Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 23 February 2022
Yesterday, I moved in committee a motion to annul an instrument that brought in provisions in the Transport (Scotland) Act 2019 to allow councils to introduce the hated workplace parking tax. Not surprisingly, thanks to the SNP and the Greens, my motion was defeated. The motion gave the Minister for Transport the chance to do the right thing—to step back from the precipice—but she did not take it.
The SNP and its coalition of chaos partners have chosen to ignore business, they have chosen to ignore the entire public sector, and they have chosen to ignore shift workers and people who are low paid. If they want to get people out of their cars, they could have used the 2019 act to introduce provisions on public transport partnerships, but they have not done that.
It has surely not passed anyone by that we have been through a tough time in the past two years. It cannot have escaped anyone’s notice that work patterns have changed, and even the most anti-business person would accept that our town and city centres have been particularly hard hit.
Liz Cameron, who is the chief executive of Scottish Chambers of Commerce, said that businesses are “incredulous”. They are. I have been contacted by a number of businesses, all of which are too nervous to go public. What a sorry state of affairs. Unlike the minister, I have spoken to the business sector, including in the east midlands, where people are worried about what is to come in Leicester—the home of Walkers Crisps, which has a big car park. This could be Leicester’s crisp tax.
It is not as though companies that have parking spaces for staff and visitors are not already paying for them: the Scottish Retail Consortium has made the point that they pay through business rates.
The tax is a double whammy on commuting. The workplace parking tax is simply a money-raising tool for councils, which—let’s face it—need everything they can get. In order to bring in the levy, a council needs merely to have a local transport strategy. The car park tax must go towards helping with that strategy, which means that it does not need to be about reducing motor vehicle travel—it can be used for anything. The money will go into a general pot.
It is no wonder that SNP councils that have been denied funds by their own Government are gearing up to bring in the tax. Anti-car City of Edinburgh Council and Glasgow City Council cannot wait, although Susan Aitken, who has one eye on the council elections, is trying temporarily to distance herself from it. In the unfortunate event that Ms Aitken remains as Glasgow council leader after May, we can expect her to get back on track. Her official, connectivity officer Deborah Paton, excitedly told councillors that a levy could raise as much as £30 million, but that was before Jenny Gilruth confirmed that there would be no limit on what councils can charge.