Everyone wants to tackle child poverty. When John Swinney made it his priority on day one, he couldn’t have picked a more unifying cause.

Everyone knows too that he and his ministers are a bit short right now, to the tune of a billion and a half. That funding gap is having an impact on every decision ministers make. Unfortunately there isn’t a National Lottery for governments which could deliver a poverty-blasting windfall. The super-wealthy tend to prefer super yachts and space rockets to ensuring children don’t go to bed hungry, so there’s no point expecting them to hand over their spare billions.

So how is the Scottish Government to meet its target of reducing the numbers of children in relative poverty to 10 per cent by 2030? With epic difficulty, obviously, but overhauling our unjust council tax system could be a part of the answer.

“It’s a regressive tax that takes up a much larger proportion of low-income households’ budget than better-off households’,” the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reminds us, in its latest warning to the Scottish Government about its vanishingly small chances of reaching the 2030 target. It describes the council tax system in Scotland as unfair by design, outdated and desperately in need of reform.

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This is another thing everyone agrees on. Council tax isn’t working. If you reformed it, not only could you reduce what people in struggling households had to pay but you could, depending on how you did it, increase the overall tax take – a double benefit. It........

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