A report commissioned by the Taxpayers Alliance has found that Scotland is overcharged by more than £1 billion annually in green taxes. That is the sum over and above what the Government in Westminster pay back to support schemes to reduce carbon emissions. The researchers found that Argyll and Bute is the third highest overcharged area, with excess annual charges of £497 per head. The Shetland Isles overpay by £519 annually and the Western Isles (Eilean Siar) top out at £534 per head. It has been noted that these three are remote rural areas with small dispersed populations and clean air – while the great conurbation of Glasgow is being annually overcharged by £132 per head. The Government has now been called on to offset this excessive take by cutting family tax.

Researchers looked at how much each council area pays compared to the carbon reduction targets set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Their calculations showed that £24.2 billion of the £33 billion annual tax take from council, fuel and motoring taxes are ‘green charges’, while the social cost of our national output of carbons is £4.6 billion. The conclusion was that even by the Government’s own estimates, the green taxes we face collect £16.3 million – which is £7.9 million in excess of what is required.

The Taxpayers Alliance points out that this overload places an unfair burden on families struggling to meet the rising cost of living alongside the current clamp down on credit. In the case of Argyll, the excess tax charge is a particularly badly timed discovery. Kintyre is reeling from Vestas’s announcement that it is to close its wind turbine plant at Campbeltown, with the loss of just under one hundred jobs and shift its ‘investment’ to the Isle of Wight as part of a UK Government initiative to make that area a centre of excellence in renewable energy production.

Stewart Hosie, SNP MP for Dundee East and the party’s spokesmen at Westminster for treasury issues, says that ‘Green Taxes should be a useful tool for for modifying behaviour to make us all more aware of our carbon footprint. But in the instance of people in rural areas, they are unfairly burdening already over-stretched families’.

Gavin Brown, Scots Tory enterprise spokesman at Westminster says ‘Gordon Brown has treated the taxpayer like a cash cow and has milked hard-working Scots dry. For him, green tax has been a cloak for stealth tax – but any genuine environmental tax should be offset with cuts in family tax’.

The Treasury position is that ‘The government’s definition of environmental taxes includes those taxes designed to primarily have an environmental impact – the climate change levy, aggregates levy and landfill tax. We make clear, for example, when setting fuel duty rates that the Government takes into account a range of factors, including costs of motoring such as congestion and the need to maintain sound public finances’.

In this case, the scale of the excessive tax take make clear the priority of maintaining sound public finances. But Argyll, Shetland and Eilean Siar could harly be described as places suffering from road congestion.