Sir Keir Starmer rakes it in after ‘selling green-belt land for £400k’

Sir Keir Starmer sold seven acres of green-belt land for an estimated £400,000 just a day before travellers set up an unauthorised caravan site on an adjoining field.

The Labour leader bought the plot behind his parents’ former home for an undisclosed sum in 1996 and apparently made a huge profit when he sold it earlier this month.

Local residents watched aghast as lorries arrived to put down hardcore and asphalt for three mobile homes the following day.

There is no suggestion that Sir Keir knew anything about the travellers’ site in advance of the sale of his plot.

Labour Party leader Sir Kier Starmer speaks to members of the media as he visits Wakefield during campaigning ahead of the by-election on June 13

But the buyer, councillor David Stamp, 37, who runs a chain of garages and a second-hand car business, told The Mail on Sunday: ‘We would not have bought the land if we had known about the travellers. The timing could really not have been any worse.’

The mobile home pitches were built without planning consent on what used to be an exercise area for horses behind the semi-detached house where Sir Keir grew up in Oxted, Surrey.

Land Registry records reveal that Irish traveller Michael Joseph Moloney paid £300,000 for the plot adjoining Sir Keir’s land in July last year.

Mr Moloney said it was just ‘a coincidence’ that he had put mobile home pitches on his land the day after the sale. He said a planning application was being submitted for his site.

He said: ‘It’s definitely not linked. We are nothing to do with that. I saw it was on the market, but we have our family land here. We have enough space . . . He made a good price for it though, didn’t he?’

The Mail on Sunday revealed in May 2020 how Sir Keir had bought the land while he was working as a human rights lawyer.

His spokesman insisted at the time that he had bought it for his parents and that they had used the field to house donkeys that they had rescued.

Residents likened the sudden development of the travellers’ pitches to ‘a military operation’.

Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer visits an on-shore wind farm near Grimsby in Lincolnshire where the Labour leader announced he will expand on the Party’s plan for clean power by 2030

One said: ‘There were proper construction crews working all day long on the site, flattening the ground, putting down foundations for the pitches and digging trenches for cables.’

Another local said: ‘It was a complete shock and was clearly well planned. The council was informed and the council leader and a local councillor came at 11am to see what was going on.

‘They returned at 3pm with the council’s legal head, and issued them with notices to stop, but it didn’t change anything. The travellers ended up blocking off the main road to traffic so they could bring their mobile homes up the track on the back of huge lorries. There was nothing anybody could do to stop it.’

Mr Stamp confirmed he hoped to keep a pony for his ten-year-old daughter on the land which he had bought jointly with his partner Poppy Mitchell.

A Tandridge District Council spokesman said: ‘On December 10 an unauthorised caravan site was set up on a field off Tanhouse Road in Oxted.

‘A council officer and Oxted ward councillors visited the site twice over the weekend. On December 11 the council served a temporary stop notice alleging there had been a breach of planning control on the site. Copies of the notice were fixed to the site. The notice remains in place for 28 days.’