“When it comes to decreasing inequalities of wealth for good or reducing unusually high levels of public debt, a progressive tax on capital is generally a better tool than inflation.” – Thomas Piketty

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In the run up to the 2021 Scottish Parliamentary Election, the SNP – like most other political parties, published their manifesto of the things they promised to do if returned to power after the election. They’ve since deleted it from their website but it has been archived here. In that, one of their promises to the voters who put them back into office stated that they would run annual Citizens’ Assemblies during this Parliamentary term “to help find consensus on issues where people have sharply divided opinions…such as such as reform of Council Tax.” Making that issue in particular more than a mere suggestion, a few pages later they stated clearly that “We are committed to reforming the Council Tax to make it fairer…We will ask a Citizens’ Assembly to consider the way forward alongside the question of wider powers for local government.”

After the election and their return to Government, they held one Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change (the process of which showed an outstanding example of the future of democratic governance but the outcome of which was a single new policy promise, later broken) but didn’t hold any others. The Citizens’ Assembly on Council Tax Reform was never formally cancelled, but no effort or resource was ever put in to organising it. There is now no time to hold such an assembly before the end of the Parliamentary Term and no ability to even throw one together at the last minute given that neither the Programme for Government nor the final budget covering a full year of the remaining term mentioned such an Assembly.

This week, the Government published their proposal for a replacement to this manifesto promise. A series of “public engagements” this Autumn consisting of three key elements:
• A formal public consultation process.
• A number of public events or ‘town hall’ meetings held over the autumn months, ensuring a reasonable geographical spread and diversity.
• A set of focused discussions with key stakeholders and experts.

This strikes me as remarkably similar to their “engagement” series on land reform in 2022 where the “town hall meetings” included gathering a dozen or so members of the public into a hall named for one of Scotland’s largest landowners to tell them that they were going to try to limit the scope of the land reform bill to only cover the management of the very largest estates in Scotland so that they could keep the costs of the reform to a minimum. They’ve since reduced the threshold of that management in the proposals for the current Bill but it is still far too high, far too limited and far too easy to evade.

This is a column about that Council Tax reform though – I’ll happily come back to Land Reform in a future column.

To say I have little faith in the SNP (or any other political party in Scotland right now) actually making meaningful steps towards reforming this badly outdated tax would be an understatement but we are an impartial think-tank and we are very much one of the “key stakeholders and experts” who should be at the table later this year (I’ll let you know if we get an invite) so fine – I’ll once again lay out the options for reform and explain why the only possible rational option is to adopt our policy paper on replacing Council Tax with a Property Tax based on the present value of a home.

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