The manifesto we published yesterday is a plan to change Britain for the better, but not in the traditional way. Instead, we’re saying something very different to the usual promises you get at election time.
No government on its own can solve the big problems we face – everyone’s going to have to get involved. That’s why we’ve called it Invitation to join the government of Britain.
This manifesto brings together all the work we’ve done over the last five years as we’ve changed into a modern, progressive Conservative Party.
We’re all in this together, and by working together we can change the country for the better. We won’t get the economy moving with a jobs tax and higher government spending – we need to help businesses create jobs. We won’t solve our social problems with more big government – we need to build the Big Society where families are strong and communities are safe. And we’ll never change politics if we leave it to the Westminster politicians – we need to give people real power and control over their lives.
So yesterday we’ve set out our plans to change Britain. Our school reform plan will raise standards and improve discipline. Our welfare reform plan will make sure that everyone who can work does work. We’ll help Britain become the most family-friendly country in Europe. We’ll cut government waste to stop Labour’s jobs tax, which will kill the recovery. We will back the NHS. And we will implement the boldest and most ambitious set of green measures ever put before the electorate by a mainstream party.
So this manifesto is different from the usual politicians’ promises. We do not say: give us your vote and we will solve all your problems. We say no government can solve all the problems on its own, and no individual can solve all the problems on their own. We say we are all in this together: come with us, and we will build a better country together.
Read our Manifesto in full here.
( 12 comments ) Tags: manifesto, nhs, school reform
Comment by Patricia Marchand on April 14, 2010 at 11:05 am
We, the public, already been asked by councils our opinion for various plans, however in 98% of the cases councils go ahead with their plans though consultation proved we opposed to those plans (passive consultation). Can the Conservatives confirm consultation will be effective in the future if they are elected?
Comment by Patricia Marchand on April 14, 2010 at 11:14 am
Currently if one is more than 55 years old, one simply cannot find work. Can the Conservatives reassure us that they will keep the retirement age as it is but promote experience and keeping as well than giving a job to those above 55 years old?
Comment by Derek Beesley on April 14, 2010 at 11:23 am
An excellent manifesto, providing vision and a theme which other parties will find it difficult to match, constrained as they are by an election strategy of fear and smeaar. The thinking voters will find your ideas challenging. The non-thinkers – and there are lots of them – may just feel that the idea of thinking for themselves is rather more than they are used to.
Comment by John Brown on April 14, 2010 at 11:50 am
Policy for Defence is lamentably thin and hides behind a promise to conduct a strategic review. Well, Labour had a review in 1997 and neglected the resulting fudge therafter. That leaves a very big mess – some say it will take up to £60 billion just to repair the damage, never mind fund a strategic way forward. Impossible in the inherited financial climate? So, the inexorable destiny of our armed forces is the world second division. In which case, where does that leave GB in the world? Quite a debate and one, I submit, that justifies rather more than you are saying in the manifesto?
Comment by Dave Partridge on April 14, 2010 at 12:42 pm
As a recently retired senior civil servant I could probably pay off the national debt if I had a fiver for every efficiency review I had been involved in. There is probably at least 5% to be found in most civil service budgets- look at the underspend figures for each year. However to winkle out the money there are 5 key lessons to apply.
1 As a Cabinet set the 3/4 essential priorities for each Department thus leaving everything else up for grabs.
2. Do not micro-manage the exercise from the Treasury. That only produces mountains of regular report backs and bleeding stumps. Treasury offcials simply do not know what goes on in Departemnt and after interminable meetings the Treasury offcilas resort to simply imposing a solution. Ill feeling all round! Simply set each Department a target and tell them to get on with it.
3.After forming your new government have a self denying ordinance not to have any more machinery of government changes until the savings are made. You have no idea how much it costs for the Ministry of Skills, Business, Higher Education, Industry, Innovation or whatever” to be shuffled and ironically efficiency initiatives are often lost in the chaos.
4. Bring back national pay bargaining and impose regional pay. Delegated pay and machinery of government changes have produced a ticking financial time bomb of equal pay claims. There are also hundreds of pay negotiators across Departments that could be re-deployed.
5. You may not like this, but beware Mr Gershon- his work for the last government failed as much because it was flawed as because it was blocked by Sir Humphrey!
Good luck
Comment by Angus Lavin on April 14, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Hi.
I am concerned as a conservative voter all of my life about the policies that are being communicated through the manifestos.
I am going to vote Conservative anyway but I beleive that the policy on ‘Running your own school/police/hospitals etc’ is absolutely nonsence. I am a firm believer that citizens should be entitled to a good standard of schools in their catchment as an example. I don’t beleive that they should have a choice in the matter but should be able to object to a poor performing school. Instead of speaking with the schools and governing bodies (local people running schools!!) the conservatives have failed to recognise this. Instead we continue on the ‘Right to Choose’ which causes a lot of uncertainty and also significant financial costs for the schools. I know from personal experience that a head teacher can be taken out of school for up to a week to deal with appeals on admissions. This is a clear example of waste in our public services. Why not just cut the spin and get on with providing good services. Listen to the people who deliver the service and remove the unnecessary red tape. I also know that students with special needs are thrust into the state system under an inclusion policy which is an appauling way to deal with people with special needs.
On another issue with employment I am hoping that the Conservatives will hault the culture of gaining more time off work for family friendly policies! It is great to have fathers acknowledged in proposed legislation but I would rather support parents by shortening the time away from work but paying them more. This improves their financial situation in the short term and also supports business. Parents, like myself, make a choice to have children and if they want time off then they should sacrifice the salary. It is a choice and a huge committment to have children although it is more an more the culture of I have a right to do work and run a family. We hear of latch key kids now the goverment is pushing breakfast clubs and after school clubs on school premises. Why have children if you are not going to look after them!!
Anyway I will stop complaining and continue voting conservative but please try to think about my concerns
Comment by Teum on April 14, 2010 at 2:55 pm
Dear Sir,
I am not member of the Conservatives party but I would like to suggest one main issue that may strength your campaign in winning the wavering voters and defeating GB and the Labour party. As you are aware the Labour party has a hidden agenda in creating a new tear class society i.e. people dependent on the welfare system. The numbers of people who are dependent in the welfare system are growing. I am sure you may have the figure to support this issue. This policy is designed to guarantee a large proportion of the UK population to be dependent on the welfare system and to vote and support the Labour party.
As you know the people who live in the welfare system are not (will not) going to vote the Conservatives or the Lib Dems parties at all. You need to expose this bad policy created by the Labour party and encourages people to live in the welfare system rather than work. This Labour policy of distributing wealth through the welfare system is not doing any favour to our country nor to the welfare claimants. It is not fair for hard working people to subsidise this group of people; most of are not genuine claimant anyway, and some individuals have an attitude saying that I am better of on the benefit system than working.
I hope you defeat GB as he drag the country into the unforeseen economic crisis. We need to hold him accountable for his failure to regulate the banks during 10 years of as a chancellor and 3 years a PM. At last he final admitted his mistakes today.
Please use the following slogan to remind voters and paint the true picture of GB and the Labour party.
1. “I have led this country from BOOM to BUST because I was PRUDENT Chancellor. Sorry I will do it again if I win the election”.
2. “I am a tax addict; I will tax you more if you give me a second chance”.
3. “I have bankrupted your country and you have to pay for many years to come to pay the debt I have accumulated”.
I hope you rephrase the above slogan better.
I wish you all the best on your campaign
Comment by Alan Chantler on April 14, 2010 at 3:03 pm
I am disabled, live in a small rural village and am over 60. So I am subject to the triple whammy of:- No earnable income but not entitled to Incapacity Benefit; No viable public transport so have to use a car with all the increasing costs; A non-listening, non-cring government which rides roughshod over our wishes for the area “because we must be well off since we live in the countrysde”. Roll on an understanding, understated government consisting of caring people with real knowledge of rural life. And please can we have a minister for agriculture who is NOT a vegetarian?
Comment by Dean A K on April 14, 2010 at 4:30 pm
I believe Gershon is right in that there are many savings to be made in the Public sector, but there seems to be an amazing amount of ‘broad brush’ assumptions thrown together when efficiency reports are created, especially about third party providers. It is well known that the labour government has overspent on just about everything, while hiring too many public sector workers and increasing their pay to on average of 20% above the private sectors. In fact if you reversed out the public sector pay rises over the last 10 years to fall 10-15% below that of the private sector, where it should be when you consider guaranteed pensions, working conditions etc, I’m sure the UK wouldn’t have an abnormal deficit. There are many more Directors in Local government departments than ever before and why have these LA CEOs & Director salaries rocketed well above inflation? In the main because they are members of SOLACE and SOLACE Enterprises carries out the search & selection for this type of role, artificially benching and moving the same people across the UK, time and time again. Nothing to do with unconnected third party providers. Therefore blaming agency staff is a weak get out.
If knee jerk reactions effect frontline workers in areas such as education & social/children’s services, this will cause many internal, community & social issues that will cost far more to repair than is saved. Since 2002 Local authorities have introduced Vendor Managed Services (VMS) to manage agency recruitment, a central point that reduces agency margins and shares the gain with the LA. Fantastic for gardeners, cleaners and general staffing. However, the correlation with their introduction and the reducing quality of staff in Social services is undeniable. The departments are getting what they pay for, in an area where ‘risk for return’ is TOO high. The diminishing return for the providers when considering compliance and vetting, makes a quality provision unsustainable. Haringey, Doncaster & Birmingham are some of the worse payers in the UK, they are also the worse performing authorities who are managing more than their fare share of child atrocities and deaths.
The introduction of over 100,000 additional education learning support assistants (LSA) has seen standards drop as teachers aren’t in the classroom, Professor Dylan Williams Director from the Institute of Education, has detailed how they actual lower the pupils attainment levels and how ICT has not improved a thing .
All this in the name of efficiencies, its reactive madness!
Please feel free to contact me should you wish to discuss this further.
Comment by Chris May on April 16, 2010 at 11:36 am
Are the conservatives going to reverse the tax hikes recently imposed by Labour in the emergency budget. No doubt Conservatives will win the election, but you are vague about this and only mention the NI hikes yet to be imposed. I think it is grossly unfair to strip professional and self employed people of their tax code. Trying to tax those who are reasonably well-off wont work. They just wont pay the extra taxes. They will either defer salary and dividends or just emigrate.
Comment by Nadeem Shah on April 21, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Dear Sir,
I am certain that Mr Cameron will be our next prime minister. With that he will have a great challenge to set out and implement desperately needed the reforms. Apart from many things that may have been planned already I want to draw your attention to the underlying liabilities in the administration of the NHS in primary care.
There are a number of professionals who at present sit in their posts with high pay bands simply to administer paperwork which can easily be done by suitably trained junior staff. I refer here to the doctors, nurses and pharmacists who’s role in the PCTs has become nothing more than bean counting and pressing forward buttons on their emails. The clinical role these people can offer in the front line is much more needed, instead we have to pay them to do nothing but replicate same work all across the the country. For example, the clinical advice from National Prescribing Centre or the Safety Alerts from MHRA can be co-ordinated by these organisations themselves instead these professionals passing them to frontline staff. The result is one ends up with multiple messages. The current posts and the organisation structure was creation of the Labour Government and I hope we can weed out the lazy staff and burden of professionals from the NHS in the administration. I run my own business and I certainly would not like to have a low asset utilization or unnecessary burden of paperwork. It happens in the public sector because no one is able to challenge and everyone protects each other so that they don’t lose their jobs for life. Its time to challenge public services by people who have to make tough choices in business in todays terms. We don’t need these professionals holding stick in their hands we need passionate people who can work with us. Trust the front line and private businesses and the reforms agenda will develop by itself. Whether its cutting bureaucracy or recycling and substitution of medicines, there should be no no go areas even the NHS.
Comment by venture on May 15, 2010 at 8:56 pm
I just got a letter from DVLA asking me for £245 for 12 months road tax.
Why doesn’t Philip Hammond let us pay by direct debit – twenty pounds a month is a much better deal than sticking £245 on my credit card.
We pay TV licence and council tax via direct debit – why not road tax.
Give us a break Philip – it must be easy!
And yes – I did vote you guys in.