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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?

We would have to look at that as part of the modelling, to ensure that we were cognisant of that. Katie Hagmann referred to some of the very small local authorities and the relative value of council tax as part of their financial base. That brings us into other spaces, such as reform, and I am aware of really good discussions between Clackmannanshire, Falkirk and Stirling councils about shared services and how we can work more closely together. We recognise that that is just one part of the jigsaw; there are plenty of other things that we need to look at, and that work needs to be led by local authorities. For example, we recognise the on-going demand for services, which will continue to increase, not least in areas such as social care, so how do we manage that in the future? What we are discussing today is just one part of that picture.

As always, Ellen.

Inevitably there will be lessons, and we will seek to draw on what has worked well in terms of communication and where communication could have been better. The main point is that, given the complexity of the system, we need to be clear from the outset what it is that we are trying to achieve and what the options are to meet that objective. We can certainly draw not just on what the Scottish Government has done but on what has worked elsewhere in this area, such as the work that has been done in Wales, as I mentioned earlier, and the work in other jurisdictions.

At the end of the day, we need to get it right for Scotland, and it is our responsibility to land any reform in the right place so that it has the best chance of producing something that is useful for us all.

That is one of the issues at the heart of this discussion, and we have to address people’s concerns in that regard. That is where strong transitional arrangements are important, and those could be available to everybody. For example, there could be no cliff edges for anyone. There are lots of ways that you could do revaluation. It could be implemented over a number of years, so that changes were incremental, and there could be referral schemes.

There could also be recognition of the fact that some people are asset rich but income poor. The reduction scheme already recognises that, to some degree, through the single person discount. Although that is not income related, it is a recognition of the central premise that we are trying to manage all the household costs. There are options.

We recognise that that is an issue, and whatever changes are made will have transitional support and relief at their heart, which might help to reduce people’s concerns. That will also be important in building a consensus as well as public buy-in.