Making the poor pay the bills of the rich is an easily-fixable act of political cowardice

The Scottish Government's announcement that it is not going to replace the Council Tax 'this decade' is a good indicator of why government in Scotland is failing. It is already nearly 20 years since the SNP first pledged to replace the Council Tax and it has broken the promise over and over, always because doing the right thing is too difficult and doing the wrong thing is easy.

There is a consensus that the Council Tax needs to be radically reformed or replaced. There are two big reasons why most observers believe the Council Tax isn't fit for purpose. It was designed to be regressive, created by an ideological Tory who was angry at having his Poll Tax overturned after trying to pioneer it in Scotland.

Michael Forsyth made the Council Tax as flat as was feasible, banding it and making the bands wide while making the price paid by each band much narrower. This has a simple result of the Council Tax not being close to reflective of ability to pay. Even on the most cursory of analyses it becomes clear that the poorest households pay five times as much proportionately as the richest.

The second reason it doesn't work well is that it is based on a system of manual house valuation which hasn't been updated in 30 years – but in 30 years the comparative value of housing has changed enormously.

While this has never been properly measured, there is reason to believe that the most desirable postcodes are comparatively undervalued (because their value has risen at above average rates over the last 30 years) and that those in the least desirable postcodes are undervalued (because those house values rose slower in the same period).

Never mind unfairnesses because of differing house price changes, it is likely that these are actually exacerbating the way this tax penalises the poor. There is no moral or policy-based justification for any of this. It is as it is because of an ideological right-wing attack on local government funding and because of the cowardice of every administration since.

The reason is really straightforward – if poor people are being cheated then that means wealthy people are being given a very generous perk. The poor are paying the bills of the rich – but it is the rich who write letters to newspapers. This is the fundamental issue with Council Tax reform – it is clearly unfair but, in political terms, it is unfair on precisely the right people, the people least able to protest or fight back against it.

What has happened instead has been entirely cynical. The first promise to reform the Council Tax was effectively scrapped in favour of an extended Council Tax freeze. But the gains from a freeze disproportionately benefit the smaller number of wealthy households with higher Council Tax bills – freezing the price of an expensive thing saves the buyer more money than freezing the price of an inexpensive thing.

So rather than reform the tax to be fair, a holding pattern was put in place which made it even more unfair. That was followed by a sequence of manifesto promises of reform. In fact there is barely an SNP Holyrood manifesto in the devolution era which hasn't promised Council Tax reform – but every promise has been broken.

There have been a sequence of tweaks to the bands, review groups and promises to finally get on top of this issue. A solemn promise was made in the 2021 SNP manifesto to hold a Citizens' Assembly to develop a consensus and that has simply been broken too. Now reform is being ruled out for the foreseeable future.

The reason given isn't even honest. The Scottish Government claims it is postponing action because there is no consensus, a consensus they promised to develop by holding a Citizens' Assembly. But of course obviously if a government didn't legislate until there was a consensus, it would barely ever legislate. The excuses are less and less convincing each time.

In many ways this is a quite startling betrayal of what now represents four explicit manifesto promises spanning two decades, all broken. It shows that Scotland does not have a government which governs based on policy analysis but on the path of least resistance. That the path of least resistance follows a route mapped out by the most powerful vested interests means Scotland is being run for the rich and powerful.

And the powerful are not mapping this route for the public good but for their own – with the Scottish Government facilitating it. This makes government work poorly, but it smooths the political path for politicians. That, in a nutshell, is why things get worse in Scotland and not better.

Reforming the Council Tax is easy. Common Weal's own policy is much easier to implement and operate and the existing one. None of this is about complexity or confusion. The refusal to act has no moral component and not justifiable rational component. It is cowardice, nothing more, nothing less.