conservative.md

Conservative Manifesto

Economy and Democracy

• By 2020, personal allowance will be increased to £12,500 and the higher rate to £50,000.
• Ensure that local residents can veto high increases in Council Tax via a referendum.
• No increase to the level of Value Added Tax
• Corporation tax to fall to 17% by 2020.
• Make sure that revaluations are conducted more frequently.
• Explore the addition of self-assessment into the valuation process.
• Lodge new UK schedules with the WTO in alignment with EU schedules.
• Replicate all existing EU Free Trade Agreements.
• Ratify agreements entered into during the UK's EU membership.
• Introduce a Trade Bill
• Create a network of Her Majesty's Trade Commissioners to head 9 new overseas posts.
• Reconvene the Board of Trade to increase experts from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as England.
• Regulate more efficiently through Red Tape Challenge and the One-in-Two-out rule.
• Increase the National Living Wage to 60% of the median earnings by 2020.
• Legislate tougher regulation of tax advisory firms.
• Improve HMRC's capabilities to stamp down on smuggling.
• Give the Pensions Regulator the right to scrutinise mergers, acquisitions or large financial commitments as well as powers to issue punitive fines to those who have willingly left a pension scheme under-resources.
• Consider introducing a new criminal offense for company directors who deliberately or recklessly put at risk the ability of a pension scheme to meet its obligations.
• Legislate to make executive pay packages subject to strict annual votes by shareholders and listed companies will have to publish the ratio of executive pay to broader UK workforce pay.
• Introduce, subject to sensible safeguards, the right for employees to request information relating to the future direction or the company.
• Extend the Coastal Communities Fund to 2022.

Deficit Reduction

• Continue the fiscal rules announced by the Chancellor last year, leading to a balanced budget by 2025.

Infrastructure

• Create extra capacity on our railways, which will ease overcrowding. Bring new lines and stations, and improve existing routes- including for freight.
• Help shipyards modernise and collaborate.
• Continue investment into strategies such as High Speed 2, Northern Powerhouse Rail and the expansion of Heathrow Airport.
• Target National Productivity Investment Fund spending at housing, research and development, economic infrastructure and skills.
• Review rail-ticketing and introduce a Passenger Ombudsman.
• Ensure through the Universal Service Obligation, that every home and business in Britain has access to high speed broadband. By the end of 2017, 19 out of 20 premises will have access to super-fast broadband.
• By 2022, extend mobile coverage further to 95% geographic coverage of the UK.
• By 2022, ensure all major roads and mainline trains have uninterrupted phone service and guaranteed WiFi internet on all such trains.
• Have a majority of the UK population covered by a 5G signal by 2027.
• Roll out Verify so that people can identify themselves on all government services by 2020.
• Reduce data duplication across all systems, so that we automatically comply with the Once Only principle in central government services by 2022 and wider public services by 2025.

Industry

• Establish funding streams to ensure investment for the long term.
• Increase spending on Research and Development so that we meet the OECD average for investment in R&D - 2.4% of GPD within 10 years.
• Create a number of Sovereign Wealth Funds, known as Future Britain Funds.
• Ensure that 33% of central government spending is from SME's.
• Ensure that big companies/contractors comply with the Prompt Payment Code.
• Make CCTV recording mandatory in slaughterhouses.
• Withdraw from the London Fisheries Convention.
• Oblige all companies to give digital receipts, clearer terms and conditions when selling goods and services online, and support new digital proofs of identification.
• Introduce a full fiber connection voucher for companies across the country by 2018.
• Institute an expert Data Use and Ethics Commission.
• Continue a £1.9 billion investment in cyber security.
• Repeal section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2014.
• Create a new presumption of digital government services by default.
• Create a new Schools Map to help parents choose the school that is right for their child.
• Combine the relevant parts of HM Land Registry, Ordnance Survey, the Valuation Office Agency, the Hydrographic Office and Geological Survey to create a comprehensive geospatial data body in government.
• Establish a regulatory framework in law to underpin the digital charter.

Brexit

• Set aside significant numbers of visas for workers in strategically important sectors.
• Double the Immigration Skills Charge levied on companies employing migrant workers to £2000 per year.
• Continue to believe that no deal is better than a bad deal.
• Maintain the Common Travel Area.
• Protect the democratic freedom of the people in Gibraltar and for our overseas territories to remain British, for as long as that is their wish.
• Enact on the Great Repeal Bill.
• Will not bring the European Union's Charter for Fundamental Rights into UK law.
• Remain signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights for the duration of the next parliament.
• Reduce immigration to tens of thousands.
• Increase the earnings threshold for people wishing to sponsor migrants for family visas.
• Toughen the visa requirements for students- expect students to leave the country at the end of their degree unless they meet new, higher requirements allowing them to live in Britain after their studies have concluded.
• Bring forward a new integration strategy.
• Establish a Commission for Countering Extremism.

Education and Childcare

• Build at least 100 new free schools a year.
• Prohibit councils from creating any new places in schools that have either been rated 'inadequate' or 'requires improvement' by Ofsted.
• Universities who charge maximum tuition fees will have to become involved in academy sponsorship or founding free schools.
• Open a specialist maths school in every major city in England.
• Require new faith schools to prove that parents of other faiths, and none, would be prepared to send their children to that school.
• Ensure that at least 100 leading independent schools become involved in academy sponsorship or founding of new free schools (if progress is not made, change the tax status of independent schools).
• Lift the ban on the establishment of selective schools.
• Conduct a review of the school admissions policy.
• Expect every 11 year old to know their times tables off by heart.
• Expect 75% of pupils to have been entered for the EBacc combination of GCSEs by the end of the next parliament. Have 90% of pupils studying this combination by 2025.
• Consider how Ofsted can give parents more information about what their children are being taught.
• Offer forgiveness on student loan repayments whilst new teachers are teaching.
• Establish a single portal for teaching jobs.
• Increase the overall schools budget by £4 billion by 2022.
• Remove universal free school lunches for 5-7 year olds.
• Provide free school breakfast to every child in every year of primary school.
• Replace 13,000 existing technical qualifications with new qualifications called T-Levels. Increase the number of teaching hours by 50% to an average of 900 hours per year. Make sure every student does a 3 month placement as part of their course.
• Establish new Institutions of Technology in every major city in England.
• Deliver the commitment to create 3 million apprenticeships by 2020.
• Introduce reduced bus and train travel for apprentices.
• Introduce a new Right to Request Leave for Training for employees.
• Introduce a National Training Scheme where the costs of training will be met by the government.
• Ensure that teaching assistants can become qualified teachers, and healthcare nurses can become nurses via a degree apprenticeship route.
• Introduce a Right to Lifelong Learning in Digital Skills.
• Introduce 30 hours of free childcare for 3 to 4 year olds for working families who find it difficult to manage the costs of childcare.
• Institute a capital fund to help primary schools develop nurseries.
• Introduce the presumption that all new primary schools should include a nursery.
• Publish a green paper on young peoples' mental health before the end of this year.
• Introduce mental health first aid training for teachers in every primary and secondary school by the end of parliament and ensure every school has a single point of contact with mental health services.
• Build up the investment funds of our universities across the UK.

Environment and Animal Cruelty

• Want almost every car and van to be zero-emission by 2050- invest £600 million by 2020 to help achieve it.
• Invest more in low-emission buses, audio-visual displays for bus passengers, and community minibuses for rural areas poorly served by public transport.
• Devise a new agri-environment system.
• Help Natural England to deliver environmental improvements.
• Grant a free vote, on a government bill in government time, to give parliament the opportunity to decide the future of the Hunting Act.
• Produce a 25 year environment plan that will chart how we improve the environment.
• Continue to support natural resource extractions from the North Sea and support the oil and gas sector.
• Commission an independent review into the cost of energy.
• Support the development of wind projects in the remote islands of Scotland.
• Legislate to change planning law for Shale applications.
• Set up a new Shale Environmental Regulator.
• Ensure smart meters are offered to every household and business by the end of 2020.
• Introduce a safeguard tariff cap on energy bills for vulnerable customers.
• Commit to upgrade all fuel poor homes to EPC Band C by 2030.

Housing

• Create a Domestic Violence and Abuse Commissioner in law.
• Full implementation of the Homeless Reduction Act - aim to halve rough sleeping over the course of parliament, and eliminate it by 2027.
• Set up a new Homelessness Reduction Taskforce, piloting a housing-first approach to rough sleeping.
• Reform and modernise the home-buying process so its more efficient and less costly.
• Deliver 1 million homes by the end of 2020 and half a million more by the end of 2022.
• Maintain the existing strong protections on designated land like the green belt, national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty.
• Enter new Council Housing Deals with ambitious, pro-development, local authorities to help them build more social housing.
• Reform Compulsory Purchase Orders to make it easier and less expensive for
  councils to use and to make it easier and less expensive for councils to use and to make it easier to determine true market value of sites.
• Continue the £2.5 billion flood defense programme which should protect 300,000 existing homes by 2021.

Healthcare

• Reform outdated laws to ensure that those with mental illnesses are treated illnesses are treated fairly, and employers fulfill their responsibilities effectively.
• Introduce a new Mental Health Bill.
• Increase NHS spending by a minimum of £8 billion over the next 5 years.
• Build and upgrade care facilities, mental health clinics, and hospitals in every part of England.
• Ensure that new NHS numbers are not issued to patients until their eligibility is verified.
• Increase Immigration Health Surcharge to £600 for migrant workers and £450 for international students.
• Implement the recommendations of the Accelerated Access Review.
• Review the operation of the NHS internal market, and make non-legislative changes to remove barriers to the integration of care.
• Introduce a new GP contract to help develop wider primary care services.
• Encourage the development of new roles and create a diverse set of career paths for the NHS workforce.
• Strengthen NHS workers entitlement to flexible working.
• Make clinical outcomes more transparent.
• Give patients ways to book appointments, contact the 111 service, order repeat prescriptions, and access & update aspects of their care records either through digital means or over the phone.
• Pilot the live publication of waiting times data for A&E and other urgent care services.
• Ensure the whole population can get routine weekend of evening appointments at either their own GP, or one nearby, by 2019.
• Legislate for an independent Healthcare Safety Investigations body in the NHS.
• In cancer services, deliver on the new promise to give patients a definitive diagnosis within 28 days by 2020.
• Recruit up to 10,000 more mental health professionals.
• Ensure all families that lose a baby are given the bereavement support they need, including a new entitlement to child bereavement leave.

Security & Defense

• British troops will in future be subject to the Law of Armed Conflict, which includes the Geneva Convention and UK Service Law, not the European Court of Human Rights.
• Introduce better compensation for injured armed forces personnel and the families of those killed in combat.
• Invest £178 billion in new military equipment over the next decade.
• Build 8 Type-26 anti-submarine frigates.
• Deliver 5 Offshore Patrol Vessels
• For the army, deliver AJAX armoured vehicles, Apache attack helicopters, new drones, new missile and bomb systems, and better equipment for special forces.
• The RAF will receive the Lightning II strike fighter and new maritime patrol aircraft.
• Maintain and strengthen the Armed Forces Covenant.
• Introduce a Veterans Board in the cabinet office.
• Legislate for roles for life in British overseas electors.
• Reduce the number of MP's to 600.
• Retain the past the post voting system and extend this system to Police & Crime commissioner and mayoral elections.
• Repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act.
• Legislate to ensure that a form of identification must be presented before voting.
• Ensure that child victims and victims of sexual violence are able to be cross-examined before their trial without appearing in court.
• Introduce an independent public advocate who will act for bereaved families after a public disaster and support them at inquests.
• Extend the scope of the Unduly Lenient Sentence Scheme.
• Create a Nation Infrastructure Police Force from the Civil Nuclear Constables, the Ministry of Defense Police Force and the British Transport Police.
• Incorporate the Serious Fraud Office into the National Crime Agency.
• Work with the National Cyber Security Centre to reduce/prevent attacks wherever possible.
• Build on the Policing and Crime Act.
• Invest over £1 billion to modernise the prison estate and creating 10,000 modern prison places.
• Create a National Community Sentencing Framework.
• Give people the ability to require major social media platforms to delete information about them at the age of 18.

### Local Communities

• Strengthen the enforcement of equalities law.
• Introduce a Domestic Violence and Abuse Bill to consolidate all civil and criminal prevention and protection orders and provide for a new aggravated offense is behavior is directed towards a child.

Social Services and Security

• Adopt a Breathing Space scheme so that somebody in problem debt can apply for legal protection from further interest, charges and enforcement action for up to 6 weeks.
• Promise to maintain the Pensions Triple-Lock until 2020. When it expires, introduce a new Double-Lock, meaning pensions will rise along with the earnings that pay for them or inline with inflation (whichever is highest).
• Ensure that state pension age reflects increases in life expectancy.
• The value of the family home will be taken into account along with other assets and income when means-testing for domiciliary care.
• Introduce a single capital floor, set at £100,000. No matter how large the cost of care turns out to be, people will always retain at least £100,000 of their savings and assets.
• Extend the current freedom to defer payments for residential care to those receiving care at home.
• Means-test winter fuel payments.

Diverse and Cultured Communities

• Require companies with >250 employees to publish more data on the pay gap between men and women.
• Reduce the disproportionate use of force against black, asian and ethnic minority people in prison, young offenders institutions and secure mental health units.
• Launch a national campaign to increase the number of black, asian and ethnic minority organ donors.

Disabilities and Mental Health

• Amend Health and Safety Regulations so that employers provide appropriate first aid training and needs assessment for mental health.
• Extend the Equalities Act protections against discrimination to mental health conditions that are episodic and fluctuating.
• Train 1 million members of the public on basic mental health awareness & first aid.
• Get 1 million more people with disabilities into employment over the next 10 years.

Foreign Policy

• Maintain the commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on foreign aid.
• Offer asylum and refuge to people in parts of the world affected by conflict & oppression, rather than those who have made it to Britain.
• Work with the overseas territory governments to create a Blue Belt of marine protection in their precious waters, establishing the largest marine sanctuaries in the world.
• Review the application of the Modern Slavery Act to strengthen our ability to stop criminals putting people in exploitative working conditions.