Sir Keir joins One Percenters with £210k income last year

SIR Keir Starmer’s income was more than £210,000 last year, pushing him into the country’s top 1 per cent of earners.

A day after Rishi Sunak published his tax return, the Labour leader followed suit and revealed his healthy earnings.

Sir Keir received £126,154 for being an MP and Leader of the Opposition in 2021-22, the tax return showed.

And he made capital gains of £85,466, on which he paid £23,930 capital gains tax.

Sir Keir said the earnings were linked to the sale of a house which he helped his sister to buy.

The tax return showed he paid a total of £67,033 in tax, up from £51,547 the previous financial year. Last week, Sir Keir accused Chancellor Jeremy Hunt of prioritising Britain’s richest 1 per cent in his spring Budget, a category into which he now falls.

The Prime Minister’s tax return, released on Wednesday, showed he paid more than £1million in tax to HM Revenue & Customs over the previous three financial years.

Mr Sunak paid £432,493 in tax in 202122, £393,217 in 2020-21, and £227,350 in 2019-20.

Last year his income from dividends was £172,415, with £1.6million from capital gains.

Sir Keir attacked plans unveiled by the Chancellor in last week’s Budget to abolish the tax-free limit of £1.07million on pensions savings. He pledged to reverse the measure if he wins the election during a speech yesterday.

On Wednesday he was accused of ‘hypocrisy’ after it was revealed he is exempt from tax rules due to a deal established under the then Labour government from his time as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP). The ‘tax-unregistered’ scheme means the lifetime allowance does not apply to his contributions while DPP between 2008 and 2013.

During yesterday’s speech in Stoke-on-Trent, Sir Keir said: ‘I am absolutely committed to changing what the Government did last week – let me go further than that. I don’t intend that to exclude me.’

Sir Keir’s civil service pension is understood to not be large enough to incur a tax charge under the pension cap system on its own, and he has not paid into it since 2013.