Meeting of the Parliament 04 February 2026
We certainly support the principle. However, given what I have just laid out, believing in the Government’s ability to deliver anything at all in this area is, frankly, a stretch. My party has concerns about the bits and pieces that we hear about the way in which the policy might be designed. A number of the properties concerned are centralised here in Edinburgh, whereas the money might be disbursed across the rest of the country. However, we have no detail on how that will work properly, and people rightly have questions to ask about it.
On the principle, there are absolutely no problems at all. Let us wait and see how the policy is implemented. Of course, given the timeframe for its delivery, it is no solution to the challenges that we are speaking about today. It is years away from being introduced and will deliver a very small amount of money, so it will not address the crisis in our local authorities relating to the delivery of services.
We have had a promise, a commission, a consultation and a working group, and now we have another consultation. Those have all been attempts to kick the can down the road or pass the blame to somebody else. Contributions on the issue from the SNP back benches to date have been like blame bingo. This is a cowardly Government that has wasted years of majorities with no intention of ever doing the hard work of reforming council tax.
Staggeringly, the recently published spending review showed that, if the SNP wins in May, it intends to cut nearly £0.5 billion from local government budgets over the next three years. That is truly hard to fathom, given the criticism from SNP councillors about what is happening. What services will have to be cut? Which vulnerable people will fall through the cracks? That is what is at stake on 7 May.
I move amendment S6M-20654.1, to leave out from first “notes” to end and insert:
“is concerned for the future of local services, in light of nearly two decades of underfunding of local government by the Scottish National Party administration; regrets the failure of the Scottish Government to build a consensus for much-needed reform of local government taxation, and calls on the next Scottish administration to take leadership and create a sustainable, long-term funding solution for local government.”
Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.