SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford has called on the Treasury to give Police Scotland a £100 million tax rebate of all the VAT the single force has paid.
The Ross, Skye and Lochaber MP used his speech at party conference to make clear it wouldn’t be enough just to change the law to fix the situation whereby the Scottish police and fire services are the only ones in the UK unable to reclaim VAT.
Blackford told the party faithful in Glasgow: “We’ll demand an end to the scandal of a Tory government that is charging VAT to Scotland’s police and fire services, and taking millions of pounds away from the frontline.”
Going off script, he added: “And in doing so we don’t just want to see a scrapping of the VAT, we want the repayment of the funds that we have paid over the course of the last two years”.
Though the SNP have, in the past, talked about getting the Treasury to give Scotland’s emergency services the money they’re due, it’s the first time someone in the party has explicitly called for a clawback of all the tax paid.
Blackford’s call comes as reports over the weekend suggested Scotland’s 13 Tory MPs are lobbying the Chancellor to ditch the tax.
A UK Government insider told the Sunday Post the proposal was “in the mix”.
One Tory MP told the paper: “We have been strongly led to believe this is happening. We have all lobbied individually to have the VAT removed from the police and fire service and it was part of the letter we sent to No 11 [Downing Street] as a group.”
A UK Government spokeswoman said: “The Scottish Government were aware the police and fire services would have to pay VAT when they made the decision to centralise them.”
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