Angela Rayner has returned the Cabinet under new PM Andy Burnham. (Image: Getty)
Angela Rayner earned more than £180,000 during her year away from the Cabinet, it has been reported. Rayner, who has been the MP for Ashton-under-Lyne MP since 2015, was handed her old job as Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government by Prime Minister and ally Andy Burnham at the start of the week.
Ms Rayner, who had served as deputy PM to Burnham’s predessor Sir Keir Starmer, resigned from Cabinet in September 2025 over a row about her tax affairs. She has since been cleared of any wrongdoing by HMRC. Public disclosures of her financial interests now show she made a small fortune from various engagements since September. The documents, which are shared online, show Ms Rayner raked in £104,000 for 15.45 hours of speeches, including lucrative engagements with the likes of the Management Consultancies Association.
However, she donated £15,000 of these speaking earnings to charity, The Daily Mail reports.
She is currently writing a memoir about her remarkable rise from being a teenage mother to the second in command beside Sir Keir.
The interests log shows she received a £61,500 advance for the book from the publisher The Bodly Head, an imprint of Penguin Random House.
She previously took aim at MPs earning money outside parliament, saying being a Parliamentarian “isn’t a second job”, it is “the job”.
Outside of these secondary earnings, she also received a ministerial exit payment of £16,876, taking the total funds brought in top of her ministerial salary (excluding the charitable donation) to £182,376.
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 pay back her severance package, something she was asked about as she appeared on BBC Radio 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.”
As an MP, Ms Rayner also earns a basic salary of £98,599. She stands to earn more with the addition of ministerial salary following her return to the Cabinet.
A spokesperson for Ms Rayner said: “All earnings have been declared in line with the rules.”