Council tax will go to schools elsewhere
Winners and losers as SNP doles out £10m from taxpayer
UP TO £10million of council tax raised in some parts of Scotland will have to be handed to other areas, the Conservatives claim.
Edinburgh, Aberdeenshire and Aberdeen are among the council areas likely to be hit hardest by the SNP’s council tax reforms.
Yet they will have to hand millions of pounds of the extra cash they raise to other parts of the country because Nicola Sturgeon promised to use the £100million raised from the changes to higher council tax bands to tackle attainment in deprived schools nationally.
From next April, families living in Band E-H homes will see their council tax bill soar as a result of controversial SNP reforms passed by MSPs last week.
Research by the Tories, using the same criteria as the SNP to determine where the money is spent, indicates councils in better-off areas with the most Band E-H homes also have the lowest numbers of schools in deprived areas.
That means they will have to hand over up to £10million of the extra cash they raise to other local authorities which have more deprived schools. Scottish Conservative deputy leader Jackson Carlaw said: ‘The SNP’s plans threaten a fundamental part of local taxation, which is that the money raised in an area should stay in that area. Across Scotland, communities are now discovering that their council tax payments are being taken away and spent in an entirely separate part of the country. It’s quite simply wrong.’
Edinburgh will be worst affected by the changes, according to the Tory research. An extra £15.6million will be raised in council tax in the Capital next year but its schools will receive only around £6.1million to tackle the attainment gap, with the remaining £9.5million sent to other parts of the country.
Aberdeenshire will hand over £6million, Aberdeen £3.4million and Perth & Kinross £3.1million. The council likely to gain most is Glasgow, which could get £50.6million more than it raises, followed by North Lanarkshire at £17.5million and Dundee at £13.3million.
The SNP will also end the council tax freeze from April, and allow local authorities to increase bills by up to 3 per cent a year. Miss Sturgeon has said repeatedly that closing the attainment gap in schools is her top priority in office.
The SNP’s manifesto for the Scottish elections in May said that the additional funding raised from the council tax changes would be provided ‘directly to schools, based on eligibility for free school meals’.
A Scottish Government spokesman said: ‘As a result of these reforms, local authorities will keep every penny of the council tax raised in their areas and there will be no change for three out of four Scottish households in terms of how much council tax they pay.’