The manifesto’s policy proposals, field by field:

Benefits & pensions

- Review the date at which the state pension age starts to rise to 66 – though this will not be before 2016 for men and 2020 for women.
- Support automatic staff enrolment into pensions schemes, and “address the growing disparity between public sector pensions and private sector pensions”, while protecting accrued rights.
- Cut tax credits to families with incomes over £50,000.
- Cut government contributions to Child Trust Funds – except for the poorest third of families and those with disabled children.

Business & finance

- Allow councils and businesses to form business-led local enterprise partnerships, replacing the work of Regional Development Agencies – though regionally-based enterprise partnerships would be allowed to continue.
- Create an independent Office for Budget Responsibility. Reform the regulation and structure of the banking system to ensure lower levels of leverage, less dependence on wholesale funding, and greater availability of credit for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
- Refocus research and development tax credits on hi-tech companies, small businesses and new start-ups.
- Create a ‘powerful’ Consumer Protection Agency to take over the Financial Services Authority’s consumer protection role.
- Launch a free national financial advice service.
- Raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1m.

Education

- Enable parents and communities to start new schools, and allow ‘any good education provider’ to set up a new academy.
- Focus education inspector Ofsted’s work more closely on weaker schools, and report on performance only in core areas; abolish many further education quangos.
- Reform school league tables ‘so that schools can demonstrate they are stretching the most able and raising the attainment of the less able’.
- Establish a multi-year Science and Research Budget; review the Research Excellence Framework.
- Introduce a moratorium on the closure of special schools; the ‘bias towards the inclusion of children with special needs in mainstream schools’ will be stopped.
- Make Key Stage 2 tests ‘more rigorous’, and give universities and academics more say over other exams’ form and content.
- Refocus Sure Start on ‘early intervention, and increase its focus on the neediest families’; provide 4,200 more Sure Start health visitors.
- Provide 10,000 extra university places this year.
- Make public funds follow student choice and have them delivered by a single agency, the Further Education Funding Council.
- Create technical academies across England, focusing on vocational education.

Employment

- Create a single Work Programme for the unemployed, delivered through private and voluntary sectors.
- Establish a new programme, ‘Work for Yourself’, giving unemployed people access to business mentors  and loans.
- Look at how to abolish the default retirement age.
- Create 400,000 apprenticeship, college and training places; give SMEs £2,000 for each new apprentice they employ.
- Establish a Community Learning Fund to restart careers; create an all-age careers service.

Energy, environment & food

- Refocus Ofgem on executing energy policy.
- Create a Green Investment Bank to finance new green technology start-ups.
- Reform the Climate Change Levy to provide a floor price for carbon.
- Create a ‘Green Deal’, giving households £6,500 of energy-improvement measures.
- Introduce honesty in food labelling.
- Negotiate reform of the Common Agricultural Policy; push for the dismantling of subsidies. Minimise and reform farm inspections.

Health

- Create a new Early Years Support Team to fund early intervention and parenting support under one budget.
- Turn the Department of Health into a Department for Public Health to promote good all-round health and the prevention of illness.
- Turn NHS providers into autonomous foundation trusts; create an independent NHS board to allocate resources and provide commissioning guidelines.
- Cut the cost of NHS administration by a third, transferring resources to doctors and nurses; make NHS staff more accountable to patients.
- Introduce a new contract to tie newly qualified dentists to the NHS for five years.

Home Office

- Create a dedicated Border Police Force, as part of a refocused Serious Organised Crime Agency.
- Amend health and safety laws ‘that stand in the way of common sense policing’.
- Extend prison capacity and expand early deportation of foreign national prisoners.
- Pilot Prison and Rehabilitation Trusts, with a single organisation responsible for reducing re-offending.
- Set an annual limit on the number of non-EU economic migrants, limiting access to “those who will bring the most value to the British economy”.

International aid

- Create a new ‘MyAid Fund’ with public input into aid spending, and a new Poverty Impact Fund.
- Create a Stabilisation and Reconstruction Force to boost the military’s role in relief efforts.

Local government, planning & communities

- Freeze council tax for two years, and scrap plans for a council tax revaluation.
- Abolish the Infrastructure Planning Commission, and replace it with a ‘democratically accountable’ fast-track process for major infrastructure projects.
- Introduce a National Citizen Service for 16-year-olds.
- Create a new ‘community right to buy’ to give local people the power to protect community assets threatened with closure. The public to have a ‘right to bid’ to run community services instead of the state.

Transport

- Stop the Heathrow third runway; block plans for second runways at Stansted and Gatwick.
- Support Crossrail and the electrification of the Great Western line to South Wales.
- Begin work on a high-speed rail line connecting London and Heathrow with Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.
- Grant longer, more flexible rail franchises.
- Reduce work-related travel.

Last updated 751 days ago by Civil Service Live