Meeting of the Parliament 05 February 2020
I, too, thank the Local Government and Communities Committee clerks for all their hard work and sound advice as we took forward the bill.
In looking at the bill, one finds it difficult to construe how someone with as keen a mind as my good friend Graham Simpson could be seduced into backing amendment 9 at stage 2. Perhaps he fell victim to the roguish charm of Alexander Stewart or the persuasive arguments of Andy Wightman. Alternatively, perhaps it was to do with Mr Simpson’s get out of jail free card: his point that amendments are sometimes supported at stage 2 to “test the waters”, as he said yesterday. Bless. The band played “Believe it if you like”. Graham Simpson was not swimming yesterday; he was drowning. Like Pinocchio, his nose was growing with every word he spoke.
It was good to see the Tories—no doubt chastened by the barrage of 27 business organisations telling them that, with regard to removal of uniform business rates, they should not be so daft—reverse their position from that at stage 2. I welcome their road-to-Damascus conversion to common sense, which was something that we did not see from the Greens, who I understand did not even publish the results of their consultation from last September. Labour members, too, U-turned on the issue, after taking representations from USDAW. I welcome the fact that they listened.
Mr Wightman’s amendments 23 and 23A at stage 3 seemed to be a clever manoeuvre, but he looked like a rabbit in the headlights as his erstwhile Tory and Labour allies deserted him. He even suggested that Sarah Boyack was sidling up to Derek Mackay, which Mr Wightman happily did in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
On amendment 25, Andy Wightman argued, Grinch-like, that charity shops should, in effect, have to pay rates, regardless of whether a local authority had decided to waive its rights to impose 20 per cent. That seems to be a reversal of the localism that he purports to champion. The Lib Dems supported the Greens, passing over the eight years of a Lib Dem-Labour Scottish Executive that was notorious for ring fencing 60 different local authority budget lines. The entire episode shows how important it is that colleagues examine the impact of amendments before deciding whether to support them.
As for all the nonsense about private schools, one would think that a drastic change was being imposed. In fact, the payment of rates is the equivalent of about 1.3 per cent of fee income. I must apologise to members, because yesterday I said that that percentage was 1.8 per cent. That is of course a lot less than the 6 per cent impact of the teacher pay rises and pension changes last year, and significantly less than the 4 per cent average rise in fees in recent years.
The Tories are clearly obsessed with that relatively minor part of the bill and, by not supporting it, they are throwing the baby out with the bath water.