Seòmar agus comataidhean

I want to avoid that. You make a fair challenge. If we were to go out and say, “Council tax: discuss,” that is exactly where we would probably end up.

The joint working group and COSLA leaders have still to narrow down the content of the engagement activity before going out to the public. It would be interesting to hear views from the committee on this. How, specifically, do we make the system more progressive? What do people think about additional bands? What do people think about transitional arrangements? We could begin to get into questions of what the system might be, rather than just saying, “Council tax: discuss.” That does not mean that the process is so narrow that it becomes one of saying, “This is your choice. Take it or leave it.” There is a balance to be struck. People need to get the sense that something could emerge at the end that will help with manifesto setting and a landing space that could be progressed in the next session of Parliament, from which people would see a tangible outcome.

I share your worry about where we could end up if the process is too broad. We do not want that, and I think that the public expects to know where the political consensus might be. Without that, legislation will go nowhere. There has to be a reality check, which should inform our thinking about what goes out to the public.

Katie Hagmann may want to add more.

Realistically speaking, I think that any actual practical changes would be made in the next session of Parliament, but we could lay the groundwork in this session for a willingness to create some consensus on which to move forward. Without that, we could have yet another parliamentary session with property values another five years out of date, no change to the bands and no movement on the issue.

I am keen to explore the art of the possible here. I think that you are right: everybody accepts that there is a problem and that changes are required. However, there are ways of giving such changes a very soft landing that would bring the public with us. Therefore, this is not just about building political consensus in order to do something to the public; that is why the consultation and the public events that we are holding are very much about engaging the public themselves on the options, on what would be acceptable, on what could make the system fairer and on how we ensure that any change lands in a way that deals with some of the obvious problems that might arise.

It would be quite an achievement to create a better landing space for any actual proposals, which could then go forward into the next parliamentary session. It will require a lot of detailed work, including technical work, and it will then require legislation, which, by its nature, will require consensus to some degree.

That is a fair challenge. My party has looked at various options for replacing council tax. For a time, we were focused on looking at whether there could be a local income tax alternative, but the problem was that that would not have raised enough money. Essentially, as the commission noted in 2015, we concluded that there needs to be a property element to local taxation.

We now have a Parliament of minorities, so the only way to move forward is to try to build consensus. However, with something as fundamental as council tax reform, even if we did not have to build consensus, I think that doing so would be the right thing to do. At the end of the day, we do not want to be seen to have developed something behind closed doors and to say, “Here it is—take it or leave it.” Even if we were able to do that, I do not think that that would land in the right way. The reform must stand the test of time, so we need to make sensible incremental changes that create a fairer system. That system might not be perfect, but people should feel that it is much better than the one that we have at the moment. I am keen to continue those discussions.

If there are recommendations from the committee’s work, we will be keen to embrace those as much as we can, as part of cross-party working.

There will be a cost; we absolutely need to recognise that. There may then be an on-going cost—is it a system that is going to be updated, and what would be the timeframe for those updates? An investment will need to be made. Basing that on the Welsh experience is not a bad starting point, but the change will require investment.

It is worth dusting down some of the work that was done rather than repeating it. The fact that there was a conclusion that local tax had to include some form of domestic property tax is not unhelpful. There is a lot in the commission’s work that could be drawn on, but we need to address the fundamental point that, by the nature of the issue, any change will progress only if it has enough political support. I keep coming back to that, but it is just a fact. Katie Hagmann and I, in our respective roles, are keen to see what is the art of the possible. Doing nothing and having a position of no change is not sustainable. If we all agree on that, we need to consider where we can move to.

We have yet to look at narrowing down the details, so I do not want to be overly prescriptive. However, my worry about that goes back to the worry that I expressed earlier about creating division rather than consensus. My instinct is that we are more likely to build consensus by adding more bands to make the council tax banding system more progressive.

There is also the issue of the complexity of delivery. Any major change or completely new system would be complex and take a lot of time and resource effort. There would have to be quite a lot of advantages to doing that instead of building on the system that we have already set up. I would be more drawn towards making incremental improvements than to trying to do something that would be challenging.

Yes. The figure could be much lower than that. The technical work will give us much more information. I ask Ellen Leaver to say something about that.

First, I think that a lot of good work was carried out through the 2015 commission. The commission did not recommend any specific form of taxation to replace the council tax, but it unpacked a lot of issues. The commission expressed a predominant view that local tax should continue to include some sort of domestic property tax, with a new system that was more progressive than the council tax.

The issue then is probably still the issue now—it is about getting consensus. That is why I have been pretty up front and honest in saying that I do not think that we will be able to move forward unless we can build enough consensus, not just in relation to identifying the problem, but about what to do next. Everybody will agree that 1991 property values are out of date and that something needs to be done about that. Everybody will agree that the current council tax system is not as progressive as it should be and that it needs to be improved. The difficulty is agreeing on what should come next in terms of improvements.

I am quite optimistic that we can genuinely build some consensus around the principles that we agree on. There will be a lot that we disagree on, but there are areas that we can agree on where we could begin to make some changes. It might not be about having a big bang, massive replacement for the council tax, but I hope that we can find areas of agreement so that we can take some incremental steps to address some of the issues, such as progressivity. It remains to be seen where we will get with that but that is, in essence, what Katie Hagmann and I are keen to do.

We have made demonstrable progress on the fiscal framework ahead of the 2025-26 budget, which has been acknowledged. The way that the budget is negotiated and discussed between ourselves and local government has been transformed. I think that Katie Hagmann and I have had about 15 meetings about the budget. The process has been quite resource intensive and there has been an open-book approach. The principles of the fiscal framework have underpinned the process and are being put into practice. I am keen to publish a version of the fiscal framework jointly with COSLA, but we need agreement on that. The discussions are on-going and we are keen to move forward on that. I think that that is where things have got to. Do you agree, Ellen?