The Poll Tax in Scotland: The Year Scotland Went First

• Scotland went first. The Community Charge was introduced in Scotland on 1 April 1989 under the Abolition of Domestic Rates Etc. (Scotland) Act 1987, a year before England and Wales.
• The idea started with a Scottish rates crisis. The 1985 Scottish rates revaluation raised domestic rates by an average of about 24%, with much bigger rises in places such as Perth and Kinross. Scottish Conservatives, alarmed for their seats, pressed hard for reform.
• "Guinea pig" is half true. Scotland was used to introduce the tax first, but Scottish Conservatives themselves asked for early action. Calling Scotland a "testing ground" is a fair description of what happened, but it misreads why it happened.
• Non-payment was on a mass scale. One estimate puts Scottish non-payers at about 880,000 of roughly 4 million liable adults. On 15 January 1990, Strathclyde Regional Council alone issued 250,000 summary warrants.
• Warrant sales were the flashpoint. Anti-poll tax unions physically blocked attempts to seize and sell non-payers' goods. Tommy Sheridan was jailed for defying a court order to stay away from one.
• The tax had a national ending. Riots in London on 31 March 1990, the day before the tax began in England, and the tax's unpopularity contributed to Thatcher's fall in November 1990. Abolition was announced in March 1991, and the Council Tax replaced the Community Charge from April 1993.
• The debt lasted a quarter of a century. In 2015 the Scottish Parliament voted 98–15 to stop councils collecting roughly £425 million of remaining arrears.

For centuries, local services in Britain were funded by rates, a property tax based on the notional rental value of a home. Rates were simple to collect but widely disliked: a pensioner living alone in a large house could pay far more than a household of several earners in a smaller one. Rateable values were also meant to be revalued periodically, and every revaluation produced losers.

In 1985 Scotland held a statutory rates revaluation, the first for years. England had postponed its own. Domestic rates in Scotland rose by an average of about 24%, and some areas were hit far harder: rises of around 70% were reported in Perth and Kinross. Many of the worst-hit households were in Conservative-voting suburbs and small towns, the party's remaining Scottish heartland.

The reaction inside the party was intense. The Scottish Conservative chairman warned Thatcher that the fallout "could devastate Conservative support in Scotland". The Scottish Secretary, George Younger, predicted severe political damage. Michael Forsyth, MP for Stirling, published The Case for a Poll Tax the same year. At the Scottish Conservative conference in May 1985, Thatcher committed publicly to replacing the rates.

A ministerial review led by Kenneth Baker and William Waldegrave was already working on alternatives. Its answer, published in the Green Paper Paying for Local Government on 28 January 1986, was a flat-rate Community Charge paid by almost every adult. Students, the unemployed and those on low incomes would still pay at least 20%. The principle was "accountability": if every voter paid towards local services, voters would punish high-spending councils at the ballot box.

The Scottish legislation came first. The Abolition of Domestic Rates Etc. (Scotland) Bill had its second reading on 9 December 1986, when the new Scottish Secretary, Malcolm Rifkind, called it a "radical reforming measure". Under pressure from Conservative MPs, the plan to phase the tax in gradually from 1989 to 1992 was replaced by a single "clean break" in 1989. Each adult, rather than each household, was made liable. The Act received Royal Assent on 15 May 1987, weeks before the general election.

That election was a disaster for the Conservatives in Scotland. They lost more than half their Scottish seats, falling from 21 to 10, even as Thatcher won a large UK majority. Critics called this the "democratic deficit": Scotland was about to receive a new tax devised by a government it had overwhelmingly rejected. The charge that Scotland was being used as a "guinea pig" became central to the opposition's argument.

Was it fair? Partly. Scotland did experience the tax a full year before England, and ministers did learn from the Scottish rollout. But the early start was not imposed on unwilling Scottish Conservatives. It was largely what they had asked for after the 1985 revaluation. The irony is that a reform meant to rescue the party in Scotland did more than anything else to sink it.

The Community Charge came into force across Scotland on 1 April 1989. Every adult had to be entered on a new community charge register, which campaigners warned could be used to track people. Councils set their own charge levels. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimated that the average Scottish household's local tax bill rose from about £399 under the rates to £467 in the first year. Large households of adults on modest incomes, often in working-class areas, were among the biggest losers.

Opposition organised before the first bill landed:

• The SNP launched a "Can Pay, Won't Pay" campaign in 1988, urging mass non-payment even by those who could afford it.
• Labour, the dominant party in Scotland, officially refused to back illegal non-payment. Its conference rejected the tactic, and it campaigned instead to "Stop It". Many Labour members defied the line, and a group of activists and MPs, known as the "Committee of 100", pledged not to pay.
• The STUC, churches and local groups joined the opposition.
• Anti-poll tax unions sprang up in schemes and estates across Scotland. Federations such as the Strathclyde Anti-Poll Tax Federation coordinated them, and the All Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation was founded on 25 November 1989.

Non-payment spread fast. Figures vary with how and when they were measured. One widely cited estimate is that about 880,000 of Scotland's roughly 4 million liable adults refused to pay. Some refused on principle; many simply could not afford it. Councils fell behind on collection. On 15 January 1990, Strathclyde Regional Council, the largest local authority in Britain, issued 250,000 summary warrants in a single batch against people who had not paid.

A summary warrant allowed sheriff officers to use Scotland's distinctive debt-recovery powers:

• arrestment of wages or bank accounts;
• poinding (pronounced "pinding"), valuing and listing a debtor's household goods;
• the warrant sale that followed, at which those goods could be auctioned, sometimes in the debtor's own home.

Warrant sales were rare, but they were deeply humiliating, and they became the movement's main target. Anti-poll tax unions set up phone trees. When sheriff officers arrived, crowds gathered to block doors, stage sit-ins, or turn up at sales and refuse to bid. Very few poll tax warrant sales were ever completed.

Tommy Sheridan, a young Glasgow activist from Pollok, became the movement's public face. In 1991 Glasgow Sheriff Court ordered him to stay away from a warrant sale. He went anyway and was jailed for six months. While in prison he stood in the 1992 general election, and weeks later he was elected to Glasgow District Council for the Pollok ward. A decade later, as a member of the Scottish Parliament, he promoted the bill that became the Abolition of Poindings and Warrant Sales Act 2001. It ended the warrant sale as a means of debt recovery in Scotland.

There were costs to the protest as well. Non-payers built up debts, and many later paid with interest or had money taken from their wages and benefits. Councils lost income, which hit the services the tax was meant to fund. Some campaigners argued that this burden fell hardest on the poorest communities.

England and Wales moved to the Community Charge on 1 April 1990. On 31 March 1990, the day before, a huge demonstration in London ended in the Trafalgar Square riot: 113 people were injured and 340 arrested. A large anti-poll tax march took place in Glasgow on the same day, largely peacefully.

Across Britain the tax was a political catastrophe. Local charges came in far higher than ministers had predicted, Conservative councillors lost seats, and the party fell well behind in the polls. In November 1990 Michael Heseltine challenged Thatcher for the leadership, and she announced her resignation on 22 November 1990. The poll tax was not the only cause of her fall, but it is widely regarded as one of the most important.

Her successor, John Major, moved quickly. On 21 March 1991 Michael Heseltine, now Environment Secretary, announced that the Community Charge would be abolished. The Local Government Finance Act 1992 replaced it with the Council Tax, a property-band tax with discounts for single adults, from 1 April 1993. The poll tax lasted four years in Scotland and three in England and Wales.

Abolishing the tax did not cancel the debts owed under it. Scottish councils were legally required to keep pursuing arrears, and they did so for more than twenty years. By 2013 only small sums were still being recovered each year, while the total outstanding, with interest and penalties, stood at about £425 million.

The issue came back in 2014. The independence referendum produced a huge rise in voter registration, and ministers feared councils might use the expanded electoral roll to trace old poll tax debtors. The Scottish Government introduced the Community Charge Debt (Scotland) Bill. Holyrood passed it on 19 February 2015 by 98 votes to 15, ending councils' duty and power to collect the arrears. It received Royal Assent in March 2015. Supporters called it overdue justice. Critics, including some council leaders and opposition politicians, argued that it rewarded people who had broken the law at the expense of those who had paid.

The poll tax is remembered in Scotland as more than a failed tax.

• It cemented the "democratic deficit." For many Scots it became the clearest example of a government with ten Scottish MPs imposing policy on a country that had voted against it, and first at that. The Claim of Right (1988) and the Scottish Constitutional Convention (first meeting in 1989), which drew up the blueprint for devolution, grew up in the same years. Historians debate how much the poll tax caused the push for a parliament and how much it simply accelerated a movement already under way. Few doubt it mattered.
• It damaged the Scottish Conservatives for a generation. The party was reduced to 11 Scottish seats in 1992 and to none in 1997. The poll tax was not the only reason, but it is remembered as the moment the relationship broke.
• It changed Scottish law. Warrant sales, the movement's main target, were abolished by Holyrood in 2001.
• It turned activists into politicians. Campaigners from the anti-poll tax unions, most famously Tommy Sheridan, went on to shape the Scottish left in the early years of devolution.

Accuracy note. The poll tax was a UK government policy, introduced first in Scotland partly at the request of Scottish Conservatives. Both the "guinea pig" story and its denial contain some truth. What is not in dispute is that Scots experienced it first, resisted it in very large numbers, and that it left a lasting mark on Scottish politics.

• "Poll" is an old word for "head". A poll tax is literally a head tax, the same principle as the hated poll taxes of the fourteenth century that helped spark the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
• Poinding, the Scots legal term for valuing a debtor's goods before a warrant sale, is pronounced "pinding".
• Scotland's 1985 rates revaluation went ahead while England's equivalent had been postponed. That difference set the whole poll tax story in motion.
• Scottish councils were still chasing poll tax debts in 2014, 21 years after the tax was abolished.

• Non-payment figures are estimates. They vary by source, date and definition. The 880,000 figure is a widely cited estimate, not an official audited total.
• The IFS figures are averages of total local tax bills. They are model estimates based on survey households, not actual bills.
• The "guinea pig" question involves interpretation. Released government papers and contemporary accounts support both the "testing ground" view and the account that Scottish Conservatives demanded early relief.
• Causation is debated. Historians differ on how far the poll tax, rather than deindustrialisation and broader politics, explains the Conservative collapse and the rise of support for devolution in Scotland.

• Devolution and the Scottish Parliament
• Red Clydeside
• Who Owns Scotland? — Concentrated Land Ownership
• The Scottish Office
• Parliament of Scotland