Chamber and committees

My worry is that we could spend an eternity talking about a full replacement to the council tax and, because that would create more areas of difference, we would end up debating backwards and forwards—as we have done over a number of years. I have run out of patience for that, to be honest. I am a pragmatist by nature. Rather than make no progress, why do we not just see whether we can make some progress? Even if it is quite modest, that will be better that than nothing.

In the future, there might be a different landscape and different views, and there might end up being a consensus around a complete replacement of the council tax, which would be great. However, I do not think that that is on offer in the here and now. There is too much scope for division. Instead of debating that, let us look at possible areas of agreement and move forward with those. If we could do something about 1991 property values in a way that is pragmatic and practical and has consensus, that would be better—it would be progress rather than nothing.

Local government has made a lot of efforts in that direction. I see a lot of local authorities setting out in detail what their council tax payers, if you like, can expect to receive from the investment that is being made. Local government services are funded through a hybrid of funds, of which council tax is just one element, but I think that there is something to be said for being on the front foot in setting out what the council tax will contribute to delivery, and I have seen some really good examples from local authorities that are doing that sort of thing more and more.

There might be something in that, although people probably have quite a strong reaction to taxes in general. I think that Katie Hagmann’s point about the visibility of council tax and the fact that it is a tax that spans two spheres of government, as well as there being interaction with actions that the Scottish Parliament might take—of course, any major changes to council tax would require legislation—goes back to the point about consensus. There is something about the complexity of council tax. There might be a historical legacy aspect and, as Katie pointed out, there is a lot of media attention. It is tricky.

That is a fair challenge. My party has looked at various options for replacing council tax. For a time, we were focused on looking at whether there could be a local income tax alternative, but the problem was that that would not have raised enough money. Essentially, as the commission noted in 2015, we concluded that there needs to be a property element to local taxation.

We now have a Parliament of minorities, so the only way to move forward is to try to build consensus. However, with something as fundamental as council tax reform, even if we did not have to build consensus, I think that doing so would be the right thing to do. At the end of the day, we do not want to be seen to have developed something behind closed doors and to say, “Here it is—take it or leave it.” Even if we were able to do that, I do not think that that would land in the right way. The reform must stand the test of time, so we need to make sensible incremental changes that create a fairer system. That system might not be perfect, but people should feel that it is much better than the one that we have at the moment. I am keen to continue those discussions.

If there are recommendations from the committee’s work, we will be keen to embrace those as much as we can, as part of cross-party working.

There will be a cost; we absolutely need to recognise that. There may then be an on-going cost—is it a system that is going to be updated, and what would be the timeframe for those updates? An investment will need to be made. Basing that on the Welsh experience is not a bad starting point, but the change will require investment.

It is worth dusting down some of the work that was done rather than repeating it. The fact that there was a conclusion that local tax had to include some form of domestic property tax is not unhelpful. There is a lot in the commission’s work that could be drawn on, but we need to address the fundamental point that, by the nature of the issue, any change will progress only if it has enough political support. I keep coming back to that, but it is just a fact. Katie Hagmann and I, in our respective roles, are keen to see what is the art of the possible. Doing nothing and having a position of no change is not sustainable. If we all agree on that, we need to consider where we can move to.

We have yet to look at narrowing down the details, so I do not want to be overly prescriptive. However, my worry about that goes back to the worry that I expressed earlier about creating division rather than consensus. My instinct is that we are more likely to build consensus by adding more bands to make the council tax banding system more progressive.

There is also the issue of the complexity of delivery. Any major change or completely new system would be complex and take a lot of time and resource effort. There would have to be quite a lot of advantages to doing that instead of building on the system that we have already set up. I would be more drawn towards making incremental improvements than to trying to do something that would be challenging.

Yes. The figure could be much lower than that. The technical work will give us much more information. I ask Ellen Leaver to say something about that.

First, I think that a lot of good work was carried out through the 2015 commission. The commission did not recommend any specific form of taxation to replace the council tax, but it unpacked a lot of issues. The commission expressed a predominant view that local tax should continue to include some sort of domestic property tax, with a new system that was more progressive than the council tax.

The issue then is probably still the issue now—it is about getting consensus. That is why I have been pretty up front and honest in saying that I do not think that we will be able to move forward unless we can build enough consensus, not just in relation to identifying the problem, but about what to do next. Everybody will agree that 1991 property values are out of date and that something needs to be done about that. Everybody will agree that the current council tax system is not as progressive as it should be and that it needs to be improved. The difficulty is agreeing on what should come next in terms of improvements.

I am quite optimistic that we can genuinely build some consensus around the principles that we agree on. There will be a lot that we disagree on, but there are areas that we can agree on where we could begin to make some changes. It might not be about having a big bang, massive replacement for the council tax, but I hope that we can find areas of agreement so that we can take some incremental steps to address some of the issues, such as progressivity. It remains to be seen where we will get with that but that is, in essence, what Katie Hagmann and I are keen to do.