By Professor John Robertson OBA
BBC Breakfast this morning looked at the increasing cost of living, in particular council tax increases.
They didn’t compare costs across the UK.
In March 2024:
While Labour, Tory and LibDem councils tried to impose big council tax hikes, it was an SNP government which has protected family budgets during this cost-of-living crisis.
As well as showing a clear difference between the SNP and the Westminster parties, it also stands as an example to show voters how decisions made in Scotland prove better for the people of Scotland.
It was the SNP that delivered a policy to protect people during a cost-of-living crisis.
The above is from SNP Media.
Progressive? Surely not?
In December 2023, the Daily Record’s Paul Hutcheon claimed:
Humza Yousaf’s council tax gamble helps the wealthy and does nothing for the poor https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/humza-yousafs-council-tax-gamble-31210722
It was a quick, little-researched stab, derived from an anti-SNP starting point.
In 2020, the Institute for Fiscal Studies put a bit more intellectual elbow into and concluded that the Conservative Party’s council tax freeze, beginning in 2010, would lead to these outcomes, illustrated in the graph above:
The biggest beneficiaries in proportional terms are those in the middle of the income distribution and those at the very bottom. Many poorer people gain little or not at all, because council tax benefit would have largely or entirely insulated them from the impact of the council tax increase that would have occurred in the absence of this policy.
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Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
While what you say is true to an extent, Council Tax is REGRESSIVE. The Tories designed it to be so and neither the SNP in Scotland nor the Labour governments at Westminster have done much to change that. The SNP increased the number of bands which meant that people in more expensive houses paid more and hypothecated the monies raised for schools and, importantly, to be spent by schools.
The freeze of Council Tax, by the SNP, while assisting in the short term did not alter the fundamentally regressive nature of the tax. In addition, it disempowered local authorities and increased the rate of centralisation of power.
We need a substantial devolution of power including revenue raising powers to Councils and we need Councils to devolve these things, further, to community councils.
Alasdair Macdonald
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