She was given duff advice, found out, corrected it. It's a silly mistake to make because if this is your ministerial brief you'd do well to seek specific tax advice from a couple of different experts, but I'm not sure HMRC would be a source of that advice.
But it now transpires that she took advice from a conveyancing company who had no solicitors working for them, and who explicitly said that any client should make their own arrangements for getting tax advice.
There is also a new development regarding her role as a trustee of the trust fund for her child. It is not clear if she was a trustee, but if she was, she should act in the best interest of the beneficiary of the trust, i.e. her son. Taking money out of the trust fund to buy a share of the house in which the son resides, may not be the best use of that money, if the money was intended to be used to pay for carers and on-going expenses.
Further, the value of the house on which the share transferred was based, was higher than the value of similar houses in the same road - last year, the highest sale price of property in that road was £100,000 less than the valuation used for the transfer. This means that the trust fund may have paid more for an asset than it was worth, again questioning whether this was in the best interests of the son.
She didn't evade it. She avoided it. Very different.
But she seems to have told the Council in Ashton that the Ashton property was her primary residence, and told the Council in Hove that the Hove property was her primary residence. She can't have two primary residences. Doesn't that sound as though she was trying to evade her tax liability (illegal) rather than avoid it (legal)?