Meeting of the Parliament 06 March 2018
This is an important debate, and it is not just a technical one. In many ways, though, it is a debate that we should not be having. I will explain why in a moment.
As the cabinet secretary says, the order delivers almost £9.5 billion in revenue support grant and non-domestic rates for councils across Scotland. The money will be used to deliver a wide range of vital public services, including environmental health, social care, leisure, recreation, transport, housing and educating Scotland’s young people.
Following the Greens’ engagement with the budget process, the settlement represents a real terms—if modest—increase in revenue spending for local government. That was a key demand in budget negotiations and I am pleased that it has been secured. This is therefore a settlement that we will be voting for at decision time. However, as I mentioned at the outset, this is not a settlement that we would like to be voting for. It is fundamentally wrong that so much of the revenue and capital budgets of local government is determined by the Scottish Parliament.
In 2014, COSLA’s commission on strengthening local democracy published its final report, in which it argued:
“The case for much stronger local democracy is founded on the simple premise that it is fundamentally better for decisions about these aspirations to be made by those that are most affected by them.”
That is an argument that I know that many members will recognise from the 2014 independence debate, when largely the same argument was used to advance the case for Scottish independence. However, for more than 50 years, local democracy in Scotland has been eroded to the point where Scotland is now one of the least democratic countries in Europe, with the weakest structure of local government and with the least fiscal freedom.
In most European countries, at least 50 per cent of the budgets that municipalities and communes raise is raised locally, and that delivers a sense of accountability that is entirely missing in Scotland. The politicians who make those decisions about raising and spending money are genuinely local; they are politicians whom one would meet daily on the street, in the shops and in the school playground.
Scottish Greens want to see a fundamental shift in political power, from Holyrood to local communities. Thus, this is the last budget on which we will be willing to enter negotiations, unless a serious, credible and substantive process is begun to increase the fiscal autonomy of local authorities, reform local taxation, shift the balance of funding from the centre to the local, and put in place the kind of fiscal framework that exists between the United Kingdom and Scotland in relation to devolved budgets.
That is why, on 21 February, Patrick Harvie wrote to the First Minister to outline why we need local tax reform, as envisaged by the commission on local tax reform. That is why, following the budget last March, we published a paper outlining what a fiscal framework for local government might look like. That is why I will soon put out for consultation a proposal for a member’s bill to incorporate the European charter of local self-government into Scots law.
In particular, it is an affront to local democracy that the limited and regressive tax power that local government does have—the council tax—remains the most regressive tax in the United Kingdom, based on a tax base last assessed more than a quarter of a century ago. It is wrong that council tax rate-setting powers have been appropriated by the finance secretary in a form of Tory rate capping in order to cajole local government to bend to the will of central Government and to punish councils if they do not meet the preferences of Scottish ministers. That is a process that would be unlawful across most of Europe and is, in my view, unlawful under international law.
I do not feel comfortable sitting in this Parliament and voting on how much money local government should receive, but we are where we are, and we will be supporting the order at decision time.
15:32