Labour pledges to spend and raise £48.6bn in general election manifesto

16 May 17

Labour has today revealed plans to spend and raise through tax £48.6bn, in its 2017 general election manifesto.

Leader Jeremy Corbyn said his party would “transform Britain for the 21st century”, pledging billions of pounds for the NHS and education.

The For the many not the few programme includes plans to nationalise rail, energy, water and the Royal Mail, end public sector pay cap as well as recruit thousands of police officers and firefighters.

Corbyn told crowds in Bradford: “We are asking the better-off and the big corporations to pay a little bit more and, of course, to stop dodging their tax obligations in the first place.

“And in the longer term we look to a faster rate of growth, driven by increased private and public investment, to keep our accounts in shape.

“This is a programme of hope. The Tory campaign, by contrast, is built on one word, fear.”

Income tax would increase to 45p for people earning over £80,000, and 50p for those on more than £123,000.

The headline manifesto pledges are as follows, with the tax proposals to pay for them at the bottom:

Education:

  • Schools: increasing funding, including protection against losses from the new funding formula, free school meals and arts pupil premium (£6.3bn cost)
  • Skills: introducing free further education tuition, equalising 16-19 funding and restoring EMA (£2.5bn cost)
  • Childcare and early years including more money for Sure Start (£5.3bn cost)
  • Removing university tuition fees and restoring maintenance grants (£11.2bn cost)
  • Create a National Education Service for England to move towards cradle-to-grave learning that is free at the point of use

 

Health and social care:

  • Increase funding by £37bn over next five years
  • Healthcare including free car parking but excluding higher pay and capital expenditure (£5bn cost)
  • Restore nurses’ bursaries (£600m cost)
  • Halt and review Sustainability and Transformation Plans
  • Create a new quality safety and excellence regulator – to be called NHS Excellence
  • Set up a National Care Service for England
  • Increase the social care budgets by a further £8bn over the lifetime of the next Parliament, including an additional £1bn for the first year

 

Nationalisation:

  • Bring private rail companies back into public ownership as their franchises expire
  • Regain control of energy supply networks through the alteration of operator license conditions, and transition to a publicly owned, decentralised energy system
  • Replace the "dysfunctional" water system with a network of regional publicly owned water companies
  • Reverse the privatisation of Royal Mail at the earliest opportunity

 

Brexit:

  • Scrap the Conservatives’ Brexit White Paper and replace it with fresh negotiating priorities that emphasise retaining the benefits of the single market and the customs union
  • Guarantee existing rights for all EU nationals living in Britain and secure reciprocal rights for UK citizens
  • Reject ‘no deal’ as a viable option and if needs be negotiate transitional arrangements to avoid cliff-edge for the economy
  • Freedom of movement will end when UK leaves the EU
  • Labour will establish “fair” immigration rules

 

Work and pensions:

  • Lift public sector pay cap (£4bn cost)
  • Social security: increase ESA by £30pw for those in the work-related activity group, scrap the 'bedroom tax', implement the PiP legal ruling, restore housing benefit for under 21s, scrap bereavement support payment reforms, £2bn of additional funding for Universal Credit for review of cuts and how best to reverse them, uprate carers’ allowance to the level of JSA (£4bn cost)
  • Double paternity pay and paternity leave (£300m cost)
  • State pensions: uprate state pensions for British pensioners overseas, extending Pension Credit to those affected by changes to their state pension age since the 1995 Pensions Act (£300m cost)
  • Introduce a Real Living Wage of at least £10 by 2020 with net fiscal benefits ringfenced to provide support to small businesses
  • Repeal the Trade Union Act
  • Halt further increases to the state pension age
  • Guarantee the state pension ‘triple lock’ throughout the next Parliament

 

Housing:

  • Build over a million homes. By the end of the Parliament Labour will be building at least 100,000 council and housing association homes a year
  • Establish a new Department for Housing to tackle the crisis
  • Give councils new powers to build the homes local communities need
  • Start work on a new generation of New Towns
  • Help private renters by introducing controls on rent rises, more secure tenancies, landlord licensing and new consumer rights for renters

 

Economy and infrastructure:

  • Create a National Transformation Fund that will invest £250bn into the economy over 10 years
  • Establish a National Investment Bank that will bring in private capital finance to deliver £250bn of lending power.
  • Consult on breaking up publicly-owned RBS to create new local public banks
  • Complete the HS2 high-speed rail line from London through Birmingham to Leeds and Manchester, and then into Scotland - link HS2 with other rail investments, such as Crossrail of the North
  • Build a new Brighton main line for the South East
  • Build Crossrail 2
  • Complete the Science Vale transport arc, from Oxford to Cambridge through Milton Keynes

 

Local government:

  • Give local government extra funding next year
  • Review reforms to council tax and business rates and consider new options such as a land value tax, to ensure local government has sustainable funding for the long term
  • Devolve more powers to local communities

 

Devolved nations:

  • Create a minister for England, who will sit under the secretary of state for communities and local government
  • Establish a Scottish Investment Bank, with £20bn of funds available to local projects and Scotland’s small businesses
  • Build on the Development Bank of Wales using more than £10bn from Labour’s new National Investment Bank

 

Defence:

  • Commit to spending at least 2% of GDP on defence
  • Support the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent

 

Other commitments:

  • Four new bank holidays on national patron saint days
  • Continue to spend 0.7% of GDP on development
  • Recruit an additional 10,000 police officers to work on community beats (£300m cost)
  • Recruit 500 more border guards, 3,000 firefighters and 3,000 prison officers
  • Other current spend items: including abolition of employment tribunal fees, additional border guards, firefighters and HMRC tax collection staff (£600m cost)
  • Barnett consequentials for Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland (£6.1bn cost)

 

Tax proposals

  • Changes to corporation tax would raise £19.4bn
  • Income tax increases for top 5% would raise £6.4bn
  • An Excessive Pay Levy would raise £1.3bn
  • Offshore Company Property Levy would raise £1.6bn
  • Labour’s Tax Avoidance programme would raise £6.5bn
  • Extension of Stamp Duty Reserve Tax to derivatives and removal of exemption would raise £5.6bn
  • Efficiency review of corporate tax reliefs would raise £3.8bn
  • Reversing tax giveaways on Capital Gains Tax, Inheritance Tax, bank levy and scrapping the married persons’ tax allowance would raise £3.7bn
  • VAT on private school fees would raise £1.6bn
  • Savings on discretionary housing payments from scrapping bedroom tax, Soft Drinks Industry Levy spend redirected from capital to revenue, higher rate IPT on medical insurance, reform Controlled Foreign Companies corporation tax regime would raise £2.6bn
  • Allowance made for additional behavioural change and uncertainty, reducing total tax take would result in a tax revenue loss of -£3.9bn

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