SCOTTISH families are “paying the price” for Westminster’s freeze on tax-free personal allowance, the SNP warns.

Research from the House of Commons Library found millions of workers across Britain are paying an extra £700 a year in income tax as the government plans to continue freezing the standard personal allowance at the 2021/22 rate of £12,570 a year.

Standard personal allowance is by default indexed to rise annually with inflation, but the previous Tory government froze it in March 2021, and continued freezing it the following years.

The Labour government said in the autumn Budget that it would continue the policy until 2030/31.

SNP Westminster leader Dave Doogan demanded the government unfreeze the allowance, saying it “disproportionately affects low-income workers.”

“Brexit Britain is broken and families across Scotland are paying the price for the Labour government’s record of failure, its creeping stealth taxes, and the dire state of the UK economy,” Mr Doogan said.

He added that workers being “£700 a year worse off, as a result of the Labour Party’s freeze on the tax-free personal allowance, will stick in the craw for the majority of hard-pressed families who are struggling to get by as the cost of living in the UK continues to soar out of control under the Labour government.

“This punitive Labour Party policy hits every income taxpayer in Scotland, and across the UK, and it disproportionately affects low-income workers and state pensioners, who are increasingly being forced to hand more of their already-squeezed incomes back to the UK government.”

Researchers estimated the personal allowance would be around £17,440 by 2030/31 if it increased by inflation, meaning workers could be £974 worse off by the end of the decade as a result.