Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Finance and Trefnydd – in the Senedd at 1:47 pm on 5 February 2020.
We are currently looking at the future of local taxes, so looking at business rates and council tax, in partnership, to explore whether there is some local government finance reform that needs to be undertaken. We've undertaken a suite of research to help us with that, including what would the implications be if we were to move to a land value tax, for example; looking at the implications of potential revaluation, who would be the winners and losers; and then also some work that looks at the implications of universal credit, specifically on the council tax side of local taxation. So we're certainly bringing together a suite of research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, from Bangor University and elsewhere, which we'll be publishing in a series of documents over the course of the coming three months, I imagine, and they'll be available for all colleagues to explore in terms of exploring a potential better way to do local taxation. What I will say is that we don't want to introduce reform for the sake of reform, but I think that there certainly is a case to introduce some further fairness and some further coherence into the system.