Meeting of the Parliament 04 February 2026
Just a minute. I have not got to the punchline yet. [Laughter.] There is a punchline.
Then, there is a ministerial reshuffle, and the next innocent soul comes in and tries all over again to excite us about the proposals. They say, “Tell us what you want to do.” We then go through the whole thing over and over. I think that I went through three rounds like that.
I am serious when I say this: when ministers say that they are up for reform, frankly, I do not believe them. I do not think that they really want to do it, and I do not think that they will ever do it. I would rather that they were just honest about that and adopted the Conservative position. The Conservatives, to be fair, have been honest about this from the beginning: they want to hold on to the post-Thatcherite tax regime. They are quite keen on it and on the fact that it is 35 years old. They like that. They like the fact that the valuations are stuck way in the past. They like all that, because they are conservatives.
The SNP should just be honest that it favours that as well, because it is too scared to change anything. I get that change is hard. Change is really difficult, but the SNP has not changed things one jot. It has tinkered at the top end and made itself feel virtuous by changing the tax for the upper bands. However, in reality, that has not changed anything for local government, which has not been given a proper settlement that respects its needs so that it can pay for the public services that we demand of it.
I just hope that ministers will take that away and either stop pretending that they are trying to change things or give us something serious. We have had commissions, talks, reviews, expert groups and the wonderful citizens assembly that died a death almost before it started. Let us do something serious if we are serious about reform.
Craig Hoy and the cabinet secretary were talking past each other about whether the 2026-27 settlement represents an increase or a reduction in funding for local government. They were both right, to some extent, because the cabinet secretary was looking to the past and Craig Hoy was looking to the future. However, the central bit of it is that the cabinet secretary said that Craig Hoy was referring to the spending review figures and not the budget figures. Does that mean that the spending review figures are not accurate and that the figures will go up? Will the cabinet secretary tell us that and whether it is guaranteed?