3. Statement by the Cabinet Secretary for Finance: Tax Policy Work Plan 2018, including New Taxes

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:45 pm on 13 February 2018.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 3:45, 13 February 2018

I thank Adam Price for all of those questions. We haven't made our minds up on the final question because it's still too early, we think, in the process.

In relation to the second home supplement within the land transaction tax, there are two parts of the work programme that have been specifically agreed with Plaid Cymru. We promised to produce a regional analysis of that, once the WRA was up and running, to see whether a tax might be calibratable to a local level, and I've taken seriously the points that Siân Gwenllian has made regularly in this Chamber about the way in which a second home tax may be having an unintended consequence of second home owners switching from domestic taxation to claiming to be businesses, and local authorities losing out on a potential income stream in that way, and that is now part of the work programme.

As far as the future of local taxation altogether is concerned, I hope to be at the radical end of it in that what I've said in the Chamber previously, Dirprwy Lywydd, is that I have set in hand a piece of work in this Assembly term that will look in practical detail at whether alternative forms of local taxation such as land value taxation would be a preferable form of taxation than the one we have presently in Wales. I want the Assembly to be in a position to come to a conclusion on that debate, not on the abstract merits of different policy ideas, but on what it would take to make alternative ways of doing things actually happen in Wales. What would we need to do? Would we have the confidence that it would be a better system than the one that we currently have? We're not in a position of having the information we need to make an informed judgment on that; I hope we will be as a result of the work that's being carried out in this Assembly term.