Angela Rayner, who has all but claimed responsibility for forcing Shabana Mahood’s £10 billion immigration U-turn for the care worker visa route spent less than three years as a carer herself. Despite claiming it was far longer…
Rayner’s intervention against Mahmood has meant that the Home Secretary has dropped plans to extend the amount of time social care workers must stay on the visa to claim settlement. Thanks to Rayner they can still apply after 5 years if they earn at least £25,000, rather than facing the 15-year wait proposed in the consultation…
The Housing Secretary is constantly touted as a “former carer” in the context of her comments, but she has wildly inconsistent career history claims. Which Guido has exposed exclusively…
Rayner’s Who’s Who entry says this of her career: “Home help, private sector and local govt, 1998–2005. Trade union lay activist, 2002–15.” That suggests seven years. The Times notes that “Who’s Who typically asks those it wishes to include to write their own entries”…
Separately Rayner’s personal candidacy website from 2014 describes her as a “trade union official with UNISON.” She says there of her background:
“My first job was as a carer, looking after elderly people in their homes. I stayed in that profession for almost a decade and experienced the conditions that often make headlines today – that’s why I joined a trade union.”
Bizarrely in a 2020 Facebook post on her personal account, Rayner commemorated her election: “Exactly 5 years ago tonight after 14 years service in Local Government as a home care worker l left Stockport Council.” Rayner upgrades her time working as a home help from seven years to 14…
Even more strangely in March of last year, during the furore over the 2015 sale of her council house, Rayner said: “At the time of the sale of the house, I was a home carer and it was my home.” That would put her time as a home help at 17 years…
According to Lord Ashcroft’s biography of Rayner the DPM spent six months as a home help in 1998 – after an 18-month gap during which she was not working as a home help she then joined Stockport Council as a home help. Council records released under FoI confirm that Rayner (or Bowen as she was at the time) was employed as a home help “with employment dates being from August 2000 to 2005.” That’s five years…
Ashcroft’s book concludes the DPM was actually employed as a carer “for just three years or so” because for up to two years of the period between 2000 and 2005 she was in fact a UNISON official working on “facility time.” This is when a union representative is allowed to take paid time off to carry out their trade union role. Ashcroft spoke to a friend of Rayner’s who said she was on facility time from 2002…
It is fitting for a carer who managed only three years in the profession to successfully campaign for foreign workers to get permanent settlement and therefore the right to both exit care work and claim benefits after only five years instead of putting the same amount of time in as everyone else. Brain dead policy…
Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked John Healey: “Just finally, I mean Andy Burnham has been very clear he wants Britain back in the European Union in his lifetime. Do you?”
The Chancellor replied: “I’m older than Andy Burnham. I don’t expect to see that.”