A SCOTTISH independence-supporting lawyer has been touring the country promoting a public revenue system that would reduce personal and indirect taxation and substantially increase people’s disposable income.

Graeme McCormick, who owns Conveyancing Direct, developed the Annual Ground Rent (AGR) method after the independence referendum debate, when Unionists constantly undermined the economic case for Scotland going it alone.

He told The National: “I thought the economic argument for independence, although it was robust, obviously failed to persuade enough people. Regardless of Brexit or anything else like that, the arguments against independence will still be directed at us, no matter what the economic position is in Scotland. I wanted to try to develop a system of public revenue which could answer these questions and successfully defend against these attacks – one not subject to the volatility of global markets, or the price of oil, or which would result in Scotland having to pay higher interest rates for the public purse to get money to invest.

“It’s a system that derives money from our land and the more I looked into it I found, astonishingly, that you could return a large amount of money to people by reducing taxation.

“Using it would encourage more of the ‘haves’ who didn’t vote the last time to say ‘there’s something significant in this for me’, apart from being of benefit to an independent Scotland as well.”

AGR is calculated by dividing Scotland’s land by the desired amount of public expenditure, and putting it into four categories – rough grazing, woodland, arable and urban. Home or land owners calculate their own AGR by multiplying the area of their space by the land type rate and would make their return online to Revenue Scotland, either yearly or by instalments.

McCormick pointed out that most people live and work in urban areas, where most public amenities are sited. Because of their intensive use they require more management, repair and replacement, but they also create greater wealth.

The urban rate would apply to houses and gardens in urban areas and buildings in rural settings, with liability for common property div-ided by the number of owners, while landowners would be able to recover the AGR from their tenants.

Revenue Scotland would carry out spot checks for inaccurate or dishonest filings, and transparency would be assured with everyone’s return on a public register.

McCormick gives the example of someone on average earnings of £26,500, who currently pays income tax and national insurance of £4,400; council tax on an average-priced property at £1,169; water rates of £417; road tax £200; and £4,943 in VAT, making a total of £11,129.

By comparison, someone living in an average urban house would pay £1,120 – a saving of £10,009.

McCormick says income tax could cease to exist, along with inheritance, business and council taxes and VAT.

There would be no adverse effect on the value of people’s homes or business premises and they would know how much they owed at the start of each year.

Big landowners would likely offload uneconomic land that did not provide sufficient income to pay the AGR, and it would be in their interests to develop, diversify and farm any that they retained.

McCormick believes AGR’s biggest selling point is its simplicity: “The bureaucracy attached to it is miniscule in comparison to HMRC. It’s such a simple way to gather public revenue – people would do it themselves and you wouldn’t need anyone official to estimate it.

“And if people are dishonest with their returns there would be spot checks with a significant penalty if they weren’t being honest about it.”