Meeting of the Parliament 28 March 2018
No, not just now. Eleven years down the road, Alex Salmond is a discredited television host, and the discredited council tax is still in place. How can we trust the SNP on local taxation? The changes that it put forward in 2016 merely tinkered around the edges. In evidence to the Local Government and Communities Committee, Professor David Bell said that they did not
“address the concerns ... raised by the commission on local tax reform”
while Kenneth Gibb of policy Scotland described them as “a political fudge”. They did not address the inherent unfairness that people see in local communities and which local MSPs see for themselves in the cases that are frequently raised with them about the council tax’s unfairness.
At the 2016 Scottish elections, Labour proposed to abolish the council tax and replace it with a fairer property tax system based on modelling that was prepared for the commission on local tax reform and which showed that 2 million households—or 80 per cent of all households—would be better off. Surely such a system is much fairer.
Of course, the issue is not just about replacing the council tax but about shifting the balance of power and responsibility and re-empowering local government. In that respect, we have, in recent times, proposed the kind of tourist tax that is used in countries such as France and cities such as Barcelona. This city of Edinburgh receives hundreds of thousands of overseas visitors, particularly during the festival period, and having such a tourist tax makes good economic sense.