HOW do you solve a problem like local taxation?

It's a question every Holyrood administration has comprehensively failed to answer.

With a Commission on Local Tax Reform to report in the Autumn, the issue will come hurtling back into the headlines soon enough. Expect it to be one of the most hotly-contested topics of next year's Holyrood election, with planning of manifestos already in their early stages.

There is broad agreement that the current council tax is no good. As the co-chairmen of the commission pointed out in The Herald yesterday, the system sees someone in a £50,000 ex-council house in Ferguslie Park, Paisley, the most deprived area in Scotland, pay only one third of the bill of the owner of a £1.5 million mansion in The Grange.

Meanwhile, a council tax freeze, brought in by the SNP in 2007 as a short-term measure but persisting to this day, has cost £2.5 billion, with the bill to rise to more than £6bn if it continues for another five years. Nicola Sturgeon's newly-appointed poverty advisor could presumably think of one or two places that the cash spent on a policy that disproportionately benefits more comfortable households could be better spent.

Yet, the council tax freeze remains a vote-winner, and herein lies the problem. All the main parties found themselves backing it in 2011, with Jim Murphy supporting it during the General Election campaign.

How much VAT did you pay last year? But, as the last remaining levy requiring an effort to pay, almost everyone knows their council tax bill, meaning any losers of an overhaul will shriek especially loudly.

Some radical replacements have been suggested to the commission. Among them is a land value tax. As the name suggests, contributions would be based on the value of land alone, ignoring anything built on it. Supporters over the years include Henry George, the feted 19th Century American progressive political economist. One of his followers invented Monopoly in a bid to demonstrate the evils of land-grabbing. Adam Smith was a fan too, with advocates arguing it is all but impossible to avoid, it acts as an incentive to productivity and is a deterrent against unsustainable price booms.

Regular revaluations would mean that people who benefit from taxpayer-funded infrastructure projects - for example those who saw property values rise by being next to an Edinburgh tram stop part-funded by taxpayers in Inverness - pay a bit more back.

Perhaps most significantly, another fan is Joseph Stiglitz. The Nobel Prize winner, who sits on the Scottish Government's council of economic advisors, recently argued that "land taxes can be an important instrument for increasing equality" and, after using statistical modelling, he concluded that "a land tax actually leads to higher wages and a higher level of national output". One wonders whether he has the First Minister's ear on this one. Sir Peter Burt, who knows more than most about the difficulties of reform after his comprehensive 2006 report recommending a levy on a home's value was disowned by Jack McConnell before it was even published, has understandably predicted that a "political fudge" will eventually follow the commission's findings.