Meeting of the Parliament 04 February 2026
I am not very surprised at my immediate feelings of frustration about how the debate is starting. There were some important and legitimate points that I agreed with in Michael Marra’s speech. However, tribalism is not going to take us anywhere, and finger pointing about the problem will not result in a solution.
Clearly, there are those who have worked hard to try to achieve reform of the council tax, and there are those who have stalled, blocked it or just not tried. I do not think that the public care very much about that. They have a right to feel that the Parliament as a whole—all of us—have collectively failed to reform council tax over decades. There has been huge success in devolution, and I am a massive fan of a great deal of what the Parliament has achieved, but the reform of council tax is a long-standing failure of multiple sessions and multiple Governments.
The idea of levying a property tax based on property values set in 1991 is absurd enough in itself, but how long do we allow that situation to continue? If 35 years out of date is not bad enough, will we allow it to be 40 years out of date, 50 years out of date or 60 years out of date? How much more broken can the system become? Even in 1991 it was an unfair system, with the ratio of the highest to lowest tax payments being 3:1 and the ratio of the highest to lowest property values being 8:1. That gap has increased dramatically as property prices have increased, so the system is even more unfair—probably dramatically more unfair—than it was then. We know that most households are in the wrong band. How on earth can we justify the continuation of a tax when we know that most households and council tax payers are paying at the wrong rate?
Polling shows that there is strong public support for reform. I acknowledge the work of Tax Justice Scotland, whose briefing sets out the polling. Of those who expressed a view in the opinion poll, a massive 84 per cent wanted political parties to make clear commitments in the coming election campaign to reforming council tax, while a negligible proportion—just 2 per cent—thought that people in low-value homes ought to be paying proportionately more, in relation to their property values, than people in higher-value housing. That shows negligible support for the status quo and for the unfairness of the current system.
We in the Greens have done our best over many years to make the case for reform, not just arguing for it but doing the detailed work to show what a land value tax and then a mixed-base property tax based on modern property values would look like and how that could be made to work, as well as setting out the reasons why a property tax is still important. Property tax has an important role to play in a diverse tax system.
Consultation after commission after commitment has not resulted in action, so we have also worked hard, including in recent years, to pursue shorter-term small changes. I am very pleased that we have managed to have success in some of those efforts in recent years; we have made small changes. However, the situation cannot last—we all acknowledge that the system is broken, out of date and chronically unfair. It needs to change, but all we do is keep tweaking at the edges to try to ameliorate the unfairness a little bit. That cannot continue.
Every political party needs to make a solid commitment in May to the reform of council tax and needs to be ready to act on those commitments after May, whoever is returned by the public in whatever numbers.