Meeting of the Parliament 19 February 2026 [Draft]
Scotland has been on a journey. Over the past decade, we have come quite far on that journey when it comes to income tax and progressive taxation more widely. The 2016 election was the first election to this Parliament in which tax was a major topic of debate. Some wanted tax cuts and others wanted small tax increases, but, by and large, most of the proposals were all or nothing: either everyone’s income tax would go up, everyone’s income tax would go down or the rates would stay the same.
However, the Greens made the case for a different system. We wanted a system in which those on higher incomes contributed more and those on lower incomes paid less. The current system is a result of that argument; it is a result of the early years of discussions between us and SNP colleagues in which we agreed to something quite different from the system that we had inherited from the UK Government.
We now have the most progressive income tax system in the UK. As Craig Hoy said, the result of that is £1.8 billion more to spend each year on public services such as our NHS than would otherwise be the case. Without that money, we would not have been able to deliver policies such as the Scottish child payment or free bus travel for young people. Without that money, we would not have been able to make Scotland the only part of the UK in which child poverty is falling.