Readers' Letters: It's time to rework council tax from top to bottom

For most, the council tax is increasing fastest and for some the increase will be 10 per cent this year, for others it will be at least 5 per cent, well above inflation at 3 per cent, after even higher hikes in previous years. The Scottish government gave £1 billion of increased funding from the previous UK budget to local government, so where has all the money gone?

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, since 2019 public sector wages have increased faster in Scotland than elsewhere, with pay now about 5 per cent higher than the rest of the UK. Rather than investing in services, local government has used increased funding for inflation-busting wages, with little effect on retention.

The council tax is increasingly 10 per cent or more of net income. In Edinburgh, for example, a middle band E household will face a £3,000 total bill, so with average net income at £30,000 per year, more households will fall into council tax poverty. For those relying on the state pension, income is £12,000 per year, even with a 25 per cent sole occupancy discount, so many on higher bands will pay over 20 per cent of their income.

With annual arrears in 2024-25 estimated at £200 million, it’s time to ditch a tax system based on 1991 property values. This should be a priority for party manifestos, and while the Green Party has an alternative proposal it’s largely a rehash based on property values.

Emphasis should be on paying services at the point of use so it’s fairer and efficient. Change is long overdue.

Neil Anderson, Edinburgh

Formula, please

John Swinney claims on ITV that “independence is within reach”. He relies on a “broken” Westminster system to support his SNP’s government latest claim.

The First Minister is a solely political animal, never having done what most of us would call a proper job. Like his predecessors, Swinney has never revealed to us exactly how Scotland will survive outwith the Union. Surely those who actually vote for an SNP government would like to know?

Doug Morrison, Tenterden, Kent

Petty attitude

I totally agree with Alexander McKay (Letters, 24 February) regarding John Swinney’s avoidance of the term “Team GB” when referring to the Winter Olympics Men’s Curling team. Scotland is always portrayed as “tolerant and welcoming”, but obviously this doesn’t apply to Great Britain representation at international sporting events.

It’s interesting that the excellent men and women curlers apparently have no problem appearing as part of Team GB – and indeed that Eve Muirhead, another great Scottish curler, accepted the post of GB Chef de Mission, and has received a lot of praise for doing the job. Has Mr Swinney made his views on that known to Eve?

The First Minister has shown a petty, small-minded attitude which does not reflect well on Scotland, but will no doubt have pleased a few SNP diehards. Of course, an election is looming – need one say more ?

For avoidance of any doubt, I am a Scot – born and bred in Joppa, now an honorary Fifer, and I have no political affiliation.

Margaret Longmuir, Dunfermline, Fife

Winds of change

An excellent article by John McLellan which the wind industry will have hated (Perspective, 21 February). Why does the Scottish government allow more wind turbines to be erected when we already export 30 to 35 per cent of wind-generated electricity to England?

But changes are in the wind. Wull Muir, an eight-turbine scheme at Heriot in the Borders had been given approval by the Scottish government despite strong local opposition and being refused planning permission by the local council. Democracy?

However, a court ruling this month quashed the planning permission granted in January 2025 for the Wull Muir Wind farm and established that developers must now treat a wind farm and its grid connection as a “single project” for Environmental Impact Assessments. Failure to assess both together can now lead to planning consents being squashed.

Surely the environmental implications of the wind turbine blades should now also be considered, since the blades are not recyclable and end up in landfill.

Surely the environmental implications and the emissions implications of wind turbines coming all the way from China on diesel ships and then being taken to site on diesel lorries should also be part of the Environmental Impact Assessments?

Clark Cross, Linlithgow, West Lothian

Ding ding

The line in the Burns poem The Dream stating “Facts are chiels that winna ding” (cannot be ignored or denied ) was a favourite quote of the late Alex Salmond. Unfortunately, he himself frequently ignored the message. It seems to me that Susan FG Forde operates on the same plane. Just a couple of points from her letter (23 February).

Firstly, pumped hydro, eg Ben Cruachan, is a consumer not a primary producer of electricity; if it was kept on continuously at full output as Ms Forde says it should be, then, sticking to Burns, I'm afraid the seas would run dry – and within one day.

Secondly, nuclear waste is nowhere near the toxicity she claims . As I have pointed out previously, if you sat on a pile of all the UK nuclear waste produced up to now it would take you a century to absorb the radiation dose you would receive in one day's radiotherapy treatment. I presume Ms Forde is not campaigning for the abolition of this and all other medical scans.

(Dr) A McCormick, Terregles, Dumfries

Border check

The wonderful photograph of two great spotted woodpeckers (20 February) from Curtis Welsh made me remember watching one such bird as a boy on a regular basis. It would peck away at a tree in the garden of a house owned by a lady whose thankless task was to teach me the wonders of imperial weights and measures for my arithmetic. Watching the bird was much more interesting than learning about pecks and bushels, rods and chains, furlongs and other such wonders of our Imperial system.

However, my thinking also turned to the location given for the photograph, which was “the Scottish Borders”. Now, call me fussy, but these Borders, as we called them in my boyhood, do tend to be in Scotland and we never felt the need to add “Scottish” back in the day. To the best of my knowledge, there is no equivalent name on the English side, which seems a slight omission.

Why, then is the area called, "the Scottish Borders" nowadays? The area borders England, after all. Should it not, logically then, be “the English Borders”?

Andrew H N Gray, Edinburgh

Climbdown

Can the next Government please make it illegal to climb any British mountain in the winter? The utterly selfish stupidity of these morons is clearly costing us millions totally needlessly; no one needs to climb, or even walk in, winter mountains, except the armed forces. Why should we supplement such lunatic behaviour?

The same goes for the halfwits who go swimming in winter seas – don't go near the mountains or the sea in winter! If this curtails some idiot's “freedom of choice”, so what?

I'll vote for whichever party at least promises to legislate on this. Even if they fail the pledge, at least it would show willing.

Steve Hayes, Leven, Fife

Protect children

The resurgence of measles is heartrending. Very few people are fully aware of the devastating repercussions of measles on infants and children under five.

Measles causes blindness, swelling and inflammation of the brain, seizures, severe diarrhoea, dehydration, ear infections, pneumonia and potentially death. If a mother contracts a virus during pregnancy, she will deliver a premature baby with a low birth weight.

Ethnic and religious communities are more prone to vaccine hesitancy, scepticism, online misinformation, deprivation, disenfranchisement and health disparities. Campaigns crafted to combat measles must therefore be holistic in nature and scope, and culturally and religiously sensitive to accommodate sundry political, religious, social and cultural facets that define our identities.

(Dr) Munjed Farid Al Qutob, London

Diverse groups

Jenny Lindsay is right to suggest that belief in gender identity has taken on the qualities of a “secular religion” (“Self-styled ‘Nice People' need to admit why the gender debate is so toxic”, The Scotsman, 23 February). Ms Lindsay’s “scaffolding” metaphor for upholding gender identity claims is apt. One of the most consequential pieces of that scaffolding is the institutional insistence that there exists a single “LGBTQ+” (or “queer”) community with shared interests and a common epistemology. This is not the case.

The LGBTQ+ movement is a coalition of convenience that redeploys political capital won through decades of LGB struggle to underwrite contested claims about gender identity. In the process, LGB concerns are subordinated: same-sex attraction is recast as just another subjective “identity” rather than a sex-based orientation (logically, opposite-sex attraction must be similarly recast); distinctions made between the LGB and the T+ are moralised as “harm”; and dissent is recoded as a lack of allyship – or worse, bigotry.

Brian Forsyth, Edinburgh

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