them were even a very short period of the time, and I think that chaos and that wider point about delivering for the British people is what we’re focused on, is not having that chaos, not looking like we’re in it for ourselves, but actually delivering on the promises that we made in 2024 in that general election.”
During the interview, the Housing Secretary was also asked if she believed Mr Burnham had made prominent enemies within the Labour Party by purging several high-profile allies of Sir Keir Starmer from frontline Government jobs.
Former housing secretary Steve Reed issued a stinging rebuke of Mr Burnham’s decision to sack him in a letter he shared on social media on Monday; while Darren Jones, Sir Keir’s ex-chief secretary, has called into question the funding behind Mr Burnham’s plans to scrap VAT on energy bills.
Ms Rayner insisted Labour was united, telling the programme: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an orderly way in which the Parliamentary Labour Party came together to say, you know what, we’re not going to pull lumps out of each other. That’s undignified. That’s what we saw the chaos under the Conservatives.
“We are going to get on, roll our sleeves up and deliver for the British people. And that’s what Andy said. He wants a different culture. I welcome that. I absolutely welcome that. And that we can work to deliver for the British people.”
Elsewhere, Ms Rayner described her time on the Labour backbenches as a period of reflection, which had allowed her to understand the cost-of-living pressures facing her constituents, and what they wanted from Government.
She told the BBC: “It was also a period of reflection on, we need to do things properly, quickly, and really drive that change forward because people are really frustrated with the cost of living and just feeling like life is just really hard.
“I think the messages out of Government was, ‘oh, it’s really hard, it is all really difficult’, and people know that, but people wanted a bit of hope.”
