This Is Not Local Democracy

Craig DalzellI started writing this column before Humza Yousaf’s keynote speech on Tuesday but while the main topic is only partially related, I couldn’t lead into it without first mentioning his surprise announcement of his intention to freeze Council Tax.This announcement appears to have shocked both the trade unions and, more importantly, COSLA, who have both been warning about the mounting crisis in local government funding. It also runs against the grain of recent Scottish Government policies on Council Tax such as the investigations into increasing the tax on second/vacant home owners and on increasing the rates levied on upper band homes (which would be an improvement on the current situation but wholly inadequate compared to actual reform of Council Tax). A freeze now is widely expected to only exacerbate severe problems coming down the line – something I’ll come back to in a moment.More than merely an ill-thought out policy or a snap decision to try to win votes (I have a suspicion that he’s hoping that he’ll try to pick up the credit for the freeze in the 2026 Holyrood elections while passing the blame for public service cuts on to Councils in the 2027 Local Government elections) this is another example of the Scottish Government holding the very concept of local democracy in contempt. Council Tax is one of the few local taxes that Councils actually control and one of their few sources of funding outwith Block Grants from Holyrood. I understand that it’s not even strictly within the gift of Holyrood to unilaterally freeze Council Tax at all – previous years have seen Holyrood effectively bribe or coerce Local Authorities into compliance by either paying for projected shortfalls in Council Tax caused by a freeze or by threatening to withhold Block Grant funding if they didn’t freeze the tax.To be clear, this is a breach of the principle of subsidiarity that says that power should be held at as local level as possible and only passed upwards if absolutely necessary and it is a breach of the principles of devolution that say that powers devolved downwards should not be meddled with by Governments above.Imagine Westminster announcing today that it was going to “freeze” Scottish income tax rates and bands – a power almost entirely devolved to Holyrood since 2017. We know they would very much rather that Scotland didn’t diverge income tax away from the rates set by the UK Government and they and their allies certainly campaign for this to be so. We also know that they have the power to do precisely this – to override Scottish devolved powers whenever they like. Or they could bribe or coerce Holyrood into accepting a freeze by promising to pay for the projected shortfalls or threatening to withhold other funding if Holyrood doesn’t do what they’re told. In short, Westminster is entirely capable of treating Holyrood in precisely the same way as Holyrood is treating Local Authorities. Would the Scottish Government – would Humza Yousaf – like to tell us if that would be acceptable?This is not how Local Democracy is supposed to work. It’s not how it can work in most European countries that we hold to be our peers. If a central government in, say, Germany or Norway tried to meddle with State, Regional or Municipal government taxes like this they would be hauled in front of the Constitutional Court to explain themselves. Perhaps Yousaf would like to reflect on the document his Government published over the summer on creating a “modern constitution” and ask themselves if they are acting in line with the principles that such a constitution should contain.The effects of this tax freeze will almost certainly feed into public service cuts and this brings us to the topic that I wanted to discuss this week – who should be responsible for those cuts?My own Local Authority of South Lanarkshire just announced a public consultation on their upcoming budget. In it they claim that their budget for 2024-25 is facing a £29 million shortfall with a further £41 million shortfall projected for 2025-26. They’ve urged the public to “have their say” but the consultation doesn’t do much more than ask the public to rank various public services in order of perceived priority and to, ironically given Yousaf’s announcement, gauge opinion on increasing Council Tax rates on upper band households. It doesn’t ask for much in the way of policy ideas that would generate additional revenue (social housing rent, a local energy company, local land taxes etc) nor does it discuss how other changes such as devolving powers to a more local level might take the pressure off of regional government. It is little more than a “Public Service Hunger Games” where we, the public, get to vote on whether we’d prefer our kids to have a school, a leisure centre or a functioning waste removal service.

(Have YOUR vote in the comments below!)

This is also not how to do Local Democracy. It is not for the public to be dumped with the responsibility of choosing which services to keep and which to cut without having any actual control over them (let’s be honest, this is much less about the decision itself and more about having a bit of paper to wave at voters when the cuts happen). Losing services will result in a downspiral of deprivation that will be increasingly hard to pull out of and will almost certainly end up with more affluent people voting to cut services that “they don’t use” despite this being the very opposite of what public services are supposed to be about. Scotland has prided itself on “participatory budgeting” but this is not that either and nor is it the promised Citizens Assembly on local government finance that is supposed to happen before the end of Parliament but hasn’t been mentioned by the Scottish Government in some time now.We need proper local democracy and properly sustainable finance. We need Scotland to have the kind of local democracy that the rest of Europe calls “normal”. This means politicians letting go of actual power and putting it in the hands of local communities – just as happens with municipal councils across Europe. It does not mean taking the credit for actions but dumping the negative consequences of those actions onto others then blaming them when they complain about it. This holds for all levels of Government. We don’t need to wait for independence and a proper written constitution for our elected representatives to start acting like we have them. Maybe if we start treating ourselves the way we want to be treated, we’ll even deserve to get them.