An ongoing debate

Up until now, the mere mention of reforming the council tax system has been enough to strike fear into the hearts of the strongest politician. Last month Finance Secretary John Swinney confirmed that council tax would be frozen for the eighth year in a row, which means all households across Scotland will continue to pay the same rate they did back in 2007. For Alison Johnstone, continuing the freeze is letting us “dodge the need to replace this deeply unfair tax”.

Speaking to Holyrood, she said: “Throughout the referendum campaign, the Greens made it clear that we were not campaigning for a mini Westminster. We wanted to see further devolution from the Scottish Parliament and we were campaigning for a parliament that would have the self-confidence to truly empower local authorities. My experience as a councillor in Edinburgh for five years really convinced me that people on the ground have the best understanding what their local communities need. 

“One of the benefits of having served as a councillor and now in parliament is you really appreciate the impact of the government’s budget on local authorities. It strikes me as ironic that the Scottish Government is absolutely determined that in order to govern properly and with accountability, they need to be in charge of setting their own budgets and raising as much of their own revenue as possible and deciding where that should be spent. 

“I think the council tax freeze has made that impossible for local authorities. Obviously budgets are tight, councils have less money to spend but it has disempowered local authorities. It has got them out of the way of thinking, ‘what could we raise’, ‘how much do we need to raise’, and ‘how are we going to spend it’. I don’t think that’s helpful.
“I have heard that Angela Merkel would be forbidden to impose a council tax freeze. The German constitution would not allow such a thing because raising money locally and spending money locally is entirely devolved to local government and national government shouldn’t be involved. There are lessons to be learned there. Across Europe, it is obvious a lot of local authorities raise a far greater percentage of their revenues than we do here in Scotland.”

Johnstone believes the SNP might speak about empowering communities but the council tax freeze has done the opposite.

“By freezing the rates they’ve avoided the question of how we find a better solution for local democracy and for funding those services,” she added.

“Under the council tax system, which is based on what homes were worth way back in 1991, the poorest in our society are hit much harder than the richest, and this is a substantial bill that most of us pay each and every month. To be fair, the SNP did recognise this when they first got into Government, and proposed a local version of income tax instead, but they hit technical and political problems with their plan. With the independence referendum debate behind us, and with cuts being made to local services while wealth inequality grows, it’s clear that the situation can’t go on much longer.

“It would have made a real difference if those who could afford it had paid a bit more over the last few years. Instead, councils have been forced to increase fees and charges for things like care homes and leisure services, which is the least fair system of all. All parties will have their own ideas to contribute, and the Greens certainly have ideas about taxing land rather than house prices, but we might get some of the best ideas from outside of party politics. This is just part of a bigger debate about how local democracy could work better in Scotland. It’s easy to feel like you have no power to influence decisions made about your local area.”

She said her Green councillor colleagues have long been of the view that the more empowered local authorities are, the better. 

She said: “We are very under represented. We have one councillor per several thousand people in a way which just isn’t replicated elsewhere in Europe. There are parts of Scandinavia where is it quite normal that one in 81 people will have stood for elected local office. If you stand for office in Scotland, you are probably pretty unusual among your friends and family. When I first decided to stand for Edinburgh Council, no-one I knew or was in regular contact with, had ever done that. It has been something which is not within a normal life experience and I think that has to change. People are representing larger and larger areas, some of our wards are pretty substantial. When I was representing Meadows and Morningside there were some 15,000 households and over 20,000 individuals. That’s just a council ward. These are things which we should look at while we’re discussing reform of local authorities.”