We are accustomed to any-thing cooked up between the SNP and the Greens being disastrous, but the latest cock-up has taken a few years to surface.
Under a deal with the Greens to alter the way business rates were collected, the law was changed in 2020 and it has only just been revealed that the new legislation was incompetent and there was no basis to charge businesses for property their owned but didn’t occupy when it took effect in 2023.
The result is that up to £350 million has been collected illegally, about £50 million of it in Edinburgh, which by rights should be repaid.
The problem was identified in August, but by strange coincidence the SNP Government chose this week, the same time as UK Labour’s crisis-hit budget, to introduce emergency legislation to sort the problem. Funny that.
The fix is retrospective so there will be no windfall for the businesses, which unfortunately is probably the right decision to avoid chaos for local authorities who have enough problems balancing the books as it is.
Then again, it’s possible some businesses which collapsed in that time might have survived had the law been properly applied. There may be claims.
But it’s unlikely there will be direct consequences for those responsible, certainly not the SNP minister at the time, Kevin Stewart, who is standing down at the election in May.
If only it was so easy as to pass a law to magic away all the other catastrophic SNP errors which have been such a drain of taxpayers’ money.
