Meeting of the Parliament 06 March 2018
I am always happy to speak on the budget and, once again, I am happy to tell the Tories why they are wrong.
Although the focus today is on local government finance, we also need to look at the wider issues of how we raise revenue and how we spend it. I suspect that most members will argue today that local government should get more money rather than less, although the Conservative policy of cutting or freezing tax would mean that either local government or other sectors would have their funding cut.
We should acknowledge the Green Party’s push on this issue and its agreement with the Government to raise income tax a bit more in order to fund our councils a bit better. However, there is only so far that we can go down that route without killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
Scottish Labour has suggested much higher taxation, but apparently without doing much research, exploring how it would work in practice or having the figures independently checked. It is interesting that a party that supported having an independent Scottish Fiscal Commission that would do the forecasts instead of the SNP Government is not quite so keen on having its own forecasts properly verified.
Assuming that we do not have scope for raising the tax take much more at this stage, parties that want to give more to local authorities presumably want to take that money from other sectors such as the health service.