The Scottish Government has a chance to turn the clock back on 14 years of austerity and rebuild community wealth. But to do so it must invest in local services, end peak fares, deliver free school meals, scrap the small business bonus scheme, and raise revenue from property and wealth taxes.
November 2024
Open letter from Scotland’s largest trade unions, academics, charities and campaign organisations calling on Scotland’s main political party leaders to ‘urgently’ revaluate property across the country as a critical step towards reforming Scotland’s broken system of local property taxation.
April 2024
A report by Howard Reed, Landman Economics, commissioned by the STUC exploring the options for increasing taxes in Scotland to fund investment in public services and public sector pay. The research finds that short-run and longer-run tax changes could raise an extra £3.3 billion per year, which could be used to fund a real-terms increase in public sector pay as well as a substantial additional investment in Scotland’s public services. The increase in public sector pay reduces gender inequalities in earnings, and the package of tax increases is distributionally progressive whether measured by household wealth or household income.
December 2022
A report by Howard Reed, Landman Economics, commissioned by the STUC exploring the options for increasing taxes in Scotland to fund investment in public services and public sector pay. The research finds that short-run and longer-run tax changes could raise an extra £3.7 billion per year.
April 2024
On 12 July 2023, the Scottish Government and COSLA published a consultation seeking views on potential changes to the council tax system that could see those in the highest value properties asked to pay more.
September 2023
On 17 April 2023, the Scottish Government and COSLA published a consultation on changes to council tax on second and empty homes/non-domestic rates, which would allow council tax to be increased for second and empty homes and for changes to the regulation of short-term lets.
July 2023
On 17 March 2023, the Scottish Government published a consultation on the draft legislative clauses to introduce a proposed relief from Land and Buildings Transaction Tax (LBTT) for Green Freeports. In January 2023, Inverness and Cromarty Firth Green Freeport and Forth Green Freeport were jointly selected by the Scottish and UK governments to become Scotland’s first Green Freeports.
May 2023
On 24 June the Scottish Parliament’s Finance and Public Administration Committee issued a call for views on the sustainability of Scotland's finances as the basis of its pre-budget scrutiny.
August 2023
In May 2022, the Scottish Government’s Resource Spending Review set out its high-level spending plans up until 2026-27, including plans to keep pay bill costs at 2022-23 levels by ‘returning the public sector workforce broadly to pre-Covid-19 levels’. For these reasons, in March 2023, the Finance Committee launched an inquiry to look in more detail at the Scottish Government’s public service reform programme, ahead of the Scottish Budget.
April 2023
Written by IPPR, this thought paper outlines the existing local government funding context, including recent cuts to local government funding in Scotland, and current funding arrangements. The paper then looks at a number of international examples of sub-state taxes, before considering which of these international examples could be applicable in Scotland. The paper considers five illustrative examples of potential new forms of local tax and local funding arrangements in Scotland.
September 2019
