Keir Starmer follows Rishi Sunak and publishes tax return
Sir Keir Starmer has published his tax returns, showing he paid £67,000 in tax over the last year.
The Labour leader paid £51,547 in 2020/21 and £67,033 in 2021/22, he said, which is a total of £118,607.
It came just a day after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak published his own tax returns, which revealed he received a total of £4.766m across the years of 2019/20, 2020/21 and 2021/22.
Sunak paid a total of £1.053m in tax – an overall effective tax rate of 22 per cent.
As an MP, Starmer earned £153,873 across the two years he has published, while his salary as leader of the opposition came to £97,976.
He earned £22,378 in self-employment income, relating to his former career as a lawyer, which he gave up on becoming Labour leader, and book royalties.
His income tax total came to £94,650 and he received £85,466 in capital gains from the sale of a house he bought with his sister, on which he paid £23,930.
The publication came after Starmer was criticised for being set to benefit from a tax-free pension scheme which he got access to after his job as director of public prosecutions.
But he has said he would scrap the scheme – and insisted that he never benefitted from it.
Starmer told a press conference today: “I’m absolutely committed to changing what the government did last week, which was to give a tax cut to the wealthiest one per cent. I don’t intend that to exclude me.”