liberaldemocrats.md

Liberal Democrat Manifesto

Economy and Democracy

• Spend on housebuilding to help build 300,000 homes a year by 2022.
• End the 1% cap on pay rises in the public sector, and uprate wages in line with inflation.
• Reforms to Capital Gains Tax and dividend tax relief, and refocusing entrepreneurs’ relief. We would reverse a number of the Conservatives’ unfair and unjustified tax cuts, including:
  • The cutting of Corporation Tax from 20% to 17%.
  • Capital Gains Tax cuts.
  • Capital Gains Tax extended relief.
  • The Marriage Allowance.
  • The raising of the Inheritance Tax threshold
• Introduce a General Anti-Avoidance Rule, setting a target for HM Revenue & Customs to reduce the tax gap.
• Reform Corporation Tax- consult on shifting away from a profits-based tax to one that takes account of a wider range of economic activity indicators.
• Review the Business Rates system.
• Consider the implementation of Land Value Taxation.
• Require the major banks to fund the creation of a local banking sector dedicated to meeting the needs of local SMEs.
• Uprate working-age benefits at least in line with inflation.
• Oppose any attempt to withdraw from the ECHR or abolish or water down the Human Rights Act.
• End the ministerial veto on release of information under the Freedom of Information Act.
• Introduce votes at 16 for all elections and referendums across the UK.
• Introduce the Single Transferable Vote for local government elections in England and for electing MPs across the UK.
• Enable all UK citizens living abroad to vote for MPs in separate overseas constituencies, and to participate in UK referendums.
• Reform the House of Lords with a proper democratic mandate.
• Cap donations to political parties at £10,000 per person each year.
• Introduce trials of weekend voting to help raise turnouts in elections

Infrastructure

• Continued commitment to HS2, Crossrail 2 and rail electrification.
• Implement a programme of installing hyperfast, fibre-optic broadband across the UK.
• £5 billion of initial capital for a new British Housing and Infrastructure Development Bank.
• Continue to champion the Northern Powerhouse and Midlands Engine initiatives and invest significant capital resources in infrastructure projects across the north of England and the Midlands.
• Continue to back new entrants to the energy market, aiming for at least 30% of the household market to be supplied by competitors to the ‘Big 6’ by 2022.
• Directly build homes to fill the gap left by the market, to reach our housebuilding target of 300,000 homes a year, through a government commissioning programme to build homes for sale and rent.
• Ensure that half a million affordable, energy-efficient homes are built by the end of
  the parliament.
• Create at least 10 new garden cities in England.
• Set up a new government-backed British Housing and Infrastructure Development Bank.
• End the Voluntary Right to Buy pilots.
• Require local plans to take into account at least 15 years of future housing need.
• Enable local authorities to:
  • Levy up to 200% council tax on second homes and ‘buy to leave empty’ investments from overseas.
  • Enforce housebuilding on unwanted public sector land.
  • Penalise excessive land-banking when builders with planning permission have failed to build after three years.
  • End the Right to Buy if they choose.
• Help people who cannot afford a deposit by introducing a new Rent to Own model where rent payments give tenants an increasing stake in the property, owning it outright after 30 years.
• Ban lettings fees for tenants, cap upfront deposits and increase minimum standards in rented homes.
• Deliver the Transport for the North strategy to promote growth, innovation and prosperity across northern England.
• Remain opposed to any expansion of Heathrow, Stansted or Gatwick and any new airport in the Thames Estuary and will focus instead on improving existing regional airports such as Birmingham and Manchester. We will ensure no net increase in runways across the UK.
• Introduce a new Young Person’s Bus Discount Card, for young people aged 16–21, giving a two-thirds discount on bus travel.
• Ensure that every property in the UK is provided, by 2022, with a superfast broadband connection with a download speed of 30Mbps, an upload speed of 6Mbps, and an unlimited usage cap.
• Invest £2 billion to ensure the provision of highspeed broadband across the rural UK.

Industry

• Expand the activities of the state-owned British Business Bank.
• Create a new start-up allowance.
• Review Business Rates.
• Reform the Regulatory Policy Committee.
• Protect the science budget by continuing to raise it at least in line with inflation.
• Major expansion of high-quality apprenticeships, including advances apprenticeships.
• Invest to ensure that broadband connections and services to be provided before 2020 have a speed of 2 Gbps or more, with fibre to the premises (FTTP) as standard and unlimited usage by 2020 across the whole of the UK.
• Grow a network across the UK acting as incubators for technology companies.
• Retain coding on the national curriculum in England.
• Continue to support the Creative Industries Council.
• Encourage employers to promote employee ownership by giving staff in listed companies with more than 250 employees a right to request shares, to be held in trust for the benefit of employees.

Employment

• Raise the employee national insurance threshold to the Income Tax threshold.
• Extend transparency requirements on larger employers to include publishing the number of people paid less than the living wage and the ratio between top and median pay.
• Stamp out the abuse of zero-hours contracts. Create a formal right to request a fixed contract and consult on introducing a right to make regular patterns of work contractual after a period of time.
• Reduce the reporting requirement for disclosure of shareholdings to 1% in order to increase transparency over who owns stakes in the biggest companies.
• Require binding and public votes of board members on executive pay policies.

Brexit

• Press for the UK to unilaterally guarantee rights of EU nationals in the UK, and secure the same rights for UK citizens living in EU countries.
• Call for an overhall and simplification of the registration process and the requirements for EU nationals to obtain permanent residence and UK citizenship.
• Ensure that trade can continue without customs controls at the border, and that the UK maintains membership of the single market.
• Any deal negotiated for the UK outside the EU must protect the right to work, travel, study and retire across the EU.
• Protect Erasmus+ and other EU-funded schemes which increase opportunities for young people.
• Ensure entitlements based on EU law, such as the right to 52 weeks maternity leave, are not undermined.
• Maintain EU environmental standards in UK law.
• Fight to maintain maximum co-operation concerning the European Arrest Warrant and shared access to police databases.
• Campaign against any reduction in investment in UK universities and for their right to apply for EU funds on equal terms.
• Strive to retain traveller and tourist benefits such as the European Health Insurance Card, reduced roaming charges and pet passports.
• Oppose any moves that threaten the political stability of Northern Ireland.
• Campaign to protect the rights of people in Gibraltar.
• Ensure that the UK retains international arrangements for jurisdiction, the recognition and enforcement of judgments and for family cases currently enjoyed under the EU Brussels I and Brussels II regulation and the Hague child abduction convention.

Education and Childcare

• Reverse all cuts to front-line school and college budgets.
• Protect per-pupil funding in real terms.
• Introduce a national funding system with a protection for all schools, so that no school loses money.
• Protect the Pupil Premium.
• Increase the Early Years Pupil Premium to £1000 per pupil per year.
• Aim for every formal early years setting to employ at least 1 person who holds an early years teaching qualification by 2022.
• End the 1% cap on teachers' pay rises.
• Guarantee that all teachers in state-funded schools will be fully qualified or working towards Qualified Teacher Status from January 2019.
• Introduce an entitlement to professional development for all teachers- 25 hours per year by 2020, rising to the OECD average of 50 hours by 2025.
• Establish an independent Education Standards Authority.
• Reform Ofsted inspections.
• Support the establishment of a new, independent Foundation for Leadership in Education, working under the Chartered College of Teaching.
• Scrap the planned expansion of grammar schools and devolve all capital monies for new school spaces to local authorities.
• Rule out state-funded profit-making schools.
• Introduce a Curriculum Entitlement- a slimmed down core national curriculum, which will be taught in all state-funded schools- including PSHE which will cover financial literacy, first aid and emergency lifesaving skills, mental health education, citizenship and age-appropriate Sex and Relationship Education.
• Work with the profession to reform tests at 11, preventing curriculum narrowing in upper Key Stage 2.
• Challenge gender stereotyping and early sexualisation, working with schools to promote positive body image and break down outdated perceptions of gender appropriateness of particular academic subjects.
• Ensure that all teaching staff have the training to identify mental health issues and that schools provide immediate access for pupil support and counselling.
• Include promoting wellbeing as a statutory duty of a school, and be part of the Ofsted inspection framework.
• Extend free school meals to all children in primary education and promote school breakfast clubs.
• Establish a new online Family University.
• Reinstate maintenance grants for the poorest students.
• Require every university to be transparent about selection criteria.
• Fight to retain access to Horizon 2020 and Marie Sklodowska-Curie actions funding.
• Reinstate quality assurance for universities applying for degree-awarding powers.
• Aim to double the number of businesses which hire apprentices.
• Work with the Apprenticeship Advisory Group to increase the number of apprentices from BAME backgrounds, ensure gender balance across industry sectors and encourage under-represented groups to apply.
• Expand higher vocational training such as foundation degrees, Higher National Diplomas, Higher National Certificates and Higher Apprenticeships.
• Ensure that all the receipts from the Apprenticeship Levy in England are spent on training, aiming to fund a wider range of types of training.
• Aim to meet all basic skills needs by 2030.

Environment and Animal Cruelty

• Additional funding to bring more private investment into renewable energy.
• Provide assistance to areas heavily dependent on fossil fuel industries, such as the north-east of Scotland, to diversify away from these industries.
• Give the immediate go-ahead to the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon project.
• Introduce a diesel scrappage scheme, and a ban on the sale of diesel cars and small vans in the UK by 2025.
• Extend ultra-low-emission zones to 10 more towns and cities.
• All private hire vehicles and diesel buses licensed to operate in urban areas to run on ultra-low-emission or zero-emission fuels within five years.
• Pass a Zero-Carbon Britain Act to set new legally binding targets to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2040 and to zero by 2050.
• Set up a British Housing and Infrastructure Development Bank.
• Support the Paris Agreement by ensuring the UK meets its own climate commitments.
• Expand renewable energy, aiming to generate 60% of electricity from renewables by 2030, restoring government support for solar PV and onshore wind in appropriate locations (helping meet climate targets at least cost) and building more electricity inter-connectors to underpin this higher reliance on renewables.
• Support investment in cutting-edge technologies including energy storage, smart grid technology, hydrogen technologies, offshore wind, and tidal power (including giving the go-ahead for the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon), and investing heavily in research and development.
• Support a carbon capture and storage programme.
• Oppose fracking.
• Maintain membership of Euratom, ensuring continued nuclear co-operation, research funding, and access to nuclear fuels.
• Establish a £2 billion flood-prevention fund.
• Pass a Nature Act to put the Natural Capital Committee (NCC) on a statutory footing, and set legally binding natural capital targets.
• Create a new designation of national nature parks to protect up to one million acres of accessible green space.
• Reform of water management and higher water-efficiency standards, and establish a ‘blue belt’ of protected marine areas.
• Aim to plant a tree for every UK citizen over the next 10 years, and protect remaining ancient woodlands.
• Suspend the use of neonicotinoids until proven that their use in agriculture does not harm bees or other pollinators.
• Introduce stronger penalties for animal cruelty offences, increasing the maximum sentencing from six months to five years.
• Bring in a ban on caged hens.
• Clamp down on illegal pet imports through legal identification requirements for online sales.
• Minimise the use of animals in scientific experimentation, including by funding
  research into alternatives.
• Introduce a national food strategy.
• Develop safe, effective, humane and evidence-based ways of controlling bovine TB.
• Pass a Zero-Waste Act, including legally binding targets for reducing net consumption of key natural resources, and introducing incentives for businesses to improve resource efficiency.
• Establish a statutory waste recycling target of 70% in England and extend separate food waste collections to at least 90% of homes by 2022.
• Introduce a 5p charge on disposable coffee cups to reduce waste.

Housing

• Pass a new Green Buildings Act to set new energy-efficiency targets, including a long-term ambition for every home in England to reach at least an energy rating of Band C by 2035.
• Ensure that at least four million homes are made highly energy efficient (Band C) by 2022, with priority given to fuel-poor households.
• Restore the zero-carbon standard for new homes, increasing the standard steadily and extending it to non-domestic buildings by 2022.
• Increase support for homelessness prevention and adequately funding age-appropriate
  emergency accommodation and supported housing, while ensuring that all local authorities have at least one provider of the Housing First model of provision for long-term, entrenched homeless people

Healthcare

• Immediate 1p rise on the basic, higher and additional rates of Income Tax to raise £6billion additional revenue to be spent only on NHS and social care services.
• Commission the development of a dedicated health and care tax on the basis of wide consultation, possibly based on the reform of National Insurance contributions.
• Establish a cross-party health and social care convention to carry out a comprehensive review of the longer-term sustainability of the health and social care finances and workforce.
• Introduce a statutory independent budget monitoring agency for health and care.
• Guarantee the rights of all NHS and social care staff who are EU Nationals to stay in the UK.
• End the public sector pay freeze for NHS workers.
• Reinstate student nurse bursaries.
• Protect NHS whistle-blowers.
• Produce a national workforce strategy.
• Increase access to clinically- and cost-effective talking therapies.
• Continue to roll out access and waiting time standards for children, young people and adults. Includes a guarantee that people will not wait more than 6 weeks for therapy for depression or anxiety, and no young person will wait more than 2 weeks for treatment when they experience a first episode of psychosis.
• Transform mental health support for pregnant women, new mothers and those who have experienced miscarriage or stillbirth.
• Promote and invest in the Frontline programme to fast-track exceptional graduates into children's social work. Also promote and invest in the Think Ahead scheme.
• End out-of-area placements.
• Ensure that all front-line public service professionals receive better training in mental health.
• Roll out the Liaison and Diversion Programme nationally.
• Implement a cap on the cost of social care.
• Move towards single place-based budgets for health and social care by 2020.
• Introduce a statutory code of conduct backed up by a care workers' suitability register.
• Raise the amount people can earn before losing Carer's Allowance from £110 to £150 per week.
• Give the NHS a legal duty to identify carers and develop a Carer's Passport scheme to inform carers of their NHS rights.
• Provide more choice at end of life and move towards free end-of-life social care.
• Promote easier access to GPs, provide national support to struggling GP practices.
• Encourage GPs and clinicians to work in disadvantaged areas through our Patient Premium.
• Publish a National Wellbeing Strategy.
• Make Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis for HIV prevention available on the NHS.
• Support effective public awareness campaigns such as Be Clear on Cancer.
• Develop a strategy to tackle childhood obesity.
• Introduce mandatory targets on sugar reduction for food and drink producers.
• Introduce a wellbeing premium to reward employers to take clear action to measurably improve the health of their employees.

Security & Defense

• Give an additional £300 million a year to local police forces.
• Maintain, as part of our fight against hard Brexit, cross-border co-operation in combatting serious organised crime, including international fraud and child sexual exploitation, by retaining the European Arrest Warrant, membership of Europol and access to EU information databases.
• End the 1% cap on police pay rises.
• Require all front-line officers to wear body cameras on duty.
• Replace Police and Crime Commissioners, elected at great expense in elections with very low turnout, with accountable police boards made up of local councillors.
• Introduce a presumption against short prison sentences and increase the use
  non-custodial punishments.
• Extend the responsibility of the Youth Justice Board to all offenders under 21, giving it the power to commission mental-health services.
• Establish a Women's Justice Board.
• Ensure that trans prisoners are placed in prisons that reflect their gender identity, rather than their birth gender.
• Scrap the Prevent strategy and replace it with a scheme prioritising community engagement.
• Oppose attempts to undermine encryption.
• End imprisonment for possession of illegal drugs for personal use, diverting those arrested for possession of drugs for personal use into treatment and education (adopting a health-based approach), or imposing civil penalties.
• Repeal the Psychoactive Substances Act.
• Commit to spending 2% of GDP on defence.
• Strengthen our armed services and address critical skills shortages by recruiting STEM graduates to be armed forces engineers, providing ‘golden handshakes’ of up to £10,000.
• Invest in countering cyberattacks.
• Maintain a minimum nuclear deterrent. Propose continuing with the Dreadnought programme, the submarine-based replacement for Vanguard, but procuring three boats instead of four and moving to a medium-readiness responsive posture.
• Support the Armed Forces Covenant and ongoing work to support veterans’ mental health.
• Improve the quality of service housing by bringing the Ministry of Defence into line with other landlords, giving tenants the same legal rights to repair and maintenance as private tenants.

### Local Communities

• Extend the Equality Act to all large companies with more than 250 employees, requiring them to monitor and publish data on gender, BAME, and LGBT+ employment levels and pay gaps.
• Set up a £2 billion Rural Services Fund of capital investment to enable communities to establish a local base from which to co-locate services such as council offices, post offices, children’s centres, libraries and visiting healthcare professionals.
• Reduce the proliferation of betting shops and capping the maximum amount able to be bet on fixed odds betting terminals (FOBTs) at one time to £2.

Social Services and Security

• Expand Shared Parental Leave with an additional ‘use it or lose it’ month to encourage fathers to take time off with young children.
• Provide 15 hours a week of free childcare to the parents of all two-year-olds in England. We will then prioritise 15 hours’ free childcare for all working parents in England with children aged between nine months and two years.
• Take 13,000 children out of poverty by letting both parents earn before their Universal Credit is cut and also reverse cuts to the Family Element.
• Reversing the cuts to Work Allowances in Universal Credit.
• Abandon the two-child policy on family benefits and abolish the Conservatives’ ‘rape clause’ where a woman has to declare children that are born as a result of rape in order to access benefits.
• Reversing cuts to housing benefit for 18-21-year-olds and increase the rates of Jobseeker’s Allowance and Universal Credit for those aged 18-24 at the same rate as minimum wages.
• Reverse cuts to Employment Support Allowance to those in the work-related activity group.
• Increase Local Housing Allowance (LHA) in line with average rents in an area.
• Scrap the ‘bedroom tax’.
• Scrap the discredited Work Capability Assessment and replace it with a new system, run by local authorities according to national rules, including a ‘real world’ test that is based on the local labour market.
• Withdraw eligibility for the Winter Fuel Payment from pensioners who pay tax at the higher rate (40%).
• Retain the free bus pass for all pensioners.
• Maintain the ‘triple lock’ of increasing the state pension each year by the highest of earnings growth, prices growth or 2.5% for the next parliament.

Diverse and Cultured Communities

• Ensure that LGBT+ inclusive mental health services receive funding and support.
• Maintain free access to national museums and galleries.
• Protect the independence of the BBC and set up a BBC Licence Fee 66 Support Families and Communities 6 Commission, maintain Channel 4 in public ownership and protect the funding and editorial independence of Welsh language broadcasters.
• Protect sports and arts funding via the National Lottery.
• Maintain current standards of intellectual property (IP) protection with continuing co-operation on enforcement of IP generated in the UK and working within the EU to ensure the continuation of territorial licensing of rights.
• Create creative enterprise zones.
• Fund more extensive childcare, and provide better back-to-work support to reach an ambitious goal of one million more women in work by 2025.
• Push for at least 40% of board members being women in FTSE 350 companies and implementing the recommendations of the Parker review to increase ethnic minority representation.
• Ask the Advisory Committee on Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs periodically to review rules around men who have sex with men and other related groups donating blood to consider what restrictions remain necessary.
• Guarantee the freedom of people to wear religious or cultural dress, and tackle the growing incidence of Islamophobic hate crime.
• Introduce an ‘X’ option on passports, identity documents, and official forms for those who do not wish to identify as either male or female, and campaign for their introduction in the provision of other services, for example utilities.
• Decriminalise the sale and purchase of sex, and the management of sex work.
• Strengthen legal rights and obligations for couples by introducing mixed-sex civil partnerships and extending rights to cohabiting couples.
• Extend protection of gender reassignment in equality law to explicitly cover gender identity and expression, and streamline and simplify the Gender Recognition Act 2004 to allow individuals to change their legal gender without unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles.
• Address period poverty by providing free sanitary products to girls at school.
• Resource BAME staff associations such as the National Black Police Association to increase ethnic diversity and BAME participation in the police.
• Provide additional government funding for English as an additional language classes.

Disabilities and Mental Health

• Replace Police and Crime Commissioners, elected at great expense in elections with very low turnout, with accountable police boards made up of local councillors.
• Raise awareness of, and seek to expand, Access to Work, which supports people with disabilities in work.
• Accelerate the roll-out of Individual Placement and Support, a proven approach to getting people with mental ill-health back into work.
• Increase accessibility to public places and transport by making more stations wheelchair accessible.

Foreign Policy

• Hold an annual debate in parliament on skill and labour market shortfalls and surpluses.
• Continue to allow high-skilled immigration to support key sectors of our economy.
• We will reinstate post-study work visas for graduates in STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects who find suitable employment within six months of graduating.
• Establish a centrally funded Migration Impact Fund.
• Offer safe and legal routes to the UK for refugees to prevent them from making dangerous journeys.
• Expand the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme to offer sanctuary to 50,000 people over the lifetime of the next parliament.
• Re-open the Dubs unaccompanied child refugee scheme, ensuring Britain meets its responsibilities by taking in 3,000 unaccompanied refugee children. Liberal Democrats would offer these children indefinite leave to remain, meaning they will not be deported once they turn 18.
• End indefinite immigration detention by introducing a 28-day limit.
• Offer asylum to people fleeing countries where their sexual orientation or gender identification means that they risk imprisonment, torture or execution, and stop deporting people at risk to such countries.
• Champion the rules-based international order.
• Support the UN principle of Responsibility to Protect.
• Implementing a policy of presumption of denial for arms exports to countries listed as human rights priority countries in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s annual human rights report.
• Creating a public register of arms brokers.
• Remain committed to a negotiated peace settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which includes a two-state solution.
• Suspend UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia in response to their consistent targeting of civilians, in breach of international humanitarian law, in Yemen.
• We will work closely with European and other international partners to exert maximum economic and political pressure on Russia to stop interfering in the affairs of sovereign Eastern European nations, and will stand by our obligations under the NATO treaty in the event of threats to NATO member states.
• Work to lead international nuclear disarmament efforts.
• Maintain our commitment to spend 0.7% of UK gross national income on overseas development assistance.
• Invest to eliminate within a generation preventable diseases like TB, HIV and malaria.
• Develop a global education strategy.
• Provide ad hoc funding to UNESCO’s International Programme for the Development of Communication.
• Campaign strongly for the abolition of the death penalty around the world.
• Publish a government anti-corruption strategy.
• Develop a comprehensive strategy for promoting the decriminalisation of homosexuality around the world and advancing the cause of LGBT+ rights