Hansard

I am grateful, Presiding Officer.

Inevitably in such debates, there are those who ask for perfection, and those who defend imperfection as though there is no imperfection. The reality is that, as with several other local government finance orders in recent years, this order is a significant way short of perfect, but progress has been made. As we can see, the general uplift is significantly higher than the non-recurring Covid expenditure that is given to local government, which should be recognised.

Taken together, the additional funding that was announced before the budget and the extra £40 million that the minister mentioned in his speech mean that the gap relating to the impact of the local government pay settlement that will have to be negotiated has been closed somewhat. It is important that we approve the order to make sure that local government has access to the funds that it needs to be provided with.

I will say something about the future. Even before the pandemic, this parliamentary session has been another period of collective failure to reform a broken system of local government finance. After so many elections in which people, including those in parties that won and became the Government, promised the reform of local government finance and a replacement for the council tax, the Greens made serious efforts to try to improve matters and move the issue forward. We tried to bring people around the table to begin to make progress. If it had not been for the pandemic, we would be expecting the publication of a draft bill for consideration in the next session as a result of those cross-party talks. However, the pandemic stalled all of that.

As the Finance and Constitution Committee’s report on the budget makes clear, Parliament in the next session will have to take on a deep re-examination of the whole of Scottish tax policy. As the committee’s report at paragraph 177 says, we will have to look at

“the breadth and nature of the tax base ... the impact of economic activity on the size of the tax base”,

and

“the relationship between local, Scottish and UK-wide taxes.”

If we are serious about having tax policy that will both support services—including services at a local level and local autonomy within that—and help to develop a fairer, more equal and sustainable economy in Scotland, it will not be good enough to have yet another session of the Scottish Parliament during which we fail to grapple the admittedly difficult but urgent issue of local tax reform. That local government simply has to wait for a handout from central Scottish Government should be every bit as unacceptable as it would be if the Scottish Government had to wait for whatever it gets in a grant from the United Kingdom Government.

Back in the days of the single, simplistic block grant, at least there was a framework that said how that block grant should be calculated. Now, we are in a much more complex scenario, and a wider range of taxes is available to us in Scotland. Therefore, we should be pushing that fiscal power down the chain to local government level. If that can be taken on in the next session of the Scottish Parliament, it will be long overdue.