Truro & Falmouth Constituency Labour Party
Labour policies
A list of Labour policies announced at or after our 2021 Conference. We have tried to make it as current and comprehensive as possible but there may be some omissions.
BUSINESS, ENERGY & INDUSTRY
- Scrap business rates.
- A ten-year commitment for the steel industry to go green, investing up to £3bn, in collaboration with business, over the coming decade.
- Help fund investment in gigafactories – large scale factories for the manufacture of electric vehicle batteries.
- Require every major business to tell us their carbon footprint and how it is consistent with net zero.
CHILD POVERTY
- A ‘ten by ten’ ambition – “to give every child a great childhood with every child enjoying ten great experiences by the age of ten”. (‘Ten by ten’ in full here.)
- Scrap non-dom tax status and use some of the money to fund breakfast clubs in schools, free for every child
CONSTUTUTIONAL REFORM
- Give power back to communities.
- ‘Clear up’ No10.
- Set up an independent Office for Value For Money to ensure public money is well spent.
DEFENCE
- Boost the current £20m government spend on veterans’ mental health by £35m, with a special fund to support mental health care for British veterans and the Afghan personnel now in the UK.
- Give the highest priority to security in Europe, North Atlantic and Artic, pursuing new defence cooperation with European NATO neighbours.
- Lead moves in the UN to negotiate new multilateral arms controls and rules of conflict for space, cyber and AI.
- Freeze Tory cuts to the army, then review and reverse the numbers if needed.
DIGITAL, CULTURE, MEDIA & SPORT
- A healthy living index to ensure that every government decision improves wellbeing, just as the Office for Budget Responsibility tracks government spending.
- Legislation that forces a proper duty of care on social media companies and introduces criminal penalties for senior tech executives who repeatedly breach the new law.
ECONOMY
- Look at every single tax break and scrap it if it doesn’t deliver for the taxpayer or for the economy, including the tax break benefiting private equity bosses who strip the assets of British businesses pay a lower rate of tax on their bonuses and scrapping the charitable status enjoyed by private schools.
- Putting an additional £28bn of capital investment into the UK’s green transition for each and every year of this decade.
- Change the priority duty of directors to make the long-term success of the company the main priority.
- Make Britain a world leader in science and R&D, setting a target to invest a minimum of 3% of GDP.
EDUCATION & EARLY YEARS
- Introduce Digital Skills as core part of national curriculum.
- Bring back compulsory work experience.
- Reintroduce competitive sport in schools.
- Scrap charitable status for private schools with funds raised ringfenced for state school improvements.
- Children’s Recovery Plan. (Plan in full here.)
- Extend the school day for additional activities – breakfast clubs giving children the fuel to learn, art, sport, cooking, coding, book clubs.
- Invest in training world-class teachers.
- Give schools the resources to expand small group tutoring.
- Support the early years sector, schools and colleges with an Education Recovery Premium, with additional learning support including for children with SEND, and engage with families around the SEND review.
- Prioritise young people’s mental health with access to a professional mental health counsellor for every school.
- End tax breaks for private schools.
- Provide every young person with work experience and careers advice, and ensure every child has digital access.
- Launch the most ambitious school improvement plan in a generation.
- Reinstate two weeks of compulsory work experience and guarantee that every young person gets to see a careers adviser.
EMPLOYMENT & WORKERS RIGHTS
- Scrap Fire & Rehire.
- Fair pay agreements. A Labour government will bring together representatives of workers and employers to negotiate pay and conditions in every sector. Collective bargaining in every sector will end the free market free-for-all that encourages undercutting, exploitation and a race to the bottom.
- Give all workers’ rights from day one in their jobs: sick pay, holiday pay, parental leave and protection against unfair dismissal.
- Create one, single worker status, banning bogus self-employment.
- Scrap zero-hour contracts and ensure all contracts come with minimum hours and reflect normal working life, requiring notice of shift changes and pay.
- Introduce a new right to flexible working as the default, protections for those with caring responsibilities and a right to switch off.
- Increase statutory sick pay and make it universal.
- Put mental health and safety on a legal par with physical health and safety, and make sure the laws are enforced by a new, empowered watchdog.
- Sign into law the new deal for working people within the first 100 days of coming to office.
ENVIRONMENT
- Put additional £28bn of capital investment into green transition every year.
- Introduce a Clean Air Act.
- Bring forward a Green New Deal, including a Climate Investment Pledge to put us back on track to cut the substantial majority of emissions this decade.
- Fit out every home that needs it over the next decade, to make sure they are warm, well-insulated and cost less to heat, and create thousands of jobs in the process.
- Meet a net zero test for everything Labour does in government to ensure that the prosperity we enjoy does not come at the cost of the climate.
- Clean up the water industry – cut sewage discharges by 90%, introduce mandatory sewage outlet monitoring, automatic fines for discharges, cut water leaks in half, cap customer water bills, introduce sanctions for failing water bosses.
HEALTH & SOCIAL CARE
- Chase failed PPE contracts to pay money back.
- Double funding on dementia care and research.
- Put mental health and safety on a legal par with physical health and safety.
- Guarantee mental health support will be available in less than a month.
- End zero-hour contracts in social care.
- Pay care workers at least the living wage.
- Recruit staff so there are over 8,500 more mental health professionals supporting a million more people every year.
- Never allow spending on mental health to fall.
- Ensure every school has specialist support and every community has an open access mental health hub.
- Train a new generation of nurses and doctors to treat patients on time again.
Recruit and retain more GPs and bring back family doctors. - Scrap the non-dom status that allows some of the most wealthy to pay less tax than they should and plough the money into the NHS and social care.
HOUSING & HOMELESSNESS
- End rough sleeping & making housing a human right.
- Redefine ‘affordable’ housing so linked to local wages not market rate.
- Cap overseas purchase on new housing developments.
- A new Building Works Agency to assess, fix, fund, certify all tall buildings and pursue those responsible for costs. Legislation to ensure leaseholders won’t pay the costs.
- A massive increase in council and social homes.
- End the huge net loss in council houses resulting from Right to Buy and its huge discount.
End no-fault evictions. - Give local authorities new powers to buy and develop land for housing, and revitalise town centres, by reforming arcane compensation rules.
- Close loopholes that let developers wriggle out of commitments.
- Give first time buyers first dibs on new developments.
- End the practise of foreign hedge funds purchasing swathes of new homes, off plan.
- Raise standards for private renters.
- Control rent rises so they don’t increase more than inflation.
- Establish a Department for Housing.
IMMIGRATION
- Introduce a points-based immigration system so we attract people who can support our economy and our public services.
- Cut dangerous small boat crossings by working with EU neighbours to tackle the people trafficking gangs.
- Eliminate the shameful backlog of 143,000 people waiting for their asylum claims to be processed.
POLICE, CRIME & COURTS
- Put 13,000 neighbourhood police and Community Support Officers onto our streets
- Speed up rape and sexual assault cases.
- Make misogyny a hate crime.
- Open neighbourhood ‘police hubs’ in every community.
- Launch a major recruitment drive for special constables.
- Create a new Child Exploitation Register for those drawing children into county lines drug gangs.
- Pass new laws to protect women and girls from domestic abuse, harassment, intimidation and violence.
- Legislate to bring the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child into domestic law.
Fast-track rape and serious sexual assault cases in courts, and toughen sentences for rapists, stalkers and domestic abusers. - Create a new offence for street harassment.
- Ensure victims of domestic abuse get the legal aid they need.
- Enshrine victims’ rights in law.
- Support the introduction of a new national pro bono service, with binding pro bono targets to support those who can’t afford legal advice and are ineligible for legal aid.
- Implement the Lammy Review. (Final report here.)
- Introduce targets to bring in more women and more ethnic minorities to the most senior positions in our courts.
TRANSPORT
- End transport deserts by offering affordable and reliable services for rural communities.
- Take the rail network back into public ownership.
WOMEN & EQUALITIES
- Introduce a Race Equality Act.
- Reform the Gender Recognition Act to acknowledge that trans rights are human rights and that would reform the Gender Recognition Act to enable a process for self-identification while continuing to support the 2010 Equalities Act.
WORK & PENSIONS
- Scrap the five-week wait for Universal Credit.
- End the benefit cap.
- End the two-child limit.
- Replace Universal Credit with a better system, including a change to the taper rate so people keep more of the money they earn and ensure assessments are focused on what people need to succeed rather than one that treats them with suspicion.