East Lothian, Borders and North Lanarkshire local authorities are raising council tax by 10%. In Edinburgh, it’s 8%, Glasgow, 7.5%. And these are modest increases compared to what’s needed: while it hasn’t passed a budget yet, Dundee city council said in November that it would need to raise council tax by 29% if it was to avoid cuts. The equivalent figures for Aberdeenshire and Angus were 17% and 15% respectively. 

In Edinburgh, this means the average household will pay £116 more a year – or just under a tenner a month. Whether that feels like a lot, or a little, will vary. But either way, it won’t raise enough revenue. After years of cuts, services will continue to deteriorate. 

As Alys Mumford, a councillor in Edinburgh and co-convener of the Association of Scottish Green councillors outlined to me, Edinburgh’s Health and Social Partnership team is having to look at cutting everything but the services it’s legally required to fund. It has already stopped funding for lunch clubs and isolation services for elderly people, meaning more will grow lonely. Fewer will get the early intervention which prevents more serious problems later. 

Look at the whole range of council services, and everything is struggling. “Damp and mould in council houses is really bad,” Mumford explains. “People are suffering from asthma and all the things that come along with that. It is the result of less staff being more stretched, much longer waits for things, much less capacity to get stuff done.”

In a sense, there’s a simple reason for this. For most of the last 20 years, council tax in Scotland has been frozen, or restricted to tight caps by the Scottish government. And because council tax is set at a cash amount, not a percentage, that means it’s fallen in real terms with inflation – despite the rises, Scottish council tax will still be lower than that in England.

In theory, the funding gap has been made up by growth in the grant from the central government. In reality, it often hasn’t been. Where it has, the cash has come with strings attached. “Our hands are absolutely tied with most things,” says Mumford, “which means” she adds, that money for investment, for anything locally specific, and for climate change related measures, simply isn’t there.

The reason for the freeze is pretty simple. Basically everyone agrees that council tax is a bad tax – the richest can only ever pay 3.6 times what the poorest pay. Because the poll tax was tried out first in Scotland, there remains a particular sensitivity here around unjust local taxations. But no one is politically brave enough to replace it, because a new taxation system would produce losers, as well as winners. And so, instead of grasping the thistle, the SNP has spent 18 years allowing council tax to be eaten by inflation, de-facto replacing it with centrally-set income tax, and some cuts. 

Alongside the financial implications, this is a serious democratic problem. The net effect is a large centralisation of power from local authorities to the Scottish government. 

Already, Scotland has the developed world’s largest local government units (with England close behind). Across Europe, the average population of a local authority is 5,620. In Scotland, it’s 175,000. As Mumford puts it, “The amount of people in an Edinburgh ward is the same as the amount of people in a normal European council”. 20 years of erosion of local taxation means we also have perhaps the developed world’s least powerful local government. 

The recent introduction of tourist levies will help this problem slightly. But local councils in Scotland need much more power to shape the communities they stretch across. They need a toolbox of revenue-raising measures they can choose between, as appropriate for their communities. 

Local government should be the democratic engine shaping our cities and counties. It needs to be able to borrow (a power largely held from it by the Treasury’s absurd rules) to invest, and build. It should have the resources to create the housing and public transport infrastructure we need. As the climate emergency intensifies, we should be using our most proximate democratic layer to come together and navigate our way through the crisis in the most equitable way possible. But instead, our overly-centralised, disempowered local authorities feel like another distant layer of bureaucracy, desperately fighting for the income they need to run the most basic services, a small player compared to the vast developers and financial firms pouring the money and concrete which really shape our communities.  

As Mumford says, “We want to tax wealthy people, and firms and corporations, and use that income to make things better for people”. But instead, councils are left fighting for their right to raise a crappy tax which no one likes, because the alternative is shutting services which save the lives of the most vulnerable.