Meeting of the Parliament 19 February 2015
We have been against the bill from the beginning. We have been critical of the way in which it was announced and the lack of consultation. We are against the bill in principle and we are concerned about the pragmatic aspects that could flow from it.
I will first deal with the point that I tried to make in an intervention on the minister. The Government tries to paint the bill as some kind of high-minded safety measure that it has to bring in to protect democracy and the electoral roll. It says that people should feel free to register without the fear of being chased for tax. However, what the Government does not say is that that applies only to the community charge. If councils want to use the expanded electoral roll to chase up council tax debts that have existed for 17, 18 or 19 years, that apparently is okay with the Government. Indeed, the finance secretary is enthusiastic about councils using their powers and the expanded electoral roll to chase up old council tax debts.
The narrative behind the bill of it being about protecting democracy falls somewhat short when it applies only to one tax debt but not to another tax debt that could be decades old. In years gone by, the Scottish National Party in particular has been pretty aggressive about the council tax and has said some pretty unpleasant things about it, which are pretty close to what it has said about the community charge. It was all very different, of course, a couple of weeks ago, when the finance secretary was praising the council tax and said on the record that it
“is linked to ability to pay”.—[Official Report, 29 January 2015; c 73.]
That is in stark contrast to what many SNP members said in the last parliamentary session, where we can find a whole plethora of quotations about how awful they felt the council tax was.
I said that we are against the bill on principle, and the principle is fairly straightforward. It is a principle that has been espoused many times by John Swinney himself: people should properly pay the taxes for which they are liable. On the Conservative side of the chamber, we do not deviate from that principle in relation to the community charge. We think that that is how it ought to be.
We also think that there should be a principle of equality between those who paid the tax and those who did not pay. We now have the situation where some people paid that community charge, even if they were against it—as I know the majority of members in the chamber were—and made great sacrifices in order to do so, but those who did not pay it, some of whom probably could have paid it quite reasonably, are let off. There is an inequality between those two situations.
I looked through the Official Report of the relevant Finance Committee meeting and that is a live issue that has been raised with many MSPs. The convener of the Finance Committee said:
“I imagine that most—if not all—MSPs have, like me, received a number of communications from constituents who have said, in effect, ‘What about those who paid at the time?’”
The convener went on to say:
“We are all getting correspondence about it. I have not had anyone tell me what a great idea the bill is, but I have had plenty of folk writing to me in the terms I have just described.”—[Official Report, Finance Committee, 14 January 2015; c 24-25.]
Those are not the words of a Conservative MSP; that is a direct quote from the convener of the Finance Committee, who did far more consultation on the issue than the entire Scottish Government.
We are against the bill for reasons of principle but we are also against it for reasons of pragmatism. That is what the amendment that we lodged earlier was about. In written submissions to the committee and in giving evidence to the committee, even the councils that were supportive of the bill, such as Dundee City Council, were concerned about the impact that the bill could have on the collection of council tax.