Rent Guarantee Insurance | That’s rich: new Bank chief’s wife condemned for London rents moan
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Critics attack remarks by Diana Carney, wife of Mark, who will enjoy a near-£5,000 a week housing allowance
The Carney family’s budget of about £4,800 would stretch to a two-bedroom flat in Mayfair or a four-bedroom house in St John’s Wood. Photograph: Luke MacGregor/Reuters Rent Guarantee Insurance
London’s sky-high house prices have been the subject of dinner party laments for years. Now even the wife of the incoming governor of the Bank of England, who has a near-£5,000 a week housing allowance, has been fretting about finding a home in the capital’s overvalued market.
Diana Carney, married to Mark Carney, who will take up the reins at the Bank of England in July, sparked a flurry of criticism about her search for a home in the capital.
Passing on a news story about France scaling back wealth taxes, which are believed to have triggered an exodus of well-heeled Parisians to London, Diana Carney indicated that it might take the heat off the housing market. The British-born Oxford University graduate quipped: “Maybe I’ll be able to find a place to live in London after all.”
Mark Carney, currently governor of the Bank of Canada, will get an annual housing allowance of £250,000 a year, taking his total pay close to £1m, part of a generous package blessed by the chancellor, George Osborne, to lure the Canadian banker to London.
Carney defended his bumper pay deal last month, saying his package was equivalent to the pay and pension of the outgoing governor, Mervyn King.Rent Guarantee Insurance
“The housing allowance relates to the fact that I am moving from one of the cheapest capitals to one of the most expensive capitals,” he told MPs on the Treasury select committee.
The former Goldman Sachs banker will be leaving the affluent neighbourhood of Rockcliffe Park, Ottawa, where he has lived since 2003. In this upscale village, a stately mock Georgian townhouse with five bedrooms, landscaped garden, sauna and fitness rooms is going for $3m (£1.8m). In London’s overheated property market, this would get you a five-bedroom house in Acton, with easy access to the central line – handy for anyone going to Bank.
The Carney family’s weekly budget, about £4,800, would stretch to a two-bedroom flat in Mayfair with views over Green Park, but this is hardly suitable for their household of six. More appropriate might be a four-bedroom house in leafy St John’s Wood going for £19,500 a month.
Labour politicians in London condemned the remarks, which come just as the government is about to cut housing benefit for people deemed to have a spare room, the so-called bedroom tax.
“Even if she is being ironic, the fact is she and her husband are being paid a £5,000 a week subsidy when the very poorest are having £17 a week of public support taken away,” said Paul Dimoldenberg, leader of the Labour group on Westminster council, in the Evening Standard. “Presumably this public subsidy reflects the fact that housing costs in central London are very high. But if it is acceptable to subsidise the governor of the Bank of England how come the very poorest people who already live in central London are being demonised and run out of town?”
Diana Carney is an outspoken development economist, who is vice-president of research at left-leaning thinktank Canada 2020. Under her maiden name, Diana Fox, she runs an eco-products website, where she describes herself as “a multi-tasking mother of four”.
Having described herself as “British by birth and Canadian by choice”, Diana Carney has made it clear she does not intend the move to the UK to be permanent. “Canada is certainly a hard country to leave. But we will be back in 5,” she tweeted in November.
Both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada declined to comment.
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