Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:34 pm on 5 July 2016.
Thank you, Jenny Rathbone, for those questions. She’s right to begin by warning us of perversities and unintended consequences that can flow from even the best motivated policies. But I do continue to believe that the basic principle that any tier of government that expends public money should also be responsible for raising part of that money is the right one. And then we have to work hard to make sure that we do it in the correct way. I thank the Member for Cardiff Central for referring to the San Francisco experience, which I don’t know enough about, but will look forward to learning more about that.
I think she points to another of these wider contextual matters that Mike Hedges raised, which is that, alongside all of this, if the Wales Bill succeeds, then this National Assembly will have new powers to propose new taxes here in Wales. And the recent Bevan Commission report rehearsed land value taxation as one of a number of possibilities that could be tested in that new regime. Personally, I have long been something of an enthusiast for land value taxation. What I do feel is that, if those new powers come to Wales, it will be important for us to think through together some examples of new taxes that we might be able to propose in order to test out the new machinery that the Wales Bill envisages and to see the best way in which we could use those new powers for the benefit of individuals and services in Wales.