Friday January 16th 2026
Glasgow City Chambers
Written by Local Democracy Reporter, Drew Sandelands
Glasgow will push for proposed reforms to “look beyond” just council tax, as councillors want a “fairer” approach to funding public services.
Options put forward by the city’s SNP and Green groups include precepting powers for regional authorities and a land value tax.
They said the city provides services “used by a population significantly larger” than its tax base, and precepting — where a combined authority can claim a share of council tax from its constituent authorities — could “redress some of that tax inequality”.
A Scottish Government consultation on the future of council tax, and possible options for reform, is running until January 30. Council tax raises 18% (£377m) of Glasgow City Council’s funding, but is based on property values from 1991.
Officials drew up a response to the consultation which suggests properties should be revaluated every six years, and a new national banding system, with 14 bands, introduced.
At a meeting on Thursday, councillors agreed an amended response, which added proposals for wider reform. The SNP/Green amendment was approved while a Labour plan to send the response to a scrutiny committee for further consideration was rejected.
Council leader Susan Aitken, SNP, said the current consultation was “too narrow”. “We need an opportunity to talk more widely about local taxation to address some of the inbuilt challenges which are inherent in council tax,” she added.
“We need to look beyond council tax just to address those challenges.”
The amendment states: “A fairer, modernised and more sustainable form of financing local government and public services in Scotland is long overdue.”
It adds council tax is “regressive and based on out-of-date property valuations” and a property-based tax should be based on current values, with bands “significantly adjusted” and protections for people on low or fixed incomes.
An “effective” transition between the current system and a new one would also be needed, the amendment states, and, even after revaluation, some councils are “likely to have a larger and more stable property tax base” due to “significant variation” in property values in different parts of Scotland.
Additional bands, announced in the Scottish Government budget earlier this week, to capture properties worth more than £1m will “raise proportionately less” for Glasgow than more affluent areas, councillors agreed.
The amendment suggests “empowering Scotland’s economic regions to grant precepting powers to any new regional governance tier”, allowing them to “help address disparities between the local tax base and services provided that benefit a wider region”.
It states there is “no single ‘perfect’ system” but the government could consider a combination of “local income taxes or land value taxation alongside the core property tax”.
“A system could be developed whereby councils are empowered to allocate a percentage of their tax take against the land and a percentage against the property,” it adds.
“Councils could tailor the exact percentage allocation to suit their own local circumstances, though it would be assumed at day one that 100% is against property and 0% against land.”
Councillors have suggested this method could be piloted in one authority, like Glasgow. They would also like the retention of non-domestic rates, to compensate for lower property tax bases, to be considered.
“We recognise that this is a reform of significant scale that will probably require more than one parliamentary term to fully undertake,” the amendment concludes.
Cllr Aitken said councils in Scotland and the rest of the UK have the “most limited ability to raise taxation locally and therefore the narrowest tax base”.
“Glasgow being a metropolitan authority… and providing services to a much wider population than our own tax base… is something that colleagues will know is a frustration for all of us,” she added.
“It is not recognised in any way at all in the way that we are financed as a council or the way local government in Scotland is financed.”
She said politicians have “shied away from” revaluation. “What we need is politicians, whoever they are, elected to our parliament, to have some courage, have some conviction, around this.”
“This job has to be done,” she added. “It is long overdue, it can’t be left any longer.”
Greens co-leader Cllr Jon Molyneux, who worked on the amendment with Cllr Aitken, said: “We know that we need a better, more adaptive, more flexible system of raising finance locally to fund our services.
“The amendment puts forward a framework for those things to be progressed.”
He added taxing land value was more progressive and could “significantly unlock investment”. “If you are taxing the unimproved value of land, you are providing more of an incentive for investment to drive improvement and potentially yield more income down the track through non-domestic rates for instance.”
Cllr Molyneux also said: “We all know that Glasgow pays for services that benefit a wider area.
“There’s lots of talk about the opportunities for a new tier of regional governance, and there might be different views on what that looks like. The opportunity to redress some of that tax inequality is really important.
“The single authority models, the London mayoral system, they have precepting powers… the combined authority is able to claim a share of council tax from its constituent authorities, and you can do that in a way that is redistributive and will address some of those disparities.”
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