Devolution

The Programme for Government 2026

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.” – Walter H. Cottingham

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An excerpt from the cover of the PfG Ambitious for Scotland Programme for Government 2026-2031

(Image Credit: Scottish Government)

Last year’s Programme for Government was a lackluster affair, as could well be expected. It came just a year before the election and so it was always unlikely that there would be any brand new initiatives given that there would be no time to legislate for them never mind implement them (the tail end of the last Parliament saw many important bills get dropped for ‘lack of time’ such as Monica Lennon’s Ecocide Bill, but that’s a topic to come back to).

In a year where the election results in a change of Government, we would expect the first PfG to be an ambitious period as the new party settles their feet under desks and starts to work out how the hell they’re going to deliver on their promises. It’s slightly different for a returning government. They have to come up with new ideas while remembering that there was little to stop them doing it before. A new plan to reform Council Tax, for instance, has to deal with the problem that next year will be the 20th anniversary of the SNP Government promising that they’ll reform Council Tax.

Still though, this is the first Programme for Government of the returning Government and can use this one not just as a plan for the next year but as a prospective for the next five years in Government. Plans can afford to be a little larger or longer range. And we’ve certainly see that, with some proposals here being substantial, multi-year projects. As we shall see from this list of some of the policies that caught my eye this year, this doesn’t necessarily mean that I think they are projects that we should be doing.

Local Government Reform: Centralising power

This has been headlined as the largest government reform of the devolved era and it’s probably not wrong in that. There has been a lot of talk recently about bring the English model of regional mayors to Scotland – largely driving by people who think that we could do with more folk like Andy Burnham taking unilateral control over large chunks of the country. My own thoughts on that particular plan can be read here…short version – I’m not a fan. A single person cannot be elected via a proportional democratic vote, therefore I do not believe that a single person should ever hold office with executive power.

This isn’t what John Swinney is proposing, in fairness. No mention is made of elected mayors over massive regions. He is, however, proposing the second part. Local Authorities to be combined in some way (it’s not clear if this would be a formal amalgamation or another tier of umbrella organisations) and given executive powers.

He even stole Common Weal’s language to help describe why he wants to do this – the current Local Authorities are simultaneously too large to be be “local” and too small to act regionally (this was the intention of the previous round of reforms after Scottish regional governments proved a nuisance to the Scottish Office). There are indeed powers that could be given to these regional councils that could be useful, like transport or energy strategy.

The big problem is that few of those powers sit at Holyrood or even Westminster. They mostly sit at Local Authority level and will be ‘pooled’ into the regional tier. And thus this reform will not decentralise power but will massively centralise it. The same goes for plans to amalgamate Scotland’s 14 Health Boards into just two.

The ‘local’ part of these reforms is non-existent. Rather than restore Scotland’s district councils (as the Greens propose) or to follow our plan to bring Scotland into line with Europe’s system of municipal councils, the ‘local’ part of Swinney’s reform is merely to “[empower] people to influence local decisions”. Not to control local decision-making. Or to make decisions for themselves. Merely to “influence” them. Which is basically the non-power that our community councils have at the moment.

Inwards Investment: The Scottish Fire Sale Continues

If there’s one thing John Swinney is known for, it’s his great love of ‘foreign direct investment’. FDI has basically been the only game in town (a term once reserved for PFI funding) for Scottish economic development for a number of years now. The problem with inwards investment like this is that, by definition, it demands a return in the form of profits that can be extracted from Scotland.

In our paper on Profit Extraction, we found that Scotland was one of the most intensively extracted nations on the planet – to a degree worse than some of the poorest and most heavily exploited nations in Africa. Between 1999 and 2021, more than a quarter of a trillion pounds has been net extracted from Scotland, largely in the form of dividends paid to shareholders and parent companies based elsewhere. One can only speculate as to what Scotland would look like if that money had been used to bootstrap up Scottish companies or had been paid to Scottish workers instead.

And it’s about to get worse.

The PfG is going to accelerate FDI via several schemes like a “High Growth Unit” and a “Major Projects Office” designed to “unlock private investment across strategic sectors”. Most disconcertingly is that the Government appears to have listened to our plea that the Scottish National Investment Bank should be investing more in housing and energy by instructing it to “leverage further private commercial capital and investment into housing…including social housing”. Even if you are being housed by the public sector, your rent may soon be subsidising the dividends of a wealthy absentee shareholder.

“Centralising health and care while cutting local communities out of meaningful decision-making isn’t exactly the same as “delivering care locally””

Energy: Fossil Fuels and Data Centres

The Government fell short of growing rumours of a moratorium on data centres. Instead, the Scottish Government will attract more data centres so long as they are “responsible, green data centres”. No, I have no idea what that means either but I suspect that it’s something a bit like Swinney’s support for “climate compatible” oil extraction. That is to say, it’s a thing to say when someone asks about these things that means that he doesn’t have to definitively say that he supports or does not support them.

One thing the Government does support right now is the cutting of profit taxes on oil companies to encourage more North Sea drilling (you know…so long as it’s “climate compatible” and it’s not necessarily any particular named project that you might be complaining about specifically).

I published my own thoughts on how those data centres should be regulated as a bare minimum – I do not expect many or any currently in the pipeline would meet these reasonable expectations. I also do not expect that the Government’s own “strategic approach” will meet or exceed these standards. Or perhaps we need to apply a bit more pressure in our campaigning to make that happen.

Health, Care and Older People: Amalgamated, Subsumed and Ignored

In that order. I’ve already mentioned the proposed centralisation of health in Scotland and we published in one of our Daily Briefings this week that we’re concerned that care is being subsumed into health as Swinney has long been obsessed with “delayed discharge” as the only metric worth measuring – if he can dump people from hospitals into care homes, then who cares, right?

Our Care Reform Group will be discussing this in more detail in the weeks to come. Another point that is missing from the PfG almost entirely is how to better support older people. The term ‘older’ does not appear at all in the PfG and ‘ageing’ only once and strictly in the context of rising pressure on health services. A “prevention-first” health strategy mentioned in this section is laudable – essential even – though it does require actual work to prevent health issues.

Centralising health and care while cutting local communities out of meaningful decision-making isn’t exactly the same as “delivering care locally” and privatising the funding of housing while maximising the incentives to push up house prices runs directly against the goal of more healthy housing.

Land Reform: This far and apparently no further

Land Reform was high on the agenda in the last Parliament. The Land Reform Bill eventually passed was weak and insufficient, but it was there. This PfG – which I remind is a strategy for the next five years – does not mention land reform or land taxation at all. Some mention is made of more support for crofting communities to support environmental work but with the proposal to centralise of many aspects of environmental governance (such as SEPA, NatureScot and Zero Waste Scotland) into a single body it seems hard to see how more localism over the control of land can come out.

Our coalition partners will be at the SNP conference next month in a campaign for a Scottish Land Tax – I know such a thing is overwhelmingly popular with party members as I’ve seen their response to it myself when I’ve been at previous conferences. Perhaps it’s time for members to make it clear to leadership that this omission is not acceptable.

Conclusion

I know this has been a negative article. I didn’t want it to be. I wanted to see ambition and progressive moves for change in this agenda. There are good policies in there (like the well publicised £2 bus fares or, with caveats, the food price caps) that we’ll be tracking and encouraging but they are all relatively small compared to the massive centralising reform that is about to crash down upon us.

The Scottish Government used to believe in subsidiarity – the principle that governance should take place at the most local level possible and only devolved upwards when absolutely necessary. It appears that that principle is not just dead but is being actively held in contempt. This is something that must be pushed back on. Democracy should be for and by all of us, not just for the one person who thinks he should be in control over everything that he can’t sell off to an inwards investor for the lowest price possible.

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Six more ideas to revitalise the high street

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you.” – Miranda July

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation page here.

A photo of an above-shop flat in a high street in Glasgow. The building, apart from the shop, is entirely boarded up.

Andy Burnham’s tenure as UK PM hasn’t exactly been a fast take-off. He’s kept many of the more objectionable policies from the Starmer government and his ministerial appointments have been a mixed bag. His attitude towards constitutional reform has been similarly mixed. On one hand telling English regions that he wants to decentralise the UK, on the other telling them that he’ll centralise that power into the hands of mayors. On one hand telling Scotland that he will not discuss constitutional reform, on the other musing about codifying the UK’s constitution in a way that may give Scotland a codified exit mechanism from our voluntary union….or may make secession explicitly illegal or practically impossible.

He’s made some positive policy announcements though many of them have been cost-free or very inexpensive (at a UK level, anything that costs less than about £1 billion a year is a budgeting rounding error). One of those was made this week and while it’s small, it’s actually pretty good. He wants to make it easier for councils to regulate the opening of vape shops and betting shops so that he can revitalise high streets.

As a policy, it’s fine. Councils should have full subsidiarity over their local planning decisions and that they didn’t was a major oversight. Personally, I’d prefer that addictive products were regulated even further with things like vapes being reclassified as medical devices to be prescribed to those trying to quit smoking or, at the very least, sold in government owned stores the way strong alcohol is in many countries in Europe and elsewhere.

But if we just want to stick with better planning policy, that’s still a positive step. However, if Burnham seriously wants to revitalise high streets then there are other policies he could implement too. And yes, many of the policies I’m going to discuss are devolved issues so if Burnham doesn’t want to do them, Scotland could get on with it in his stead.

1) Redevelop high streets so that there are more people walking around them instead of cars driving through them.

One of the biggest drivers of custom to small businesses in High Streets is the ability for passers-by to just drop in. This is difficult to do if you’re driving past at 30mph and streets simply cannot be made in a way that allows for mass car parking outside the shops. Wherever this has been done, it contributes to lower pedestrian footfall and even fewer customers. Instead, converting roads to pedestrian-only or, at the very least, pedestrian-first streets allows for people to drop in to shops, even those they didn’t come to the high street specifically for.

2) Tax and regulate predatory online platforms like Amazon that push up prices and crush local businesses.

Cory Doctorow has written many times over many years about the predatory nature of online platforms like Amazon. It’s not just the ease-of-use of online shopping that means we don’t need to leave the house any more (believe me…I enjoy that too), but it goes worse than that. Amazon has a history of jacking up platform fees and forcing marketers to pay even more to ensure their product appears near the top of the search list.

Then Amazon copies their product and sells a knock-off version themselves (they can easily undercut on price because they don’t need to pay themselves platform fees, and they can adjust their own search algorithm to ensure that their products always appear top of the list). Worse, they’ve been known to enforce price controls such that if you try to sell your product in your own physical store at a lower price, they’ll kick you off Amazon.

So when you do go into the a shop, you might end up paying a price including platform fees. Rather than making goods cheaper, Amazon makes everything, everywhere more expensive, and then they still rip merchants off and steal their sales. We need to better regulate online platforms and properly tax them. Personally, I’d regulate such that a company that provides an online marketplace cannot also sell their own products on that market. They can either own the market, or they can sell through it – not both.

3) Bring vacant high-street houses back into use.

An interesting fact emerges in our increasing xenophobic politics. It is becoming received wisdom that immigrants are competing for houses and are pushing out native-born families and homeless households. This is, to put it bluntly, total crap. The problems in the housing sector are much more being driven by housing developers who drip-feed construction in order to keep their own profits high.

Another issue though is vacant housing. There are about 7,000 asylum seekers in Scotland right now. There are about 34,000 homeless households in Scotland. There are about 89,000 long term vacant homes in Scotland. This means that if we really wanted to, we could give every asylum seeker in Scotland, every homeless household TWO homes each…and there would still be more than 7,000 empty homes in Scotland.

Many of the empty homes in Scotland are flats sitting above high street shops. These are often cheaper to renovate up to appropriate standards as compared to building a brand new house somewhere – by some estimates, it might be possible renovate three houses for the price of one new one. Doing this would bring people into the heart of the high street and turn them into thriving 15 minute neighbourhoods. This, in turn, would bring entrepreneurs close to their place of work and close to their customers.

4) Pay workers enough and reduce their rent/utility bills enough so that they can afford to shop based on local quality instead of cheapest import.

Have you been feeling the pinch in terms of affordability lately? I know I have (reminder, Common Weal is almost entirely funded by small donations of an average of £10/month). Even where wages have somewhat kept up with inflation, there seems to be some data coming in that there is a shift in what we spend out money on.

This is going to be a bit of a research for me in the near future (right after a slightly different report on affordability currently in the pipeline..and another project that I’ll be talking about soon) but looking at data on what we actually spend our money on appears to be revealing that a greater percentage of that money is vanishing into rents/mortgages and energy bills. It’s no wonder therefore that we have to cut back on “discretionary spending”.

I certainly eat out far less often than I used to. And if we want a high street of local businesses, we can’t assume that they’ll be able to compete on cost with cheap imports. If we want people to buy quality goods or have quality experiences in the high street then we need to pay workers more and we need to aggressively reduce rents and utility bills so that people have more to spend and it doesn’t cost businesses so much to deliver their services.

“High Streets should be the heart of our towns and cities. They should be the places within our 15 minute neighbourhoods where we choose to go for most of our needs.”

5) More low emission zones and re-naturing of urban spaces to make them more comfortable to be in, especially during heat waves.

I was in Glasgow recently for the first time in several months and something struck me – the city was a lot quieter than I remembered. It wasn’t entirely down to reduced footfall either, the volume of traffic in the city was greatly reduced and the noise the vehicles were making was much less too. A good chunk of this is the transition to electric vehicles and legislation like the Low Emission Zone which keeps nosier combustion engines out of the area.

It also makes the air much cleaner. I remember the days working in our office in Union Street (a building that is now sadly lost to the recent fire – see the point above about regulating vape shops) and I remember getting to the end of the day with the rasp in my lungs due to the exhaust fumes. Imagine then living in that space. Air pollution is one of the biggest killers in our society and it makes even visiting a dense area like a high street simply unpleasant to be in at best and an active health hazard at worse. This goes double as the climate emergency bites further and our cities get hotter and more unsafe.

We could revitalise high streets by making them urban oases. We should Green our cities to provide shade, actively prevent heat islands and pull pollution out of the air while at the same time double down on LEZ legislation to reduce that pollution in the first place. Ignore the far-right and other climate deniers who claim to be fighting for ‘freedom’. Their promises to repeal low emission zones should be called out for what they are – policies that will kill thousands of people every year.

6) Create more deconsumerised community spaces.

I want you to think about your local area. Think about a place where you can go where you could: a) Accidentality meet someone you know. b) Stay as long as you like. c) Not have to make a purchase either to get in or once you’re there.

It’s quite likely that the place you’re thinking about is a park (unless you’re in England and it has an entry fee) or a library. It might be a museum. Maybe an art gallery? Might it even be a set of concrete steps? Does your community have any of those kinds of spaces? A major draw to the high street must be to do something other than to spend money.

We should be able to spend time there too, without having to spend money. Whatever the revitalised High Street has – men’s sheds, drop-in centres, community kitchens, art galleries, maker spaces so that locals can make art for the gallery, or whatever – we should be able to enjoy ourselves there in a multitude of different ways.

Conclusion

As hinted above, many of these suggestions are actually issues devolved either to Holyrood or to local authorities so, in Scotland, they aren’t Andy Burnham’s to do. This doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be done though. I’ll even throw in a secret seventh idea – one perhaps a bit more radical as I don’t necessarily approve of the gambling aspect within it.

In 1950s Taiwan where businesses were largely dealing in cash and were hiding their sales volumes to avoid tax, the government brought in an “invoice lottery”. Customers would get a lottery ticket printed on their receipts that would pay out a share of revenue from business rates. Now customers had a vested interest in businesses creating an official paper trail and revenue shot up – more than paying for the lottery. The scheme is still popular to this day.

With efforts to part-devolve VAT to Scotland still underway, perhaps we could do something similar. Perhaps Scottish-owned high street businesses could be registered for a similar state-owned invoice lottery – shop Scottish, maybe win a prize! As I say, I’m not keen on gambling myself, but it might well be a good nudge to choose a local high street shop over a bigger chain, even one next door.

High Streets should be the heart of our towns and cities. They should be the places within our 15 minute neighbourhoods where we choose to go for most of our needs – not just our shopping but to meet people and take part in our community. Letting them rot vacant or, worse, letting them get homogenised under the crushing weight of private equity does us no good as a society or for our economy.

Andy Burnham has started his tenure with a series of small but generally positive steps. He’s going to have to ramp up beyond the small if he wants to get anywhere (hint: calling a COBRA meeting to discuss the English drought and heatwaves and coming out after with a proposal to consider banning disposable BBQs isn’t looking beyond the small) but if he’s willing to make those small steps or even just a large series of those small steps then we could get somewhere positive.

And if he doesn’t, well – maybe Scotland should stop waiting for him to walk and start running ahead instead.

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If energy powers get devolved – what then?

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Spring is the time of plans and projects.” – Leo Tolstoy

This blog post previously appeared in Common Weal’s weekly magazine. Sign up to our Daily Briefing and Weekly Magazine newsletters here.

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John Swinney has kicked of the election campaign with promise that should he be returned as First Minister then “on the first day” he’ll submit a Section 30 order to the UK Government to request the devolution of energy powers to Scotland.

I want to make something clear from the outset – Scotland should have more powers over energy and, given that Scotland holds a massively substantial share of the UK’s total renewable energy resources – the powers that do remain reserved should be jointly managed to a much greater degree than they are now.

The current bickering and grandstanding between governments combined with the, frankly, whining from either government that the other government is blocking progress as they see it serves none of us at a time when first the climate emergency and now escalating geopolitical turmoil is demanding that we get ourselves off of our dependence on fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. To that extent, a campaign for more devolved powers is not just welcome, but vital.

This is not to say that I believe that a simple call for those powers via a Section 30 order will be successful. I don’t think it will be, for the same reason that the Section 30 order for independence referendum powers almost a decade ago was not successful. Governments and politicians will only do something that they do not want to do when the consequences of not doing so – as they see and feel them – are worse than the consequences of acquiescing. If they are told to do something and there is no credible answer to the inevitable response “or what?”, then they won’t.

But let’s assume that they do. Let’s imagine a scenario after May where the Scottish Government clearly won’t win a campaign for a second independence referendum (which would inevitably absorb all other campaign energy and would, if successful, win the powers over energy anyway) but there is scope to win a “more devolution” campaign, including or centred around energy. It might well come about due to the SNP failing to win a majority of seats in Holyrood (and thus failing in their self-imposed prerequisite for an indyref campaign) but there nonetheless being a strong pro-independence majority in Parliament coupled with voices on the other side who don’t favour independence but would welcome more powers over energy (so…not much different from the recent outgoing Parliament then?).

What then?

The powers over energy get devolved to Holyrood, but what then? What is the plan for using those powers? here

I know what Common Weal would do with them. We’ve written extensively on energy matters for over a decade now and have pulled in expertise from some of the top people in the field. We have papers on how to reform the Grid written by people who have helped to run national grids. We have papers on how to heat homes, written by people who have helping to define the standards by which home energy needs are measured. We understand that trying to decarbonise the economy we have today without fundamentally changing that economy is doomed to failure.

So we have our own answers to the question of what we’d do with devolved energy powers and you can hear about a few more of them in my recent interview on the Scottish Independence Podcast here and below.

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I’m not convinced that the present Scottish Government has fully thought their answer to that question through though. From what I can see there are promises of energy price cuts without elaboration as to how it’d happen, there’s a manufacturing sector based almost entirely around inwards investment – though the UK’s blocking of the Ming Yang wind turbine factory on “national security” grounds (read: “we didn’t want to upset Daddy Trump”) is appalling – and there remains the continued risk that vital improvements like the proposed PassivHaus energy efficiency standards will get watered down and compromised by people who profit massively from your heating bill.

I am greatly concerned that the current Scottish Government’s plan, such that it is, will not be the overhaul of the energy sector that it needs. It won’t be based around bringing the sector into public ownership. I suspect this because they haven’t used the powers they currently have to bring much of it into public ownership.

They’ve also made efforts to privatise energy infrastructure that was in public ownership for no reason other than it would boost the “inwards investment” line a bit more – Scotland’s ‘public’ electric car charging network is now operated by an Austrian company. The Government also reviewed policies around community benefit fund recommendations and chose to reduce them in real terms compared to when they were first launched. And, of course, we’ve seen what happened with Scotland’s largest auction of offshore energy options where it’s very possible that the Scottish Government left many billions of pounds on the table due to undervaluing those assets.

As of the time of writing, we’ve yet to see the manifestos of most of the political parties (including the SNP) ahead of the elections next month but on this topic I’ll be paying particularly close attention. It’s simply not enough to call for more powers but to not lay out what to do with them and I am concerned that what the parties would do with them would just perpetuate the rip-off that the energy sector is. Powers must be used with purpose and that purpose should be not to serve the already wealthy and powerful, but All of Us.

It’s a lack of will, not consensus, that prevents Council Tax reform

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“We need an assembly, not for cleverness, but for setting things straight.” – William Golding

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The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has published a significant intervention into the upcoming Scottish election, saying that the next Parliament must stop cringing away from reforming Council Tax.

The Scottish Government’s current position is that they can’t make that change because there’s no political consensus for what comes next. This is a disingenuous take, given the chances they’ve squandered or deliberately suppressed in order to manufacture that situation.

Everyone, even the Scottish Government, agrees that the Council Tax is fatally broken. No other tax is based on valuations that were set a third of a century ago (imagine suggesting that your income tax should be based on what your salary was in 1991). No other tax so badly misvalues so many houses (imagine there was a 50:50 chance that your income tax code wasn’t even based on the job your doing right now). Almost not other tax gives such a high tax break to so few at the expense of so many. It absolutely must change and should have changed 30 years ago.

There have been several alternatives to the Council Tax that have been mooted over the years. Some have been better than others. But to my mind at this point there really are only two possible positions in the debate.

On one side, there are those who advocate for a fair and proportionate Property Tax that applies the tax based on a percentage of the present value of a home. Our own proposal to this effect models – for the purposes of making the argument – a flat percentage rate across all homes but there’s absolutely no reason why that rate can’t be varied by Local Authorities, surcharges for multiple ownership or even, as our friends at Future Economy Scotland have mooted this week, why there couldn’t be a progressive element for very high value homes.

The key point to this though is that if your neighbour who differs from you only in that they own a house that costs ten times as much as yours does, then it is fair and just that they pay ten times as much Property Tax than you do.

On the other side of the argument there is everyone else – who, regardless of what they are putting forward in terms of a reform plan – fundamentally believe that the top 10% of property owners in Scotland should have their lifestyles subsidised by the rest of us – even those of us who are going increasingly into debt just trying to keep a roof over our heads.

That sounds harsh, but let me explain.

If you believe in a banded Council Tax similar to the current one or perhaps modified by the proposals in the recent Scottish Government consultation (or their plan for a mansion tax that came out of nowhere while that consultation was still live) then houses in the top band will always and by definition win a tax cut. Even under the “mansion tax” proposal, a £20 million house will pay the same Council Tax as a £2 million house. This is not fair.

Under our proportionate Property Tax and even under its nation-wide flat rate of 0.63% (or £630 per year on a £100,000 house) we found that despite bringing in the same amount of total revenue, almost everyone whose house cost less than £400,000 would get a tax cut. The same would also be true if any of the Government’s consultation options were adopted and then we decided to move to out Property Tax later. The banded system simply doesn’t work and ALWAYS leads to a subsidy for the rich.

The same is also true for replacing Council Tax with an income tax (a position the SNP had in 2007 and some other parties still have). Wealth inequality is far higher than income inequality and property speculation is itself a major driver of that wealth inequality. Failing to tax wealth would release the brakes even further on property speculation and allow those who bought houses when they were cheap to profit even more when they sell them (The myth of the aged widow with no income living alone in their mansion with no-where else to go is largely that and would be better solved with individual discounts or exemptions and providing more appropriate housing they could move to).

But if, after that, the political parties still can’t agree to reform Council Tax in the only way they should then they should have stopped being the problem. In the run up to the 2021 election, the SNP made a manifesto promise to hold a Citizens Assembly on local tax reform, including Council Tax reform. They failed to deliver on that promise. That Assembly could have created the consensus that Robison is using as a shield against inaction – which is probably why they failed to deliver.

As I point out when I wrote about this last time, the major weakness of the idea of a Citizens Assembly is that politicians fundamentally don’t want them to work. For them to work, the politician has to step out of the way. They have to accept that the Assembly is happening because they weren’t able to do their job. They have to give the power to make the decision to the citizens who form the assembly and then they have to agree – ahead of time and not just if the final answer suits them – to carry out the instructions given to them by the Assembly.

If Shona Robison or her successor wishes to claim that the reason they can’t reform Council Tax is because of a lack of consensus then it is incumbent on them to create that consensus. If they can’t do it themselves, then they need to accept that they are part of the cause of that lack of consensus and should step out of the way.

The debate on Council Tax reform has gone on far too long. Everyone agrees that things need to change. No-one, it appears, wants to be the one to take the responsibility of making that change happen. This isn’t good enough. I’ll be watching the party manifestos closely in the coming weeks. If any of my local candidates can’t tell me what their party is going to do about this failure of responsibility that leads to 90% of people in Scotland effectively subsidising the top 10%, then I’m going to have to ask them who I should vote for instead of them.

What Scotland can learn from the world’s first UBI

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.” – Confucius

This blog post previously appeared in The National, for which I received a commission.
If you’d like to support my work for Common Weal or support me and this blog directly, see my donation policy page here.

(Image Source: Wikimedia)

I like to say that in politics everything seems impossible right up until the moment it becomes inevitable. What this means is that in hindsight, it’s easy to see how something happened even though the campaign had to fight through a mire of “it’ll never happen” almost all the way.

Few campaigns exemplify this maxim for me better than the campaign I’ve been a part of for more than a decade for Scotland to introduce a Universal Basic Income. What began as a campaign so outlandish and so seemingly utopian that we may as well have promised the Moon and the stars has reached the point where, in theory at least, there is currently a Parliamentary majority in favour of the principle of a UBI (The SNP, Greens and Lib Dems all support one in principle and Scottish Labour supports the weaker idea of a Minimum Income Guarantee though I do not believe they’d vote against a UBI if it came to it), even if the barriers to actually implementing one largely prevent it from happening quite yet (barriers largely within the power of the UK Government to remove…we’ll come back to that in a bit).

But still, elsewhere in the world, the impossible truly has become inevitable. This year, a news story happened that has been covered extensively outwith the West and Global North but which you almost certainly haven’t heard about. In November, the Marshall Islands became the world’s first UN Member Nation to announce the implementation of a full Universal Basic Income.

It’s still not “a lot”, even for the local economy, but it will be enough to make a meaningful difference. The UBI is set at 200 US dollars per quarter plus a system of additional rates for people who live in the more outlying islands in the state as well as for retirees, people with disabilities and others who qualify for a top up. It is expected that the system will have a gross cost around 8% of the state’s GDP for the foundational UBI. The payment can be made in the form of paper cheque, direct bank transfer or via cryptocurrency – the latter garnering some attention in crypto circles despite only a dozen or so people opting for this method of payment.

The UBI is largely being funded externally. The Marshall Islands are a sovereign state that is in a “free compact” with the USA – the UK equivalent would be something like an Overseas Territory like the Falkland Islands, albeit with more power over foreign affairs than the UK allows its former colonies – and the bulk of the money will draw from a trust fund set up by the US as part-compensation for the damage wrought by nuclear weapons testing.

We don’t (yet?) have a wealth fund like that but let’s consider what a UBI could look like if Scotland followed the example of the Marshall Islands.

At 8% of GDP, Scotland’s UBI would translate to around £3,200 per person per year or about £60 per week. This is around half of the maximum amount of Universal Credit so it probably strains the definition of “basic” at this level. And yet, we’ve seen in Scotland that even smaller payments, like the £27/week Scottish Child Payment, has already made a massive difference to those who receive it.

The gross cost of an 8% of GDP Scottish UBI would be £40 billion per year or about a third of the total Scottish public sector expenditure budget. But this is misleading on the face of it for the same reason that it would be misleading to judge the Marshall Islands’ UBI on its gross cost.

In Scotland’s case, the implementation of a UBI would require an overhaul of existing social securities. An independent Scotland would be free, of course, to design the system from the ground up but a devolved Scotland would have to renegotiate the Block Grant and devolved Fiscal Framework with the UK Government so that the UBI could part-replace Universal Credit or the state pension without being unfairly clawed back (the failure to agree this scuppered plans for a Scottish UBI pilot scheme a few years ago). Transferring, say, a third of the existing social protection budget into the UBI would reduce the gross cost by around £11 billion.

And then there’s the Scottish tax system. The principle of universality underlying a UBI states that it’s much easier to ensure that no-one who needs it doesn’t get it and that no-one who doesn’t qualify for it doesn’t cheat the system if everyone gets it unconditionally – from the poorest to the richest. Of course, those who “don’t need it” can simply have their total income tax increased to tax it back off them. A simple way of doing it would be to set a line – perhaps at the UK Minimum Income Standard level of around £31,000 per year for a single person with no children – and tax the UBI back off those who earn more. As this would cover around half of Scottish income tax payers – 1.5 million people – this would reduce the gross cost again by another £5 billion or so.

We could close the gap further by making the tax progressive and by targeting wealth as well as income via a land tax and reformed property taxation so that those who earn and own much more than most of us could “pay for” the UBI of several people.

As people spend their UBI, they will pay VAT and companies that receive extra custom due to people being able to afford to buy things will pay corporation taxes (both are currently reserved taxes and therefore raising complications around fiscal transfers under devolution). We could also look at using devolved taxation powers to target Scotland’s keystone exports of energy, whisky and salmon (sectors which are highly foreign-owned and therefore also export their profits from Scotland, contributing to a loss of more than £10 billion per year from Scotland).

Taking these into account reduces the total actual bill for a Scottish UBI from “impossible” to a scheme that starts to look just about possible even under devolution (so long as Westminster abstains from its effective veto over implementation). But there’s one final aspect of a UBI to consider. The cost of poverty within the current system.

If we consider the cost of healthcare resulting from poverty-related conditions, the loss of productivity from poverty (the chronic stress of poverty makes for less productive workers and blocks the ability to take risks such as entrepreneurship), the cost of delivering expensive services such as crisis care for homeless people rather than simply making affordable housing a human right, the additional costs of administering “means-tested” social securities which sometimes exceeds the cost of the benefits being withheld because the punitive nature of the system is part of the point.

This kind of poverty may well be more expensive than the overall net cost of a UBI sufficient to eliminate it. At this point, we see that a UBI isn’t an impossible utopian dream, but becomes a moral imperative that must happen if we are to continue to call ourselves a civilised nation.

The Marshall Islands have proven that the impossible can become inevitable. I look forward to the day that Scotland inevitably does the same.

The Scottish Government wants to avoid reforming Council Tax

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“I hate paying taxes. But I love the civilization they give me” – Oliver Wendell. Holmes

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A stock photo of a street in Glasgow emphasising a row of above-shop flats

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In the run up to the 2021 Scottish Parliamentary Elections, the SNP published their election manifesto with a promise to hold in depth discussions about reforming local taxation, culminating in a Citizens’ Assembly on the subject. After they were returned to Government, they embedded that idea in the 2021 Programme for Government and explicitly elevated the idea that Council Tax reform would be part of this discussion from an idea to an promise.

I remember this being an exciting time in Scottish politics. I was still riding the high from being an expert witness in the Scottish Climate Assembly (and didn’t yet know how badly the Government would let them down). After multiple years of failure to reform or replace one of Scotland’s most badly broken taxes, this was finally a change for politicians to admit that they were part of the problem, to step out of the way and to let citizens tell them what to do instead.

It was never going to be that simple. Despite the success of the Climate Assembly to produce radical ideas – or because of that success in the face of the politicians’ unwillingness to relinquish power and implement those ideas – the promise of a Citizens’ Assembly before the 2026 election dragged on. It was never formally dropped, but Nicola Sturgeon’s Government did not appear to take any action towards setting it up.

When she resigned in 2023, time was tight for the Humza Yousaf Government to pick up the policy. One lesson from the Climate Assembly was that they can take a year to plan, several months to undertake and then a year to properly analyse the results. By his tenure, there was still time to create the Assembly but he’d be passing the job of actually reforming Council Tax to the next Parliament.

And then he, too, resigned. Without once to my knowledge even mentioning the Assembly and not doing much at all to reform local tax by other means (other than his disastrous ad hoc announcement of a freeze to rates during a local government revenue crisis).

And now, in the waning days of the Parliament and with zero time to implement anything new at all, John Swinney’s Government still hasn’t formally cancelled that 2021 manifesto promise but they have clearly decided that they’ll break it.

Instead of a Citizens’ Assembly, his Government has put out a very standard public consultation on some options that they’ve considered around reforming Council Tax while also stating that even if they accept one of them after next year’s election that we shouldn’t expect any actual change to the tax any time within even the next Parliament. We’ll submit our formal response to that consultation and you can too here, but I wanted to use my column this week to discuss their proposed options.

The first thing to say is that they’ve effectively ruled out replacing Council Tax entirely.

The Scottish Government has presented four proposals for reform of Council Tax. This first is the most minimal change possible, though it’s one that has been advocated for as long overdue. The current Council Tax isn’t based on what your house is worth now but what it was worth in 1991. Keeping the current rates and bands but revaluing houses to ensure they are all in the correct and appropriate band would fix problems that have crept in over 30 years of rampant but uneven house price speculation (I’ve seen houses worth £30,000 and worth £300,000 both marked as Band D for Council Tax).

This has been designed to be “revenue neutral” with the current system and as such doesn’t do much to cut taxes for people already in appropriate and low bands or to raise taxes for those appropriately in high bands. It does fix the problem of possibly half of Scotland being in the wrong tax band but this effectively means a lot of upheaval to the system for comparatively little actual gain – even where that gain is necessary.

Two intermediate steps are to change the current 8 Band system to a 12 Band system with one aimed at keeping taxes more or less the same for folk in lower band houses and adding addition bands for the extremely wealthy at the top and the other being more “progressive” by reducing tax rates slightly for lower bands and and increasing it for upper bands.

And finally, there is a 14 band system that looks much like the 12 band “progressive” proposal but with a slightly greater cut for lower bands and a slightly higher increase for upper bands.

The problem with all of these proposals is that the banding system for Council Tax is inherently unfair. Not just in its present form where a house worth 10 or 100 times more than a cheap, Band A house will still only pay about 3.5 times more in Council Tax, but even if the bands were reformed or extended as the Government has proposed here, that problem will always exist.

The very rich who live in houses in the top band will always pay less than their fair share of tax and that means that those in the poorest households will always pay more than their fair share. Even the 14 band system would only apply a maximum differential rate of about eight times as much Council Tax for a house sitting near the bottom of the highest band (starting at £1.83 million) compared to one sitting at the top of the lowest band (£65,000).

This means that a house worth more than 28 times another will only pay about eight times as much tax. What the Government is claiming is a more progressive tax proposal than the current system is still nonetheless deeply regressive and its claim of being “revenue neutral” still means, in effect, the poor are paying a massive tax subsidy to the rich.

“Nine out of ten houses in Scotland are worth less than £400,000.”

Instead, we argue for a proportionate Property Tax similar to the one used in many countries in Europe where the property tax is based on a percentage of the current value of the house – doing away with bands entirely (One could argue to make things even more proportional and add surcharges on very expensive houses in the same way that we don’t pay a flat income tax rate but a progressive one based on how high our salary is – but let’s make the case for a flat percentage tax first, then we can discuss going further). This removes the inherent problem of banding. A house worth ten times as much will always pay ten times as much tax.

One of the arguments against property taxation as opposed to taxing income is the “ability to pay”. It’s often held up that there will be asset rich, income poor people stereotyped as a lonely widow living in her mansion after the kids leave the family home. The truth is that while I’m sure that there will be people in a situation like that, there are better mitigations available than holding the rest of the country back from reforming and replacing an outdated tax system.

The consultation document itself considers a couple of these such as phasing in the tax over several years to make it easier for people to adjust their finances to copy with any increases or allowing people to defer the tax for several years – perhaps until the sale of the house or the death of the owner, though this may result in people having to face a large lump sum tax bill when that time comes.

Another option, one that we may suggest in our response, might be to limit the increase someone pays due to the transition to some percentage of their income or to expand Council Tax discounts to cover people in that situation. Over time though, this would become less of a problem. House prices in general will adjust to reflect their tax bill and houses that are currently overvalued may reduce in price as a result of a high tax burden attached to them (something that wouldn’t happen if we abolished property taxes for a local income tax as some have suggested).

A final point to make in this column is the fact that people don’t really understand just how unequal property wealth actually is in Scotland. This can be seen in the Daily Express’s claim that the Scottish Government’s proposal would mean a tax of up to £6,600 on “hard working families”, without mentioning that this is what would be paid only in the biggest change proposed (the 14 band system) and this rate would only apply to the most expensive houses worth more than £1.83 million.

Very few “hard working families” in Scotland live in £1.8 million houses. In fact, thanks to this consultation, we now know how many households live in worth £1.83 million or more. This band would cover just 0.02% of houses in Scotland – fewer than 15,000 out of Scotland’s more than 2.6 million homes.

In fact, as you can see in our Graph of the Week this week, we can plot the various government proposals (in this case we’ve just plotted the most and least progressive of the four) in comparison to how much more or less people would pay in Council Tax compared to a fair Property Tax. If we moved to our Property Tax then a small house in Band A could see its tax bill halve, while a £2 million mansion would see a substantial increase of £6,000 or more. The “breakeven” point between the current Council Tax (and, in fact, all four of the Government’s proposed reforms) is a house worth £400,000 that is or should be in Band F.

This threshold is at about the 90% percentile of house prices. Nine out of ten houses in Scotland are worth less than £400,000. That means that nine out of ten households in Scotland are currently paying more than their fair share of Council Tax and would benefit from a fair percentage based Property Tax. It also means that all four of the Government’s proposed Council Tax reforms would tweak but would not remove this inequality.

The Scottish Government is, in effect, continuing to protect Scotland’s top 10% of property owners at the expense of everybody else. This is a key lesson that we will be including in our response to the consultation and I hope you will too.

The Council Tax is outdated, unfair and needs to change. The argument of that fact was won more than a quarter of a century ago. That the Government accepts the need for a progressive and fair tax but still cannot bring itself to propose one is a dereliction of duty. That they’ve broken a manifesto commitment to let the people come up with a solution instead is a democratic scandal.

And that they’ve stated that even if they win the next election, they’re not going to implement the solution in the next Parliament just means that this consultation looks like it’s much more about delaying change for another decade rather than righting the wrongs of the lack of change so far.

We can do better than this, especially when the solutions are already clear and understandable. Please submit a response to this consultation and do make clear to your local MSPs that you want to see Council Tax fixed properly, fairly and for the ultimate benefit of All of Us.

You Have Options Too: An Open Letter to John Swinney

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“Squeezing the lives of people is now being proposed as the saviour of the planet. Through the green economy an attempt is being made to technologise, financialise, privatise and commodify all of the earth’s resources and living processes.” – Vandana Shiva

This blog post previously appeared in The National.
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wind turbines on snowy mountain under clear blue sky during daytime

DEAR First Minister John Swinney,

The UK is running away from the hard choices on energy. Its dismissal of ideas like zonal pricing – ­currently the only scheme yet presented that would allow the UK to maximise renewable energy generation, minimise infrastructure costs like ­pylons and to reduce fuel poverty while giving communities more incentive to take control of their own local energy generation – has been rightly criticised by you last week in a statement where you called out the UK for not doing enough on energy policy.

It was concerning to note, though, that your critique wasn’t backed up by much on what you want the UK to actually do instead. Even as you complained about the UK “ruling out all options to bring down ­energy bills” by abandoning zonal pricing, I’m not clear if you support it or would bring it in if you had the power to do so.

We all know that Scotland’s devolved powers in energy are limited and that, right now, you couldn’t do something like this, but also missing from your critique was what you plan to do with the powers you do have.

Scotland’s own devolved energy ­strategy has been woefully lacking in recent years – from the sell-off of ScotWind at ­bargain basement prices, through ­dropping ­climate targets that were designed to push ­action ever forwards, to flogging off (sorry, “­encouraging foreign direct investment in”) every piece of our renewable energy sector to multinational companies and ­foreign public energy companies to ensure that everyone in the world can profit from Scotland’s energy except us.

We can take another path, though. ­Scotland must ensure that we own our own renewable energy future and the way to do that is by bringing it into public ownership. Here are several ways that you could do it.

1) A National Energy Company

This is what most of us think of when we think about “Scottish public energy”, and it’s the model that the Welsh Government adopted under the name Ynni Cymru. This is a single national company, owned by the Scottish Government or by Scottish ministers (similar to Scottish Water), that would own, generate and sell energy to consumers.

There is a snag to this plan in that the Scotland Act currently prohibits the ­Scottish Government from “owning, ­generating, transmitting or storing” electricity, so if we want the National Energy Company to be based around supplying ­electricity, then the first thing that the Scottish ­Government could be doing is mounting a pressure campaign to amend the Act – it puts Scotland in the ridiculous position that it’s legal for the Welsh Government to own a wind turbine in Scotland but not the Scottish Government.

Until that campaign is successful, there is something you can do.

The Act quite specifically bans your Government from owning electricity ­generators. It does not ban other forms of energy. A National Heat Company based around deploying district heat networks could supply all but the most remote of Scottish households.

While this would be a large infrastructure project, it wouldn’t be larger than the one required to build the electricity pylons we need if we’re going to electrify heat instead and the pipes would have the advantage of being underground and out of sight while ultimately providing heat to homes in a cheap, more efficient and ultimately more future-proof way that the current setup of asking people to buy heat pumps and just hoping that the grid can cope with the demand.

2) Local Electricity Companies

So, First Minister, let’s say that you’re not a fan of campaigning for the devolution of more powers and really want Scotland to be generating electricity. You can’t create a National Electricity Company but you can encourage local authorities to set up their own Local Electricity Company.

Conceivably, the 32 councils could even jointly own one National Electricity Company – the Scotland Act merely bans the Scottish Government from owning the company.

In many ways, this would be an even better idea than the Scottish Government doing it. Government borrowing ­powers are far too limited and you’d need to ­campaign for more borrowing powers to get the scale of action required to build the infrastructure we need – but councils have a trick up their sleeves.

They are allowed to borrow basically as much money as they like so long as the ­investment the borrowing allows brings in enough of a return to pay back the loan. This is very likely how Shetland Council will finance its plan to connect the islands via tunnels – the construction would be paid for via tolls on traffic.

Energy, as we know, is very profitable indeed so there should be absolutely no issue with councils being able to pay back their loans and then to use the revenue from their energy generation to subsidise local households against fuel poverty and to support public services.

If we want to go even more local than this, then councils and perhaps the Scottish National Investment Bank could support communities to own their own energy.

We’ve seen multiple times that community ownership generates many times as much local wealth building – as well as skills and jobs – than the current model of private ownership plus paltry “community benefit funds”.

3) A National Mutual Energy Company

This is another national-scale energy company that the Scottish Government could launch but in this case wouldn’t own or control. Instead, the “National Mutual” would be owned by the people of Scotland.

In this model, every adult resident of ­Scotland would be issued one share in the company. They wouldn’t be able to sell it and they’d have to surrender it if they ever stop living in Scotland, but ­other than this, it would be much like owning a share in companies like Co-op.

The company would be run as any other commercial company and would be beholden not to the Government but to its shareholders – us. We’d jointly ­decide ­future energy strategy and even potentially have a say in how much of the company’s operating surpluses are invested in future developments or distributed to shareholders (again, us) as a dividend.

This model would be particularly suited to very large energy developments that cut across local authority or even national borders or to help develop offshore assets. Imagine ScotWind had been owned by the people of Scotland, instead of being flogged off to multinational companies in an auction that had a maximum bidding price attached.

Conclusion

First Minister, I applaud you for keeping up some sense of pressure on the UK Government on energy.

As we make the necessary ­transitions ­required of us under our obligations to end the climate emergency, this is one of the sectors of Scotland that will change the most. It’s vital that we get this ­transition right, or not only will ­Scotland see yet another generation of energy ­potential squandered in the same way that the coal and oil eras were, we’ll see Scottish ­households bear the weight of others ­profiting from that transition while we still experience crushing levels of poverty and economic vulnerability.

The UK Government may be ruling out all of their options on energy but that doesn’t mean that you need to do the same. We don’t need to wait until independence – as vital as it is – or to wait until Westminster gets its act together – which may or may not happen. We – you – have options too. It’s time to take them.

Yours, expectantly …

How to Launch a Scottish Wealth Tax

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.” – Eugene V. Debs

This blog post previously appeared in The National.
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person holding fan of us dollar bill

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“From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. This used to be the core credo of parties of the Left – particularly the Labour Party in Britain – but it appears to have been eroded to the point of meaninglessness. Wealth inequality is increasing at an unimaginable rate and is currently substantially higher than income inequality. The rich are taking from all of us far more than they need and are giving back far less than what they are able to. This is a self-reinforcing problem such as where people who were able to buy houses when they were cheap (perhaps during Thatcher’s Right to Buy demolition of the social housing sector) became able to rent them out at ever increasing rates to people who can’t now afford to save the deposit to buy a house because house prices are rising faster than they can save due to the amount they have to spend on rent. Even the Office of Budget Responsibility is now warning (as I did several years ago in my book All of Our Futures) of the fiscal risks looming due to the number of people still privately renting when they retire and who will simultaneously be unable to afford to keep paying those rents and won’t have any capital saved in their house to subsidise their inadequate state pensions.

It’s not for no reason that the British public are increasingly demanding that the UK Government brings in a wealth tax to rebalance our increasingly unstable economy. I will say that there are good reasons for the UK to not bring in “a wealth tax” – by which I mean a single annual payment calculated as a certain percentage of the value of all of the assets and possessions that you own. Prof. Richard Murphy has articulated many of them well. It’s hard to value those possessions. Easy to hide them. And there are other taxes that the UK could use – such as reforms to taxes on stocks, shares, pensions and capital gains – that would achieve much of the same result. Not that the UK Government is going to do any of that either unless the pressure escalates to the point that the impossible becomes inevitable.

Let’s say, however, that the Scottish Government wants to take the first step. Could we do it here instead of waiting for the UK?

The patterns of wealth ownership in Scotland are substantially different than in the UK (particularly in London and the South East). We don’t have quite as many financial billionaires floating about the place. We don’t have as much wealth in stocks and shares – mostly because we don’t have a stock exchange in Scotland any more. Our generally lower rates of pay mean comparatively lower rates of wealth stored in pensions. There are, however, two sectors in Scotland where wealth is substantially stored and which could be taxed using devolved tax powers – Land and buildings.

Scotland already has its Land and Buildings Transaction Tax but despite the Scottish Greens seeking to apply what they called a “mansion tax” to it this would remain merely a surcharge on the transfer of assets, not a wealth tax applied to the holding of them. If you never bought another mansion, you’d never pay the mansion tax.

Council Tax is the most outdated and badly broken tax Scotland still insists on inflicting on the poor. The Scottish Government has stated that they’re not even going to think about reforming it until the end of this decade. This is completely unacceptable, especially as the solution is obvious. We need to scrap Council Tax and replace it with a tax based on a percentage of the present market value of the property. Common Weal argued that a rate of 0.63% would have been revenue neutral compared to Council Tax at the time we published the paper. That number could be recalculated now but we estimated then that a “revenue neutral” rate would actually mean a tax cut for eight out of 10 households as the burden of paying the tax would be placed more fairly on those who lived in the most expensive houses. We calculated that the “break even” point then would have been a house worth something like £400,000. This is based one a flat rate of tax too. We would argue that Councils should have the power to add progressive rates on extremely valuable properties like £1mn+ mansions or, as is the case with the current Council Tax, additional multipliers for multiple home ownership.

This would immediately act as a wealth tax both on the most expensive properties but also on multiple property ownership. Unlike Council Tax that is paid by occupants, our Property Tax would be paid by property owners and they could only pass on to their tenants the basic rate of tax. Landlords would have to pay any multiple ownership surcharges themselves.

The second wealth store in Scotland – land – is probably the greatest store of almost untaxed wealth in the country. Many countries tax the ownership of land as a distinct tax from properties built on it (sometimes because of local democracy, for example you might pay the land tax to your municipal government and your property tax to your regional government) but in Scotland there may be good reason to not do that but to simply extend the Property Tax to cover not just the land under and around your mansion but also the broader estate you own with it. Given that the two are often sold together, this will be much easier to put a price on than trying to calculate a separate Land Value Tax. We’ve estimated that doing this at the same flat rate as the Property Tax would bring in around £450 million a year in revenue – though this could be adjusted down to account for subsidies for small farms or up to better tax the 422 people who own half of Scotland.

One of the major advantages of both of these taxes – one that negates objections from both the UK and Scottish Government whenever taxes on the wealth have been suggested – is that it completely bypasses the idea that the rich will simply leave the country. Recent studies have shown that the idea of “millionaire flight” basically isn’t a thing (it’s not just a huge logistical hassle for comparatively little financial gain to pack everything up to go and live in a tax haven, even millionaires have friends and family as do their kids and tearing up those social bonds to save a bit of money just isn’t worth it) but this hasn’t stopped the media pushing that line anyway. Even if it was true, the wealth they have locked up in Scottish land and housing can’t move with them. The tax still needs to be paid by whomever owns them regardless of where they live (and many of the largest landowners in Scotland already don’t live here so the point is particularly moot there).

One of the biggest sources of instability in our current society and economy is wealth inequality. It urgently needs to be reigned in and reversed. If the UK Government persists in refusing to do it then there is at least something that the Scottish Government can do without having to wait for them. And if the current Scottish Government doesn’t want to do it either well, there are elections next year. Maybe politicians could suggest who we should vote for who will?

Democracy By All Of Us

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / 1 Comment

“Politics should be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.” –  Lucille Ball

This blog post previously appeared in The National as part of Common Weal’s In Common newsletter.
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Chamber

With a single act, the Scottish Parliament could radically overhaul our devolved democracy and put people at the heart of holding our legislators to account.

I’m grateful for the coverage The National gave to the the Independence Forum Scotland National Convention last weekend. It was wonderful to see the building activism in the room and delegates certainly kept me on my toes during the Energy World Cafe. The desire to see Scotland bring more of its energy resources into public hands is strong and I was glad to lay out how it could be done despite the limited powers of devolution.

Another question came out of the day about navigating similar limits in another area. One of Common Weal’s calls for the strengthening of our democracy is the creation of a second chamber in the Scottish Parliament that could take some of the weight off of the scrutiny committees, could make sure our laws are fit for purpose and – perhaps most crucially – could oversee the Parliamentarians themselves and hold them to account if and when they fall short of the standards expected of them. In this way it would act very much like the House of Lords down south or the elected or appointed upper chambers in many other countries (Scotland is one of the very few national-scale polities that don’t have an upper chamber – even most of the US states have one) but we want to improve on the highly corruptible model of appointing Lords for life based on their loyalty or political donations (still waiting on Labour delivering on the manifesto promise they made over a century ago to fix that one down south) or even the counter productive model of electing party-loyal people to that chamber (and thus replicating the US model where there is zero accountability when one party controls both houses and zero progress when they don’t). Instead, we want a Citizens’ Assembly where all registered voters in Scotland are entered into a lottery similar to jury duty and are called to serve in the Parliament. Appointments would be by random selection initially but the long list would be adjusted to ensure that the actual Assembly is balanced demographically across age, income, geographic representation and other factors (this model was used to great success in the 2021 Scottish Climate Assembly). Appointments would be generously paid (on par with MSP salaries) and would last a fixed time – we suggest a one year appointment with a third or a half of the chamber rotating out periodically – and there would be the same protections on returning to your job as there are for jury duty or paternal leave. The comparison to juries is a strong one. If we trust our peers to determine if it has been proven or not proven that someone has broken the law, then we are more than capable of determining whether or not the laws themselves are broken.

Sounds great, but the question we were asked at the Convention was whether or not Scotland has the power to set up such a Chamber.

If we were independence, it would be a relatively trivial matter to write the structure of the Chamber into our constitution but until then, the constitutional document we have to follow is the Scotland Act. Yes, the UK does have a constitution – it’s just not written down in one place and unlike the constitution of most nations, Westminster has sovereignty over it rather than being subordinate to it and so can change it whenever it likes.

As the Scotland Act doesn’t mention an Upper Chamber in its framework and as Westminster is extremely unlikely to exercise its power to write one into the Act, how could we set one up pre-independence?

Essentially we act as if we can.

The Scottish Parliament can set up advisory bodies or Commissioners to oversee the work of Parliament and even though we couldn’t mandate that they must follow the advice of those bodies (this was ultimately the source of the failure of the Climate Assembly – the Government decided they didn’t like the advice they were given so largely ignored it), Parliament and Government could collectively agree to follow those instructions – there’s nothing in the Scotland Act that actively prevents them from doing this just as nothing prevents parties whipping their members into voting along certain lines despite that not being an “official” part of our democracy.

Such an “unofficial” upper chamber wouldn’t be nearly as powerful as a constitutionally mandated one but that’s not to say that it would be powerless. Yes, something created by an Act of Parliament alone could be scrapped by one (a constitutional amendment would require a referendum). Yes, the Government could simply stop listening to its advice. This would place it on par with the other Commissioner bodies that exist around the Scottish Parliament. Yes, Westminster could overrule the Scottish Parliament and write a specific prohibition into the Scotland Act or elsewhere. This would place it on par with any other piece of legislation the Scottish Parliament has ever passed. If either of these barriers are enough to stop us, we might as well just give up on devolution entirely.

Scenes playing out across the world right now only serve to highlight how precious and vulnerable the very concept of democracy is and how no single person or even multi-person office can be trusted with more power than it needs. Scotland’s highly centralised form of government needs to be spread out a lot more locally but we also need more scrutiny and accountability at all levels from the top down. The best people to do that are All of Us appointed not to a House of Lords, but to a House of Citizens.

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The Only Way To Fix Council Tax

/ Dr Craig Dalzell / Leave a comment

“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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