BILL Findlay (Letters, November 17) should understand that informed voters are aware that the council tax makes up generally only about 20 per cent of the revenues available to local government.
The real problem with local government finance is the austerity cuts on Scotland's block grant from Westminster which translates into progressively less money available for our councils.
In every year that the council tax has been frozen Finance Secretary John Swinney has stepped in and given extra money to the councils as their reward for agreeing to it.
However, as council tax makes up such a small part of local government funding, increases in the tax would have to be very substantial indeed to provide any significant benefit to council funding.
And such an imposition of course would exclusively be on named householders and not where it more sensibly should be - on all taxpayers.
Through the council tax we have the ridiculous and unfair situation of an aged person now living alone in the family home and making very little use of local services paying almost as much in council tax as the combined payments of three or four active wage-earners living next door.
Council tax bears no relationship to ability to pay and in any progressive and fair taxation system is unacceptable because of that. It goes without saying that increases in it are undesirable.
The Scottish Government under SNP control has always recognised the unfairness of the council tax and supported the much more sensible suggestion of a local income tax on all wage-earners easily collected through the existing tax collection mechanism.
Movement towards this fairer system had to be abandoned because Westminster threatened to stop the grants it provided to local government funding to Scottish councils if the Scottish Government decided to abandon council tax in favour of a local income tax.
Dave McEwan Hill,
1 Tom Nan Ragh,
Dalinlongart,
Sandbank,
Argyll.
IN your leader ("Party of the left is yet to be identified", The Herald, November 15) you repeated the common misconception that the council tax freeze "disproportionally benefits those on higher incomes". Obviously, the council tax is related to house valuation, not income, which are not well correlated. I assume you actually meant "disproportionally benefits the rich", which is also false.
The usual attack on the council tax is that it is highly regressive. Those in band A properties pay a far larger proportion of their average income as council tax. Those in band H houses pay three times as much, but have an average income more than three times higher. Their houses are valued at least eight times higher. For some people their income is 30 or 300 times higher. The freeze benefits those on higher incomes because they have higher council tax bills, but it is Orwellian doublespeak to describe this as a disproportionate benefit.
If a tax is regressive, not raising it (a cut in real terms, given inflation) is intrinsically progressive. This must be equally true if the rise is five per cent or 500 per cent.
Ideally I would see the council tax abolished, and replaced by a land value tax. This places me in the company of arch capitalists Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats, somewhat to the right of the much-delayed official SNP policy of a local income tax.
Alan Ritchie,
2/2 72 Waverley Street,
Glasgow.
AT Westminster the SNP have not supported Scottish Labour in trying to get rid of the bedroom tax. Recently only two of the six Nationalist MPs turned up to vote for the Affordable Homes Bill when every Scottish Labour MP was present and voted to try to end the bedroom tax. The bill is now at the committee stage. Where is the SNP concern for social justice that we hear about?
The Holyrood Government could have delayed re-tendering for the ScotRail franchise until it could allow a public bid and nationalisation, which it is supposed to favour. Instead it awarded the franchise to Abellio, the Dutch state railway company. It apparently has a very poor performance record in southern England. This makes no sense.
The SNP are supposedly against public-private partnership (PPP) but the Scottish Government has just awarded hundreds of millions of pounds to a PPP project extension at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
The SNP talk a good game, but when it comes to actions, they have a poor record.
In seven years it is hard to find any action of theirs which has redistributed wealth to the less well- off. They could have unfrozen the council tax and redistributed resources. They could have used their income tax-raising powers to spend more on the NHS. Instead there has been a smaller percentage increase in NHS spending in Scotland than there has been in England. Is this the promised protection of the NHS?
If the SNP want more power they should be seen to be using the powers they have fully and in a more radical way.
Esther Clark,
2 Ronaldshaw Park,
Ayr.
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