MINISTERS and Scotland’s councils must commit to a publicity campaign to prepare the public for council tax reforms amid fears of a backlash.

Unions and local authority chiefs have warned that front-line council staff fear an upsurge in abuse over the changes due to come in next April.

Holyrood's Local Government Committee heard the next council tax bills had to be seen to be fair in both verbal and physical abuse towards workers could rise further.

Meanwhile, the body which represents the country’s tax professionals said the reforms would only be marginally fairer with the system remaining fundamentally regressive.

The Chartered Institute of Taxation (CIOT) said public understanding of how local authorities are funded should also be improved, to ensure people realise less than a fifth of local council funding comes from council tax.

Moira Kelly, chair of the CIOT Scottish Technical Committee, said: “While the Scottish Government’s reforms to council tax are a welcome first step, we think more could be done to reform what will remain a regressive tax.

"We call on the Scottish Government not to rule out future changes and to make good on the opportunities afforded by last year’s Commission on Local Tax Reform."

Under the reforms, charges will go up in the four highest council tax bands E-H in order to bring in an extra £100 million a year to be invested in schools, a policy which has been criticised by councils as undermining local democracy.

The council tax freeze, in place since 2007, will end and local authorities will be able to increase council tax by a maximum of three per cent per year.

Dave Watson, head of policy and public affairs at Unison Scotland, told the committee: "People are going to be faced this year with some, in many cases, quite big changes and there's a huge amount of concern among the staff.

"People frankly don't always understand, remember we've come off a very long council tax freeze and therefore this will be a change.

"What we are seeing more generally, as our annual survey of abuse and violence demonstrates, is a significant increase in recent years in both verbal and physical abuse towards local authority staff. It has gone up fairly significantly year-on-year, and clearly therefore we're very concerned.

"We accept that at present there are a lot of uncertainties, there are still things to be sorted out and therefore the detail might not be there, but we do think with this type of communication exercise you can't start too soon and therefore we would urge, and we don't frankly care which, government, council, whoever does it, but we would urge a very major communication effort to explain the changes so that it's not our members who get the grief on the doorstep."

Derek Yule, director of finance at Highland Council, added: "I would strongly advise the Scottish Government to take responsibility and ownership of the policy and to explain that clearly.

"The fear I have is the confusion that will be created in the public mind if councils take the opportunity to increase tax."

Asked whether councils could face a backlash that would impact on collection rates, he added: "I think I would flag it up as a risk, how big a risk it is I'm not entirely sure."