Report on the Welsh Tax Base

Part of 1. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Finance – in the Senedd at 2:07 pm on 18 July 2018.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:07, 18 July 2018

Well, I thank Jack Sargeant for that. It's an important part of the report that says to us that we must think about Welsh taxes in the round and that we must be prepared to think about ways in which decisions made on taxes on income can be calibrated alongside decisions made about taxes on property. There are some very interesting parts of the report that refer to the trade-offs that there may be between the one and the other. So, I can certainly give Jack Sargeant an assurance that we are looking carefully at that, that I do discuss it with Alun Davies, and that there is a set of work in hand to look both at short-term changes we could make to council tax to try to make it less regressive than it inevitably is, and then to look at some more profound reforms of local taxation to see if there is, in a practical sense, something different that we could use instead of council tax. I hope that that work will be completed during this Assembly term and available to the next Assembly.