Meeting of the Parliament 26 February 2015
The point is that, based on what the minister said, the commission will not even be trying to make firm recommendations. I am genuinely confused about what the commission’s purpose is. It sounds from what the minister said as if the plan needs a rethink by the Government.
To put that to one side, Mr Rowley made the point that we were going to make. We chose not to sit on the commission. We are grateful for the invitation from Mr Biagi and Councillor David O’Neill and, as a group and a party, we talked it through carefully. We concluded that we would not sit on the commission for a couple of reasons.
The first reason is that we intend to set up our own commission to look at finance more widely. Ruth Davidson announced the low-tax commission at the Conservatives’ UK party conference in September last year and it was formally launched as the commission for competitive and fair taxation this week, with a range of commissioners who have experience and can bring a lot to the task, and who will ultimately produce conclusions and—in this case—recommendations on what ought to be done.
The commission will look at taxation widely but, given the size of local taxation—when we add everything together, it is about £5 billion in round figures, while expenditure is well over double that—that issue will occupy a significant amount of the group’s resources and will be a key feature of its recommendations. Our view as a party is that we will put our support behind that group’s work instead of diluting it across two work streams.