There was talk over the weekend about the rise in council tax that’s inevitably coming when the current freeze – announced last year by Humza Yousaf – comes to an end. One SNP MSP was quoted as saying “councils will be able to let council tax rip”. Brace yourselves.
The question is whether ending the freeze and allowing councils to increase the tax again is the right way to go. The Scottish Government’s rationale when they announced the freeze was that people were struggling with their bills during a cost of living crisis, which they were and are, and that council tax was one of the bills the government could control to make people’s lives a little easier. Don’t dig too deep – in fact, don’t dig at all – and this is a perfectly reasonable argument.
The problem with it is that freezing council tax actually punishes, twice over, the people it’s trying to help. First of all, it’s the middle classes and above who benefit most from a freeze because they pay more of the tax and people in poverty see virtually none of the savings. Secondly, a freeze means councils have less income (even with the government’s extra budget to compensate) and start to make cuts or charge for services and, again, it’s people in poverty who rely on those services most and therefore suffer the most.
I would have thought all of this is fairly obvious because everyone everywhere has been saying it for years. Poverty campaigners say the tax is regressive because it doesn’t pro.