Alma Economics was commissioned by the Scottish Government to analyse the responses to a consultation seeking views from the public on increasing Council Tax charges by 7.5%, 12.5%, 17.5% and 22.5% for Bands E through H, respectively. These changes were designed to address a perceived imbalance in the system: as noted in the Commission on Local Tax Reform’s 2015 report, under the current system, the effective Council Tax rate is higher for lower-value properties (when expressed as a percentage of the estimated property value).

Through the Joint Working Group on Sources of Local Government Funding and Council Tax Reform (JWG), the Scottish Government and Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA) sought the public’s views on this proposed change to the current system. A public consultation was open from 12 July until 20 September 2023, and aimed to collect views and opinions on:

• Whether households in properties in the highest Council Tax bands (Bands E to H) should make a greater contribution, and

• The relationship between the valuation band a property is in, and the tax rate set by the council for the local authority area.

The consultation received over 15,000 responses in total. Our research methodology consisted of: (i) manual reading of a representative sample of responses; (ii) an automated approach assigning themes to remaining consultation responses by training a set of machine learning models on manually-reviewed responses; and (iii) an iterative process through which researchers reviewed the theme labels assigned automatically and fine-tuned the algorithm to increase the robustness of our thematic analysis.

➥ See our full report here.