Meeting of the Parliament 07 January 2026
I always welcome the chance to debate the tax system and how to make it fairer, and I am proud of the Green record in achieving that. Our 2016 manifesto proposals became the basis of the five-band income tax system that Scotland adopted. We set the tipping point at which people should start paying a little more tax at roughly the average full-time salary, largely because we thought that people would see that as fair. The system has been tweaked a bit since then, but the six-band system that is now in place continues the same direction of travel, even if we think that it could go further. Although the SNP has relied too much, to my liking, on the argument that most people pay a bit less tax—which I think implies an acceptance of the right-wing framing of tax being a bad thing—it has continued to ensure that Scotland’s income tax system follows a progressive direction, with those who can afford to pay more doing so, because the alternative is cuts to services that fall heaviest on those who have the least.
In the 2025-26 budget, Scotland’s tax changes generated around £1.7 billion extra for public services, so Scottish tax policy unquestionably protects the services that are needed by those who do not enjoy high incomes and makes possible groundbreaking initiatives such as the Scottish child payment.
Let us compare all of that with the Tory plan for £1.1 billion in tax cuts. That is equivalent to the budget of the entire rural affairs, land reform and islands portfolio going in a oner. If the Tories do not want to scrap that, they might say that they prefer cuts to social security, so they could do away with the Scottish child payment—an internationally recognised initiative that is the single most successful measure that we have for cutting child poverty. However, no—sorry, but that would not be enough. It would not even meet half the cost of the Tory black hole.
How about cutting the affordable housing supply programme? That would get us closer. Scrapping that would save £768 million, leaving only a third of a billion of other cuts still to find, and I am sure that the Tories think that leaving people at the mercy of unregulated private landlords would be a reasonable alternative to delivering affordable housing.
However, it is not just the cuts that the Tory plan would rely on that nauseate me. My issue is also about who gets the benefit. From the changes that are set out in the motion alone, we can see that the plan would benefit a young full-time worker on the minimum wage by something like £40 a year. Someone on a wage that is closer to an average income of £25,000 might save something like £100 a year. I am sure that that little bit of extra cash would be welcome to people on those incomes and that, if they were very lucky, their landlord would not just hike the rent and take it straight back off them again. However, let us look at someone on twice that income: £50,000. By my calculation, they would save something like £440 a year, and Craig Hoy suggests that that figure could be up to more than £600 a year. That same £600-a-year saving would go to people on 60, 80 or 100 grand a year under the plan. For someone on such high incomes, 400 quid or 600 quid a year is nothing. They would not even notice the difference.
A case can be made for cutting income tax further for low earners and for people on middle incomes, but it can be made only if we ensure that the high earners and the wealth owners are the ones paying for it. The Tory plan gives high earners the biggest tax cuts and pays for it all by slashing the public services that are most relied on by the least wealthy. That is no surprise from the Conservatives—it is their natural instinct—but it would be bad for our society and bad for our economy, and it would be a fundamentally uncivilised policy.
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