New legislation is to be brought in to prevent councils from collecting "ancient" debts resulting from the Poll Tax, Alex Salmond has announced.

The First Minister said: "After 25 years it is about time that the Poll Tax was finally dead and buried in Scotland."

Fears had been raised that council chiefs in Scotland could use details of the tens of thousands of people who registered to vote in the the run-up to last month's independence referendum in their efforts to recover old debts that are still outstanding from the controversial charge.

The scheme, which was officially called the Community Charge but was more widely known as the Poll

Tax, was introduced by Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister.

It was introduced first in Scotland in 1989 before being rolled out to England and Wales a year later.

But it proved to be massively unpopular, sparking a large scale non-payment campaign and major protests, some of which turned into riots.

To try to avoid the levy people refused to register to vote, sparking concerns that the large-scale increase in the number of people on the electoral roll brought about by the referendum could see some of them pursued for historic Poll Tax debts.

More than 4.2 million people in Scotland are now registered to vote, some 97% of the population.

Mr Salmond announced today that councils would not be able to take any further action to recover Poll Tax debts.

He said the charge, which was replaced by the Council Tax, had been abolished more than two decades ago.

"It is over 20 years since the Poll Tax came to an end and I believe the expanded electoral roll should not be used to collect poll tax debts," Mr Salmond told MSPs at the start of First Minister's Questions

"It is, of course, within the law for councils to use current legislation to assess current council tax liability, and given the current council tax reduction scheme protects 500,000 of our poorest citizens, the tax is being applied in a proper and fair way.

"However, the relevance of information from the current electoral register to the position of debts from 25 years ago is difficult to fathom, except through some misguided political intention."

He said £396,000 in old Poll Tax debts had been collected by councils in Scotland last year as he announced: "It is the Government's intention to bring forward legislation to ensure that councils can take forward no further action to recover ancient poll tax debts."