This morning we held an event giving an overview of the Scottish Budget unveiled earlier this week.
The slides from this event are available for download here, and are provided below.
Derek MacKay’s third budget of this parliamentary session was doomed to be overshadowed by events at Westminster.
With many people’s attention only partially focussed on events at Holyrood, much Scottish budget commentary will not get beyond an analysis of income tax differentials. Whilst MacKay had heavily hinted in recent weeks that he would not follow the UKG policy to substantially increase the higher rate, he surprised many by freezing the threshold in cash terms. Scottish taxpayers will start paying 41% higher rate at income above £43,430, whilst counterparts in rUK will continue to pay basic rate of 20% up to an income of £50,000.
The Scottish income tax policy is estimated to raise Scottish Government revenues by just over half a £billion compared to what it would raise if it followed rUK tax policy, although the difference in tax liability for individuals is now quite marked, particularly for those with incomes around £50,000.
However, the government’s resource budget for day-to-day spending remains unchanged in real terms compared to 2018/19, despite the freeze in the higher rate, and despite an improved outlook for revenues from LBTT (in part driven by the decision to increase the Additional Dwelling Supplement from 3% to 4%). This is effectively because over half of the £720m increase in consequentials announced by the UK Government in the summer have been offset by a deterioration in the Scottish Fiscal Commission’s assessment of the outlook for wage growth (and hence income tax revenue growth) in Scotland compared to their forecasts this time last year.
As anticipated, spending increases have been prioritised in the health portfolio. In fact the health budget is up 3.4% in real terms, taking it to over 49% of total resource spend.
The detailed inventory of budget winners and losers will be compiled over subsequent days. The Local Government settlement can be notoriously difficult to decipher. The headline figure in this year’s budget shows the local government allocation flat in real terms – but only if one includes funding for capital as well as resource, and specific grants as well as general grant. Resource funding including specific grants – notably in relation to the expansion of childcare provision, and the Pupil Equity Fund – is down 1% in real terms. But the discretionary grant is down by over 3% in real terms.
This outlook for local government may well change during the forthcoming weeks of budget negotiation, as the minority government seeks to secure backing for its budget. It seems unlikely that the draft budget goes far enough on local tax reform at this stage to persuade the Green Party to sign up to it (the budget commits to a series of ‘national discussion event’s around proposals for a Transient Visitor Levy). On Council Tax, local authorities will again be able to increase council tax by 3%, but there is no hint of the more fundamental reform that the Scottish Green party have argued for.
The underlying narrative of the budget remains, as last year, that higher personal taxation on those in the upper half of the income distribution is justified as part of a ‘social contract’ that includes universal service provision in a greater range of areas than south of the border, and additional spending on various aspects of social security.
But some will question the juxtaposition of the income tax policy choices against Mr. MacKay’s enthusiasm for securing lower business rates increases than in other parts of the UK. The budget boasts that 90% of business in Scotland will pay a lower poundage than they would in other parts of the UK, and that Scotland has the ‘most generous package of reliefs in the UK, worth more than £750 million in 2019-20’.
In his budget speech Derek MacKay argued that Scotland is the ‘fairest taxed part of the UK’, but that claim to fairness will be hotly disputed in the coming weeks.
This afternoon, Mr Mackay set out the proposed income tax parameters for 2019/20 in the draft Budget.
These are shown in the table at the bottom of this blog, together with last year’s policy and the 2019/20 UK policy.
Mr MacKay said that 99% of Scottish income taxpayers will pay less tax in 2019/20 than they did in 2018/19.
This statement is correct in the sense that, in 2019/20, 99% of taxpayers will benefit from a higher tax-free personal allowance**, (and to a lesser extent the Scottish Government’s increase in the thresholds for the basic and intermediate rates).
What about comparisons with the rest of the UK? Mr Mackay pointed out that 55% of Scottish taxpayers will pay less income tax than rUK taxpayers with equivalent income.
This is true in that the 19% Starter Rate in Scotland means that those with income less than £27,000 (slightly above the Scottish median income) will pay less tax than rUK counterparts.
It is worth bearing in mind however that the difference between Scottish and rUK tax liabilities at this end of the income distribution is small – the maximum benefit to Scottish income taxpayers is just over £20 per year.
Some examples of the difference in liabilities for different salaries are given in the diagram below.
Today we published our latest Economic Commentary.
Today’s Commentary includes a forward look to tomorrow’s Scottish Budget.
In this blog, we summarise some of the key points from our latest outlook.
Wednesday’s Scottish Budget announcement will almost certainly play second fiddle to Brexit as a news story, and justifiably so given the significance of the UK’s future relationship with the EU.
But the Scottish budget is important too, and not just because it tell us how much income tax and council tax we can expect to pay next year. It also sets the direction of devolved public spending in Scotland, which, when set alongside budgets of previous years, is beginning to tell a story of substantial change in the way in which devolved public spending is distributed across public services.Continue reading