Meeting of the Parliament 26 February 2015
Not at all. Like the many commissions that I know Mr Crawford has been involved in and seen, although we have set up the commission, it will operate independently. Its weekly work will not be set by us and its conclusions will be independently reached by its commissioners. It will then of course be up to the party to decide whether to take all or most of the recommendations on board. That is how most independent commissions work. Mr Crawford ought to know that, having sat on one or two himself.
The other reason why we chose not to join the minister’s commission is that, having thought carefully about where the group might end up, and given the views of the left-wing parties in the Parliament and the cosy left-wing consensus that exists across the chamber, we genuinely do not believe that there is almost any prospect of our agreeing with the SNP or, for that matter, the Greens on what local government taxation should look like.
We know that the Greens want a land value tax; they always have done and I suspect that they will push for that. We know that the Liberal Democrats want a local income tax and that the SNP wants a national local income tax. We do not know what the Labour Party wants, and I suspect that it does not know what it wants. However, we are pretty clear that all those parties would want to hammer taxpayers in a way that we would not.
The land and buildings transaction tax debates during the course of the budget gave a clear example of that, because none of the other parties batted an eyelid when punitive rates were announced that included a staggering 10 per cent on homes that are worth over £250,000. Labour and the Greens were unhappy when Mr Swinney changed his mind and introduced the 5 per cent banding rate, although we did not think that he went anywhere near far enough. Of course, the SNP was happy and so were the Lib Dems, but Labour and the Greens were unhappy that Mr Swinney had moved on the issue at all.
We are setting up our own commission because we think that we are very unlikely to agree with what the minister’s commission concludes. We believe that voters deserve a choice in 2016 based on the independent work done by our commission and by the minister’s commission.
When the Government responded to the Local Government and Regeneration Committee’s report, it said clearly that the choice should be put to the people. Our concern is that, if all the parties simply agree and put only one proposition to the people at the next election, that will be no choice at all. That is why we are not joining the minister’s commission and why we will not support the motion at decision time.