Scots Labour leader seeks council tax alternatives

28 Oct 13
Labour’s leader in Scotland has called for a rethink of Scottish local government finance, to identify alternatives to the ‘discredited’ council tax

By Keith Aitken in Edinburgh | 28 October 2013

Labour’s leader in Scotland has called for a rethink of Scottish local government finance, to identify alternatives to the ‘discredited’ council tax.

In a weekend BBC Scotland interview, Johann Lamont claimed that the council tax freeze enforced in Scotland since 2007 had been underfunded by the Scottish National Party government at Holyrood, resulting in a deterioration of local services for which SNP Ministers had then blamed the councils. 

‘We also know that the council tax is discredited and I would hope that, across parties, we could have a discussion about how properly to fund local government,’ she said

‘I want a discussion, not where the parties get dividing lines between each other, but [where they] come together and address the challenge of how do you properly build confidence in the way you raise taxes locally.’

She was commenting in the wake of a report from retired academic Arthur Midwinter, which calculated that some £1bn had been diverted from anti-poverty programmes as a result of the cost of the council tax freeze and the associated removal of ring-fencing within municipal budgets.

Midwinter is advising Lamont on options for re-ordering Scottish spending priorities, with a particular focus on SNP-backed universal benefits like free tuition, prescriptions and pensioner travel. ‘There is no sound financial reason why the universal benefits or subsidies should be exempt from the resource restraints which other programmes are facing,’ his report says.

‘The major gainers from these universal benefits have been the middle and upper income households.’

The review has been controversial since Lamont suggested in a speech last September that some universal benefits created a ‘something for nothing’ culture for the better off.  

Lamont has been seen by some commentators to have since been trying to row back from that speech.  She told the BBC: ‘It is a reflection of the cartoon politics that the SNP misrepresent and scaremonger about what Labour has said. 

‘I have never said that some people get something for nothing. What I have said is that you have to look at both what you spend money on and what are the consequences of that.’

But First Minister Alex Salmond’s office seized on her latest remarks as ‘a massive own goal’, pointing to poll findings that showed the council tax freeze to be popular with 82% of Scottish voters, and 75% of Scottish Labour voters.

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