By Keith Aitken in
Edinburgh
4 April 2011
First Minister Alex Salmond has been forced to shelve plans for a local income tax in Scotland amid criticisms that the government has suppressed adverse official advice about the costs.
The setback comes just days before Salmond is due to publish the Scottish National Party’s manifesto and as polls suggest that the SNP has begun to overtake Labour in the run-up to the Holyrood elections on May 5.
The SNP took office in 2007 committed to replacing the council tax with a local income tax, provisionally set at 3p in the pound.
The plan was ditched in 2009 after hostility from the other Holyrood parties, but the SNP had been expected to present voters with a reworked proposal in 2011, ready potentially to mesh with the Scotland Bill reforms in 2015.
Salmond has now announced that a re-elected SNP government would not attempt to introduce local income tax in the next Parliament – which runs to 2016 – but would spend the next five years instead laying the groundwork for implementation.
The 2009 decision followed written advice from the government’s senior economic adviser, Dr Andrew Goudie. Opposition leaders speculate that this might have corroborated their claim that the SNP’s costings were wrong.
An application by the Daily Telegraph for Goudie’s paper to be published was granted by Freedom of Information commissioner Kevin Dunion, but appealed by the government to the Court of Session. That appeal is ongoing.
The episode has revived tensions between the SNP government and Dunion, with ministers insisting that advice from officials must stay private. Dunion sees this as an overly narrow interpretation of FoI obligations, and ruled that release of the Goudie paper was in the public interest.
More immediately, the issue has given other party leaders an opportunity to attack Salmond. Labour will hand out 250,000 leaflets in the next few days, accusing the SNP of spending £53,000 of public money to keep its tax policy secret
Iain Gray, the Scottish Labour leader, called it ‘a defining issue of the campaign’, while the Conservatives’ Annabel Goldie accused Salmond of spending an ‘outrageous’ sum of taxpayers’ money on trying to hide the truth.
