Initial thoughts: Labour Party Election Manifesto

by | Oct 17, 2024 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

The UK Labour Party Manifesto was published this morning (13 June). Here’s a quick summary, and some thoughts below.

5 missions (which have already been trailed in the past month:

1) Economic Growth

2) Clean energy superpower

3) Crime

4) Break down barriers to opportunity

5) NHS

The key policies that stood out to me, from my initial reading and are of relevance to regional, urban and local economies include:

Economic growth and stability, underpinned by a new national industrial strategy and a new partnership with business. New £7.3 billion national wealth fund. Stable business environment, and tax environment.

To pay for better public services, defence, criminal law, social welfare and other things – high rates of economic growth are needed. Stability is welcome but is not enough, on its own to stimulate growth. To some extent, the “big ideas” around growth are difficult to communicate and prioritise because there is a lot of spending involved – capital spending on infrastructure, housing, continuing to push R&D spend, trying to encourage innovation and company growth. And there are some massive challenges – such as post Brexit market size and trade.

Enhanced devolution powers in existing Combined Authorities and for other areas. A statutory requirement for “Local Growth Plans that link towns and cities” that are aligned with the National Industrial Strategy.

This has got to be welcome. It’s been long-apparent that some kind of local economic strategy or growth plan is necessary to unlock funding for local growth. However, there’s no clue to what shape or form that will take. Will it reach the value of £30 billion per year – as spent on German reunification?! There’s not much detail or any idea of funding for local growth. A big challenge is developing the concepts, identifying options then designing the growth plans and delivery programmes. It’s hard to scale up from where we’ve been over the past 5 years – in my opinion, delivery capacity and capability has been at a low ebb. Devolution doesn’t solve this dilemma – that wherever the money is coming from, we need great ideas, plans and delivery capacity and capability to drive local economic growth and prosperity.

Local authority funding – recognition of significant funding pressures and proposals to have multi-year funding settlements.

It’s good that this is recognised, although difficult to see much headroom in a budget to restore local authority budgets to pre-2011 levels.

A big push on workforce training, particularly to address skills and labour shortages. Youth guarantee restored (18-21). Jobcentre Plus and National Careers Service to merge to become the National Jobs and Careers Service. There is also a commitment to reform and improve the Apprenticeship Levy.

I’ve written previously about the missed opportunity increasing education and training provision for skills shortage occupations that have resulted from Brexit and tighter immigration controls. This seems sensible. Any investment and formalisation of apprenticeships and young people’s training, particularly more work on employer engagement, is welcome. The Apprenticeship Levy definitely needs improvement.

“New Deal for Working People” – improving working conditions, reducing discrimination, removing age bands for minimum wages. Creation of Skills England to bring together business, training providers and unions with national and local government to ensure the highly trained workforce needed to deliver Labour’s Industrial Strategy.

This looks like an effort to push up pay and conditions. Skills England looks a bit like the old UK Commission for Employment and Skills, which was very good, although lacked influence with government policy in its latter years. Its easy to create national partnerships and commissions – but harder to get Whitehall departments to take any notice of them.

650,000 new green jobs by 2030. Emphasis on local energy.

This is very ambitions but there’s some practicality and recognition that it will involve jobs in retrofit and other activities.

There’s also some focus on innovation, with some good worthy stuff in there.

However – the perennial challenges are to ensure that the innovation activity gets embedded in the UK economy and allows some scaling up and impact on the wider economy. There’s many UK innovations and firms, but a lot of it is small scale. It seems that public projects are ripe for reform and some bold steps to open them up to innovation? but this has not been mentioned.

1.5 million new homes, the return of mandatory housing targets for local planning authorities. Emphasis on social housing and affordability. Some mention of selectively removing parts of the green belt for housing development.

The new homes will be welcome. The emphasis on social housing and affordability means more public/ social housing instruments rather than private sector housing. It’s the only way to make rapid progress on these targets. Some parts of the green belt have very little habitat value, whereas there are unprotected areas outside of the green belt with a lot of habitat value and other natural capital. So it seems sensible to have a proper system and approach to this.

Altogether – it all seems pretty sensible and joined up. Putting it into practice will require a lot of thought and work to get the details right. And delivering will be a challenge, given that the capacity and capability of the public sector will need to make fast recovery and progress too.

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