Why the SNP’s Council Tax options won’t work
There’s an old joke about government consultations: they’re the political equivalent of a recycling bin. A place where promises go to be filed away, never to be seen again. The Scottish Government’s latest paper on Council Tax reform fits neatly in that category.
On the surface, it looks like progress. After all, since 2007, it has been official government policy to replace Council Tax. In fact, it was an SNP policy from the beginning of devolution. Now – finally – they’ve published yet another consultation, the third of its kind. But look closer and you’ll see what’s really happening: this isn’t reform. It’s four options for tinkering at the edges, all carefully designed to avoid confronting the simple truth that probably around eighty to ninety per cent of Scottish households are paying more than their fair share so the richest ten per cent don’t have to.
That’s not a rhetorical flourish. According to the Government’s own paper, the dividing line is around £400,000. If your home is worth less than that – and most are – you’re almost certainly being overcharged. If your home is worth more, you’re getting a discount. And the higher you go, the more absurd the discounts become. A house valued at £1.4 million would save between £2,300 and £5,000 under the ‘reform’ models. A £2 million home? Try £9,000 a year.
This is not a tax system designed to be fair. It’s a tax system designed to be tolerated by the wealthiest, and defended by a government too nervous to upset them.
The consultation offers four options – from revaluation to new band systems – but all are ‘revenue neutral.’ Councils won’t gain, households won’t get relief. At best, bills shuffle slightly between bands.
This is not reform. It is the equivalent of rearranging the cutlery while the roof leaks.
If you’re wondering why this consultation has appeared now, after four years of silence, the answer is painfully simple. The SNP’s last manifesto didn’t even promise Council Tax reform. It promised a ‘public debate’ and a Citizens’ Assembly on the issue. Publishing this consultation is barely the pretence of sort of meeting part of the promise. Finance Secretary Shona Robison said openly that the process would take a long time, rely on ‘consensus,’ and “likely not be complete this decade.”
So that’s four years of waiting to publish a paper that kicks reform another ten years down the road. That’s not delivery. That’s procrastination dressed up as progress.
The politics are obvious. Any reform that raises bills for the top ten per cent – especially in Edinburgh, East Renfrewshire, and other expensive corners of Scotland – risks a middle-class revolt. Those are the people who write to their MSPs and dominate the press.
“This is not reform. It is the equivalent of rearranging the cutlery while the roof leaks.”
Rather than face that fight, the Government shields them. They say they need ‘consensus,’ which in practice means giving those same households an effective veto.
It is the perfect example of short-termism: the Government protects the few, while the many quietly overpay year after year. And it’s why Scotland remains stuck with a system widely acknowledged to be unfair.
There is another way. Common Weal has long argued for a Proportional Property Tax – a simple levy on the actual value of your home. Set at around 0.63 per cent annually, it would raise the same amount as Council Tax but fairly: no more arbitrary bands, no more 1991 valuations, no more £2 million homes paying proportionately less than a £120,000 flat.
Under such a system, around eighty to ninety per cent of households would pay less or the same as they do now. Only the top ten per cent would pay more. That’s what fairness looks like.
But the Government has excluded it – because it would expose their priorities too starkly.
Council Tax reform is one of those issues politicians love to talk about but never touch. Everyone agrees it’s broken. Every government promises to fix it. And yet, more than two decades after devolution, we’re still here.
In the meantime, inequality deepens, councils cut services, and ordinary households carry the weight. And now we’re told that even if reform is agreed, it won’t happen until the 2030s.
What message does this send to voters? That the Government would rather stall for another decade than confront a small but powerful minority. The interests of landlords and the wealthy matter more than the daily reality of households struggling under £400,000.
Scotland has a choice. We can keep pretending that shuffling Council Tax bands counts as reform. Or we can confront the obvious: a system that lets £2 million homes pay proportionately less than modest flats is indefensible.
The Government can side with the many, or it can keep shielding a few. So far, it has chosen the latter – and voters are noticing.
