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Plenary, 01 Feb 2006

01 Feb 2006 · S2 · Plenary

Item of business

Council Tax Abolition and Service Tax Introduction (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Lyon, George LD Argyll and Bute Watch on SPTV

I thank Mr Swinney for that intervention, which highlights why we oppose the bill. The taxation level would be decided in the Parliament instead of at the local level.

Mr Sheridan claims that that reduction in the powers of local authorities could be balanced if councils were given the power to set their own business rates. However, nowhere does the bill provide for business rates to be returned to local authority control. The bill would nationalise and centralise local taxation decisions, thereby undermining and disfranchising the 1,200 councillors who rightly take the decisions on local council tax levels.

Throughout the bill, there are errors and omissions. For example, the Executive memorandum on the bill points out that the tax bands that are used in the bill are different from the tax bands in the paper that provided the yield forecasts for the bill. That basic error led to a miscalculation of £192 million in the financial memorandum. I understand that, since then, Mr Sheridan has recalculated the yield forecasts, with a different result. Indeed, since the seven-page financial memorandum was produced, Mr Sheridan has submitted 16 pages of clarifications and corrections to it. There is something wrong with the accounting somewhere. In his policy memorandum, Mr Sheridan is not even certain how many times his proposal has been debated and rejected in the Parliament. A qualified statement in that document refers to four motions in the Parliament, although five dates are cited.

One thing of which Mr Sheridan—and, I think, all of us—can be certain is that Parliament will reject the Scottish socialist tax. Mr Sheridan has at least accepted one thing: regardless of how the Parliament feels about the nine lines in the bill on the council tax, it will want to delete the 104 lines on the Scottish socialist tax. That is Mr Sheridan's great gamble. He wants to use the nine lines that would be left in the bill to delete the council tax, thereby deleting the £2 billion of income that it generates. He gambles that the Parliament would build a consensus on an alternative at stage 2. The Executive will not join him in that gamble. We do not want to risk that £2 billion—and the future of every school, care home, leisure centre and highway in Scotland—on a hope and a hunch.

Mr Sheridan takes a fingers-crossed attitude that admits that the 104 lines on his service tax are expendable; he simply hopes that somehow, somewhere, an alternative will emerge at the Local Government and Transport Committee in the next few weeks. If he was serious, he would recognise that the Scottish service tax is the least popular tax ever to be proposed in the Parliament—it has even less support than the council tax. If he was serious, he would not gamble £2 billion on the least popular tax in the Parliament. He would build consensus and do the work to guarantee money for local government, not gamble away services for young and old alike. He has not done that; therefore, I ask Parliament to reject the Bill.

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Plenary, 01 Feb 2006

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