Meeting of the Parliament 28 March 2018
I am sorry, but I have only four minutes. Mr Wightman will have a chance to respond in winding up the debate.
Those of us with long memories will recall that, in 2007, the SNP was elected on a clear manifesto commitment to scrap the council tax and replace it with a local income tax. Indeed, the language that SNP politicians used at the time was near hysterical. They talked about the “unfair” council tax or even the “hated” council tax. Of course, once the SNP was in office, even with an overall majority, it took no steps to scrap the council tax, despite all its promises and despite the fact that it was supposedly hated.
As Andy Wightman said, back in 2015, the report of the Scottish Government’s commission on local tax reform said that council tax must go but, just like the Greens today, it could not come up with an alternative proposal. Fortunately, the Scottish Conservatives were there to help out, not for the first time. We established our independent commission on competitive and fair taxation in Scotland, which reported just a month later, in January 2016, recommending that the council tax structure should remain essentially unchanged, but with an increase in the multiplier for the higher bands of G and H. As it happened, the SNP Government rejected the recommendation of its commission on local taxation and adopted proposals that were very similar to those of our commission, although it went further by increasing the multipliers for bands E and F in addition and increasing those for G and H by more than we would have done.
That is where we are. We have already had reform of the council tax, and we do not support further reform of it. Accordingly, we reject the Green motion. The council tax is by no means perfect—no system of taxation is—but it is better than many of the alternatives. The council tax is long established, easily understood, relatively efficient and relatively easy to collect. It is a property tax, and therefore an approximation of a tax on wealth, which is appropriate at a time when we regularly express concern about the bias in our tax system towards taxes on income as opposed to taxes on wealth. Although property may not always be an accurate proxy for wealth, nevertheless, our view is that some sort of property tax should be a component in the overall taxation mix in Scotland, as it is in most other western countries.