Meeting of the Parliament 07 January 2026
I am pleased to speak in favour of our motion, which calls for lower bills for workers, who are suffering as a result of the cost of living crisis, and for an end to the SNP’s high-tax agenda.
The devolution of extensive taxation powers to the Scottish Government was an opportunity to create a tax system that supports Scottish businesses, incentivises growth and delivers for the Scottish public. However, it seems that the current SNP Government only ever saw those powers as a chance to hike taxes on hard-pressed Scottish workers. Making Scotland the highest-taxed part of the United Kingdom is hardly a legacy that the Scottish Government would have hoped for, but that is exactly what it has created.
Stakeholders such as Scottish Financial Enterprise and the Confederation of British Industry continue to highlight the impact of those taxes on Scottish businesses. The CBI has said that higher Scottish taxes mean that businesses are struggling to compete for highly skilled staff, and that current income tax policy is acting like a “handbrake” on Scotland’s economic growth.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has called Scotland’s income tax system “unnecessarily complicated”, and that was before the SNP introduced the sixth band to the tax system. IFS analysis also shows that the behavioural changes caused by the tax policy mean that it is unclear how much revenue those changes have raised, and it says that the Government should be open to “reversing course” on its tax policy.
Regardless of what the Scottish Government might say, it is unlikely that it will be changing direction any time soon. Not content with keeping the higher-rate threshold significantly lower than elsewhere in the UK, the SNP raised the higher rate to 41 per cent and then raised it again in 2023. The SNP’s income tax strategy has been a never-ending series of tax rises, with the tax burden creeping up year on year. Scotland is therefore left with a tax system that is too complicated, too damaging to growth and too costly to the taxpayer. The SNP has played this game for many years, and it would be naive to believe that it will stop any time soon.
Our solutions to the problem are clear. We are calling for the SNP to increase income tax thresholds in line with inflation in the forthcoming 2026-27 budget and in future budgets. We also want to see a simpler Scottish income tax system with a single rate of 19 per cent applied up to the higher rate. Those are proportionate and reasonable policies that would bring us towards closing the current tax gap with the rest of the United Kingdom. They would ensure tax cuts—which could be up to £600—for the vast majority of Scottish workers. We should be trying to put more money back into the pockets of hard-pressed Scots and workers in our country to support them.
Our policies would help to undo the damage that the SNP’s high-tax agenda has already done to the Scottish economy. They would also make Scotland an attractive destination for top talent. We should be trying to attract talent, not send it elsewhere, which is what we are doing on a daily basis.