Hansard

The Scottish Greens set out two red lines at the start of the budget process. One was about climate and nature spend and the other was a real-terms increase in local government funding and an end to the council tax freeze. I am pleased that we were able to achieve both. However, as this afternoon’s debate has made clear, none of us thinks that that is enough. None of us believes that local government is sufficiently resourced, and a process of annual haggling in this Parliament over a block grant that is allocated to local government is never going to solve that problem. It puts Scotland well outside the European mainstream that our local government can raise directly only a very small fraction of its overall finances. In most European countries, certainly in western and central Europe, local government raises the majority of its budget directly.

We have made incremental progress in recent years. The visitor levy is an obvious example for local authorities such as the one whose area we are in now. The City of Edinburgh Council estimates that it will raise more than £50 million a year from its levy, and Highland Council will be another major beneficiary. We have given councils the power to double council tax on second and holiday homes, which both raises revenue and acts as a direct lever in relation to the housing crisis, in particular in areas such as Arran, which I represent. Today, the Scottish Government launched the consultation on the cruise ship levy, which my colleague Lorna Slater announced when the Greens were in government. That will be particularly valuable to areas such as Inverclyde, in my region, which will, with the best will in the world, never benefit significantly from the existing visitor levy.

All that progress is welcome, but it is no substitute for a genuine, full replacement of the council tax. I spend a lot of time talking about that, as do other members. I note that we do not talk enough about non-domestic rates as the other key lever of local taxation, but that is because they are not really local. They are nominally local, but they are also set from here. That brings me to the point that what we have at the moment is 32 regional service delivery bodies, and not genuinely local government. It is not local, which is a separate issue from the finances, and its ability to govern is massively restrained, in significant part because of its lack of financial powers.

As I mentioned in my interventions, revaluation is a key first step. It seems that we all agree that that is necessary, so the question becomes why we have been unable to complete a revaluation exercise in the 26-year history of this Parliament. I believe that Wales has completed three in that time. There is clearly a need to make progress, and there is an appetite for it both in this Parliament and among our colleagues in local government. I hope that we do not get to the end of the current session of Parliament having failed to at least begin a process of revaluation. It is absurd to have a system of tax that is based on valuations from 1991, which has resulted in most people paying the wrong rate. There are probably roughly equal numbers of people paying too much and people paying too little, and the system is certainly broken.

We can debate the reliefs that will be necessary in a new system, what formulas it should be based on and the transitional arrangements that will inevitably have to be brought into place, either for a few years or for a longer time, but we need to have an accurate data set first. There is no point in progressing with a replacement to the council tax if it is based on the 1991 valuations as well. The Scottish Greens want the replacement to eventually move into the space of a land value tax as well as property taxation, but it is critical that we do not micromanage that from Parliament.

Those matters are of huge significance to our constituents, because although it sounds abstract and is very technical, in practice we are talking about how we fund our schools, social care services, bin collections, libraries, roads and pavements, leisure centres, libraries and so much more. I do not want us to get to the end of the parliamentary session once again wringing our hands about our lack of progress on one of the areas that most significantly affects our constituents.