Meeting of the Parliament 26 November 2025
I will make a wee bit more progress, before perhaps giving way to the member later.
As members know, the Scottish Parliament voted in 2020 to devolve empty property relief to local authorities in order to provide greater local fiscal empowerment for councils by letting them, rather than Scottish Government, decide whether to offer any rates discounts to the owners of unoccupied properties.
To do that, a Government amendment at stage 2 of the Non-Domestic Rates (Scotland) Bill in 2019, approved on a cross-party basis at committee, repealed legislation from 1966 that provided that no rates were payable on unoccupied properties, and also repealed a power that allowed ministers to prescribe by regulation classes of unoccupied property for which such rates were payable.
Empty property relief was devolved on 1 April 2023 and local authorities were given £105 million of additional revenue funding each year, equal to the forecast cost of that relief before it was devolved. Councils, which are accountable to their local electorate, have full flexibility over how they deploy those extra resources locally.
However, a technical error in the Non-Domestic Rates (Scotland) Act 2020 was recently identified that means that the amendments did not have the intended legal effect. Although section 19(2) of the 2020 act repealed section 24 of the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1966, which stated that no rates were payable for unoccupied non-domestic property, the effect of section 16(1) of the Valuation and Rating (Scotland) Act 1956, which sets out that rates shall by payable by occupiers only, was regrettably not taken into account.
In the interest of transparency, I can inform members that a routine inquiry about the basis for rates to be charged to the owner of unoccupied properties was received from a council by Scottish Government officials on 23 June. There was no indication at that time of the implications of the query and it was treated as routine.
In investigating the issue, it became apparent to Scottish Government officials that there might have been an error in the 2020 legislation. Initial concerns were notified to ministers on 21 August, and that concern, following further investigation and legal advice, was confirmed to ministers on 19 September.