The council buck stops with the Scottish Government

She was responding to accusations by Cosla, the body that represents Scotland’s councils, over a lack of consultation by ministers about the council tax freeze Humza Yousaf had sprung on local authorities last autumn in his party conference speech.

Contrary to ministers’ claims, the council tax freeze is not being fully funded by the Scottish Government, Cosla says, and there would as a result have to be yet more cuts to local services if it were imposed.

Inverclyde Council leader, Labour’s Stephen McCabe, said that there had been a generally “intransigent” stance towards councils from ministers, instead of real negotiation, since the freeze was announced. The Verity House Agreement signed between central and local government last summer, supposedly enshrining the principle of full consultation about any budget changes, was “dead in the water” as far as Mr McCabe could see.

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Ms Robison essentially dismissed it all. First she blamed Westminster budget cuts and secondly “political leaders” in local government. Ms Robison seemed to be suggesting it was a row instigated by certain political (particularly Labour) opponents. Nothing to see here.

It was not too difficult in the wake of Ms Robison’s performance to imagine the "extremely disappointing tone” of letters from members of the Scottish Cabinet that Cosla had referred to. There was little sign of willingness to broach a deal, far less contrition.

But it was consistent - consistent with the annual tussle over council funding which itself springs from a decades-long reluctance by the Scottish Government to put council finance on a sustainable long-term footing. Council tax is regressive and it should have been abolished and replaced with something fairer long ago - indeed it has been SNP policy to do so since time immemorial - but after nearly 17 years in power, nothing has been done except some tweaks made to the existing system.

Why? Well presumably because reform, while desperately needed, would be hard.

Short-term political considerations drove Mr Yousaf’s announcement of a council tax freeze last year, apparently a panic response to the SNP’s drubbing by Labour at the Rutherglen by-election. Because council tax is regressive, so is a freeze, as it benefits wealthier people far more than it does the worst off. This is not a pro-poor policy, as the left-leaning IPPR think tank has made clear, arguing that the money being spent by ministers on the freeze should have been used to uplift the Scottish Child Payment, taking 10,000 more children out of poverty instead.

Humza Yousaf last year announced a council tax freeze (Image: PA)

No; it was a politically driven move that achieved two things for the First Minister: it allowed him to claim he was reducing the burden on people during a cost of living crisis (even though the hardest-hit will benefit from it hardly at all) and it made it politically easier to raise income tax in the December budget. It’s not hard to understand why Cosla wasn’t consulted. The decision seems to have had very little to do with what was best for local government and local services.

For councils, the loss of autonomy and the undermining of local democracy angers them almost as much as the budget challenges. They have lost their vigour, their power drained away over successive years. Time and again, the SNP has been called out for centralising power in Edinburgh. Council leaders are deeply vexed by the inflated proportion of their funding that is now ring-fenced for spending on Scottish Government priorities, placing limits on their autonomy and ability to meet local needs.

The deep irony of a government that endlessly decries Westminster’s hoarding of power, committing an act of reverse devolution within the boundaries of Scotland, is obvious. But that’s politics.

More and more voices are being raised in dissent against this regressive drift and this week’s ill-tempered exchanges are just the latest development. The think tank Our Scottish Future, founded by the former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, called yesterday for reform of councils and of council tax. It wants groups of councils to be able to form Scottish Combined Authorities to collaborate and pool resources.

It wants councils to be given multi-year budgets so they can plan properly (though the Scottish Government may argue it itself has to live with great uncertainty from one year to the next).

Crucially, it also advocates for a new progressive local property tax, noting that "for years Scottish local government has been the ‘least fiscally empowered’ in the whole of Europe, with the lowest level of local income-raising fiscal powers".

All this follows a similar suggestion last summer by a group of 52 anti-poverty groups including the IPPR, Oxfam and the Poverty Alliance, for council tax to be replaced by a new much more progressive tax on property, set at 0.75 per cent of a house’s value.

Council tax reform is aeons overdue. What everyone agrees is that a cross-party approach is required and the next Scottish Government, whoever leads it after 2026, cannot be allowed to kick it into the long grass yet again.

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Humza Yousaf supposedly agrees with all this. He has spoken of his commitment to look at wealth taxes and has even used that pariah of a word, “redistribution”. Well done him - but then he also spoke of his commitment to work constructively with local government, and look how that worked out.

The bald truth is that with his leadership in a wounded condition, it’s hard to see him going boldly where neither Alex Salmond nor Nicola Sturgeon was prepared to go.

But the buck stops with the Scottish Government. Yes, Westminster budget settlements are tight but improving Scotland’s local democracy and coming up with better local taxation is entirely in the gift of Scottish ministers. Yes, councillors are expressing their annoyance publicly but who can blame them given the Scottish Government’s imperious behaviour?

Blame deflection only gets you so far. It’s the consequences of centralisation and inaction on council tax reform that’s playing out now.