A proposal for a Local Authority controlled Land Tax with projected revenue for each Local Authority in Scotland
This paper builds out from Common Weal’s 2021 proposal to reform Council Tax with a Property Tax on dwellings set at a percentage of the market rate of that home and applies that same principle to the ownership of land. For the first time, a proposal for a Scottish land tax estimates not just the potential revenue for Scotland as a whole but combines real estate data with data on the economic potential of land to estimate the revenue that each of Scotland’s Local Authorities could bring in and finds that in many cases, the combination of reform of Council Tax and the extension of the resulting Property Tax to land would substantially or completely close currently projected Local Authority budget shortfalls.