It's all in the language.

[islaydarkblue]

Local income tax is interesting. If you work in Perth and live in Dundee which local authority area is entitled to your tax? Take it to an extreme situation. Everybody works in Perth nobody works in Dundee. Allocate the local income tax element based on place of work, Perth does really well Dundee gets nothing. Vice versa if you use place of residence as the determining factor. I think property taxes are essential, but that's because I don't think I have seen an alternative that looked workable. Maybe people who have lived and worked abroad in property that they owned abroad could help explain other ways to raise taxes locally.

There is a simple solution.
Scrap Council Tax and bring in a local sales tax. Other countries such as America manage to have a local sales tax with no problems.
At present local authorities throughout Scotland receive 76% of the income from Holyrood via the Barnett Formula with the remaining 24% from Council Tax and charges imposed by local councils such as car parking, fees for planning applications etc.
People living in Invergowrie and Monifieth doing their shopping in shops and supermarkets in Dundee would pay a local sales tax which would go into the Dundee City Council coffers.
On Islay council taxpayers are hit with a double whammy. We have a three weekly uplift of our General Waste bins with no food waste bin scheme in place because the Argyll and Bute councillors and bosses are too lazy to put the scheme in place. The island of Barra with a resident population of 1,000 has a food waste bin scheme in place but the only part of the Argyll and Bute Council area that has a food waste bin scheme in operation is Helensburgh because its population is higher than the minimum population recommended by the Scottish Government for introducing a food waste bin scheme. The rest of the Argyll and Bute Council area have stinking General waste bins during the warmer summer months.
Thanks to the Scottish Government ‘flagship’ Small Business Bonus Scheme (SBBS) businesses with a rateable value of less than £18,000 do not pay business rates but they have to pay for the uplift of their business waste.
In 2014 I received a ‘tip off’ that 69 self catering properties on Islay which had registered under the SBBS were not paying for the uplift of their business waste.
At the end of June 2015 I spoke to the Head of Law and Governance at Argyll and Bute Council about this fraud. He told me to give him the name and addresses of these properties registered under the SBBS but not paying for their business waste and he would investigate.
I told him that it was not the job of a council taxpayer to do the council’s ‘dirty work’ for them. It should not be too difficult to cross reference businesses registered for SBBS but not paying for the uplift of their business waste against their website advertising their self catering property for holiday lets.
I heard nothing more about this until I happened to attend an Islay Community Council meeting at the end of August 2019 where Councillor Robin Currie announced that Argyll and Bute Council had lost £76,000 as a result of businesses not paying for the uplift of their business waste. I told the meeting about me advising the Head of Law and Governance at the end of June 2015 about this fraud but nothing was done about it.
As usual the long suffering Argyll and Bute Council Tax payers have to pay for this fraud through increased Council Tax payments,
However if the Argyll and Bute council staff in the finance department carried the job they are employed to do this shortfall of £76,000 would never have happened.
Yet more local authority incompetence.



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