Sift relevant facts when making election choice
Many of the policies being put forward by parties in the run-up to the General Election do not apply to Wales. Will Hayward reports...
With so much information being thrown around during the election it can be hard to decide which party to vote for.
Often it can be a case of weighing up their policies and deciding which works best for you.
With many areas of decisionmaking now devolved to Wales, many of the parties’ flagship policies do not actually apply to the people here, at least not directly.
We have gone through the main parties’ manifestos to pick out the policies which won’t actually apply to you and your family. These don’t include every policy but some of the ones the parties gave the most fanfare.
Note – Plaid Cymru policies were only framed in a Welsh context so have not been included.
HEALTH AND THE NHS
Labour policies:
■ Increase expenditure across the health sector by an average 4.3% a year;
■ Guarantee universal healthcare by ensuring women’s and children’s health services are comprehensive;
■ Provide an additional £1.6bn a year to ensure new standards for mental health are enshrined in the NHS constitution, ensuring access to treatments is on a par with that for physical health conditions;
■ Invest more than £1bn in public health and recruit 4,500 more health visitors and school nurses. Conservative policies:
■ 50,000 more nurses and 50 million more GP surgery appointments a year;
■ By the end of the Parliament, £650m extra a week spent on the NHS;
■ 6,000 more doctors in general practice and 6,000 more primary care professionals, such as physiotherapists and pharmacists;
■ £1bn extra of funding every year for more social care staff and better infrastructure, technology and facilities;
■ £74m over three years for additional capacity in community care settings for those with learning disabilities and autism. Liberal Democrat policies:
■ Raising £7bn a year in additional revenue by putting 1p on income tax, with this money to be ringfenced for spending on the NHS and social care (though the tax rise will affect Wales);
■ Use £10bn of capital fund to make necessary investments in equipment, hospitals, community, ambulance and mental health services buildings;
■ End GP shortfall by 2025 by training more GPs and making greater appropriate use of nurses, physiotherapists and pharmacists, and also phone or video appointments, where suitable.
EDUCATION
Labour policies:
■ Reform early-years provision, with a two-term vision to make high-quality early-years education available for every child;
■ Extend paid maternity leave to 12 months;
■ Within five years, all two-, three- and four-year-olds will be entitled to 30 hours of free preschool education per week and access to additional hours at affordable, subsidised rates staggered with incomes;
■ Nearly 150,000 additional early-years staff;
■ Introduce an arts pupil premium to fund arts education for every primary school child;
■ Replace Ofsted. Conservative policies:
■ Raising teachers’ starting salaries to £30,000;
■ An extra £14bn in funding for schools;
■ Investing £500m in new youth clubs and services;
■ Investing almost £2bn to upgrade the further education college estate.
Liberal Democrat policies:
■ A “skills wallet” for every adult in England, giving them £10,000 to spend on education and training throughout their lives. The government will put in £4,000 at age 25, £3,000 at age 40 and £3,000 at age 55.
■ Employing an extra 20,000 schoolteachers;
■ Scrapping mandatory SATs, and replacing league tables with a broader set of indicators;
■ Introduce ‘baby boxes’ in England, to provide babies and parents with essential items.
COMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT
Labour policies:
■ Ensure libraries are preserved for future generations and updated with wi-fi and computers. Conservative policies:
■ Asking every community to decide on its own design standards for new development;
■ Local councils encouraged to build more beautiful architecture.
Liberal Democrat policies:
■ Give democratic local government enhanced powers to call on new income sources appropriate to their area to support local services and investment.
HOUSING
Labour policies:
■ Create a new Department for Housing;
■ Set up a new English Sovereign Land Trust, with powers to buy land more cheaply for lowcost housing;
■ By the end of the Parliament have an annual house-build rate of at least 150,000 council and social homes, with 100,000 of these built by councils for social rent.
Conservative policies:
■ Bring forward a Social Housing White Paper which will set out further measures to empower tenants and support the continued supply of social homes. Lib Dem policies:
■ Build at least 100,000 homes for social rent each year and ensure that total housebuilding increases to 300,000 each year;
■ Help finance the increase in the building of social homes with investment from £130 billion capital infrastructure budget.
TRANSPORT
Labour policies:
■ Increase and expand local services, reinstating the 3,000 routes that have been cut, particularly hitting rural communities. Conservative policies:
■ End the complicated franchising model and create a simpler system, including giving metro mayors control over services in their areas;
■ £28.8bn investment in strategic and local roads;
■ Launch the “biggest ever” pothole-filling programme as part of our National Infrastructure Strategy.
Lib Dem policies:
■ £4.5bn over five years to restore bus routes and add new routes where there is local need.
ENVIRONMENT
Labour policies:
■ Set legally binding targets to drive the restoration of species and habitats;
■ An “ambitious programme” of tree planting.
■ Conservative policies:
■ An additional 75,000 acres of trees a year by the end of the next Parliament
Lib Dem policies:
■ Planting 60m trees a year.