In the course of the current heated debate about the replacement of council tax with a Scottish national income tax supplement, it is very disappointing that there has been absolutely no discussion on the real and fundamental issue, namely, a reduction in the level of taxation.
Perhaps if council tax had increased in line with inflation (or less) rather than by over 70 per cent since devolution, council tax might not be the thorny issue that it is today. Substituting one unpopular tax for another will simply not solve the i
nherent problem. That is, the rapidly growing costs of council bureaucracies.
No politician or political party seems to be addressing the issue of why we need 32 councils in Scotland, each with a chief executive and a multitude of service directors on vastly inflated salaries of well over £100,000 each. These directors and their associated staffs are each doing the same thing 32 times across Scotland. In my local council alone the payroll has increased by over 25 per cent (by over 1,000 people) in the past ten years and there has been no discernible improvement in services – quite the contrary.
Surely, the political priority must be to rein in council costs, where the scope for reduction must be significant, rather than in trying to find the least painful way of extracting ever more money.
G M LINDSAY, Whinfield Gardens, Kinross
The full article contains 236 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
