Currently we tax young people for getting an education that often doesn’t enhance their income, tax employers for hiring them, tax them for coupling up, ration the asset they most need to access adult life, and, when they fall into depression and despondence, reward them for giving up.
Conservatives have been eager to champion startups, small businesses, AI firms and tech entrepreneurs, but philanthropists who want to give back to their local communities are often welcome behind closed doors yet rarely backed at the national level.
The soaring number of exclusions in our schools reveals an education system that is in disarray. This highlights broader warning signs of an education system that has failed to get back on track even six years on from successive lockdowns.
It makes sense to fund degree apprenticeships in the same way as the rest of higher education rather than as a charge on employers via the Apprenticeship Levy which should be focussed on much more deserving cases
The employment rate was higher for mothers than either women or men without dependent children and has been since 2017. Working mothers still need better options to satisfy childcare requirements
Too often, the child poverty discussion purely focuses on income inequality. Policies like the two-child benefit cap focus on cash handouts that get families just over the relative income line needed to avoid being ‘in poverty’.
Either we can continue in the delusion that further borrowing and increased taxes will help us out of this mess, or we can be honest and call for real economic reform.
Labour believes the state spends our cash better than we can: the Tories must show how to let money fructify in the pockets of the people.
We are the only party that is prepared to tell the truth and take the tough decisions to get spending under control. That’s the way to bring real change.
In a speech at the Centre for Social Justice, Badenoch sets out how Britain is “sitting on a ticking time bomb” of welfare dependency and calls to restrict health benefits to only the “more serious conditions”.
The right path begins with acknowledging that equating mental and physical health, though well-meaning, has led to unintended consequences. Changing course will take moral courage.
This is not a license to release every, indeed any, murderer, rapist, and terrorist onto our streets. But where there is no threat to public, and prison will have little reformative effect, it gives the judiciary another weapon in their arsenal to drive down reoffending and those people going in and out of prison.
Front gardens have all but disappeared from new housing developments in favour of concrete drives, yet having a front garden has been shown to contribute to neighbourly relationships and better mental health.
Findings from our research with young people suggest that banning zero-hour contracts is not what respondents are seeking, and that it could risk employers replacing one type of precarious contract with another.
Welfare should be a safety net, not a way of life. It should support people back into work, not write them off. We will vote against because, for all their self righteousness, Labour won’t see that ‘fairness’ cuts both ways.