Meeting of the Parliament 03 February 2016
I am only helpfully going to dismantle Labour’s proposals, so they should be quiet and listen.
If the rebate is a tax relief, it is outside the powers of the Scottish Parliament in relation to income tax, as conferred by the Scotland Act 2012. If it is a social security payment, that is outside the competence of the Parliament, as defined in the original Scotland Act 1998.
Further evidence that the proposal is not properly thought through is provided by the lack of clarity about how it would be administered and, in particular, how it could be done within the £75 million that has been allocated for the proposal by Labour. An estimated 1 million taxpayers—workers and pensioners—could be eligible for the £100 rebate, which would cost £100 million. That is more than Labour has budgeted for the rebate, which does not even meet the needs of individuals within our society.
The second problem is that on top of that would be the costs of setting up and operating administrative systems by 32 local authorities across Scotland. We know already that it costs local authorities many millions of pounds to administer help with council tax bills, for which authorities already have a lot of information about the circumstances of claimants.
Thirdly, the rebate payment is likely for tax purposes to be counted as income, and so those who receive it would be liable to pay tax on it. It does not seem to me to be too much to expect that those who propose policies of this kind have at least considered those issues, but there seems to be little evidence that that has happened.
The only conclusion we can draw is that it is unlikely that anyone would receive the rebate on the basis of the proposition that Labour has offered to the people of this country.