Navigating the landscape of political manifestos can be overwhelming, especially when each party presents a multitude of detailed promises. We’ve compiled a summary of major policies from the main political parties to help you understand the key points relevant to students and young people. This will help you to understand which manifesto benefits students the most.
Navigate this article:
Higher education policies 🎓
Conservatives
- Shut down university courses with poor outcomes, such as high dropout rates or graduates faring worse than non-graduates
- Ensure universities provide the promised contact hours to students
Labour
- Create a “secure future for higher education”
- Support “the aspiration of every person who meets the requirements and wants to go to university”
Liberal Democrats
- Immediately reinstate Maintenance Grants for disadvantaged students
- Rejoin the EU’s Erasmus+ programme for broader study abroad opportunities
- Review higher education finance and implement necessary reforms
- Prevent retrospective increases in student loan interest rates
- Introduce a Student Mental Health Charter
Green Party
- Restore Maintenance Grants and “fully fund” every student
- Abolish undergraduate tuition fees
- Aim to cancel all graduate debt in the long term
Housing policies 🏘️
Conservatives
- Build 1.6 million homes over the next five years
- Fast-track housebuilding on previously developed urban land, and increase density in inner London
- Maintain a commitment to protect the green belt (areas of countryside protected from urbanisation).
- Raise the first-time buyer stamp duty threshold to £425,000
- Provide access to mortgages with 5% deposits for first-time buyers
- Pass a Renters Reform Bill to “deliver fairness in the rental market for landlords and renters”
Labour
- Build 1.5 million homes over the next five years.
- Fast-track building on previously developed land
- Protect the green belt
- Introduce a comprehensive mortgage guarantee scheme for first-time buyers with 5% or 10% deposits
Liberal Democrats
- Every year build 380,000 new homes, including 150,000 social homes
- Ban no-fault evictions
- Make three-year tenancies the standard
- Create a national register of licensed landlords
- Introduce a “Rent to Own” model for social housing, enabling tenants to own their homes after 30 years
- Allow local authorities to increase council tax on second homes by up to 500%
Green Party
- Provide 150,000 new social homes annually and end the right-to-buy policy
- Empower local authorities to introduce rent controls
- End no-fault evictions and implement long-term leases
- Grant tenants the right to demand energy efficiency improvements
- Campaign to require all new homes to include solar panels and low-carbon heating systems
- Protect the green belt
Healthcare policies 🧑⚕️
Conservatives
- Recruit 92,000 more nurses and 28,000 more doctors
- Expand Pharmacy First (a scheme that allows you to visit a pharmacy for some issues, rather than a GP), including to cover contraception and chest infection treatment, “freeing up 20 million GP appointments a year”
- Build or modernise 250 GP surgeries
- Increase the planned expansion of NHS Talking Therapies by a further 50%
- Implement Cass Review recommendations on NHS gender services for young people
Labour
- Add 40,000 new appointments weekly
- Allow hospitals to share waiting lists to reduce backlog
- Double the number of CT and MRI scanners to catch cancer and other conditions earlier
- Recruit 8,500 new mental health staff
- Introduce a Dentistry Rescue Plan for 700,000 more urgent appointments and recruit new dentists
Liberal Democrats
- Hire 8,000 new GPs, ensuring seven-day access or 24-hour urgent care
- Guarantee emergency and urgent dental care access for everyone
- Establish walk-in mental health hubs for young people and regular mental health check-ups
- Extend young people’s mental health services up to the age of 25, to ease the transition into adulthood
- Ensure 100% of patients start cancer treatment within 62 days of an urgent referral
- Develop a post-pandemic support strategy for immunocompromised people
Green Party
- Invest £20 billion in hospital construction and repair over five years
- Oppose NHS privatisation
- Ensure everyone has access to an NHS dentist.
- Support pay restoration for junior doctors
- Provide equal access to mental health therapies within 28 days
- Support assisted dying legislation for terminally ill individuals
Environmental and energy policies 🌲
Conservatives
- Reach net zero by 2050
- Continue North Sea oil and gas production
- Reverse the ULEZ expansion in London
- Open new gas power station
- Triple offshore wind capacity
- Build the UK’s first two carbon capture and storage clusters
- Increase the use of nuclear energy by approving “two new fleets of Small Modular Reactors” and halving the time taken to approve near reactors
Labour
- Set up Great British Energy, a publicly-owned company generating clean energy
- End the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity by 2030, driven by plans to double onshore wind, quadruple offshore wind, and triple solar power.
- Invest in carbon capture and storage
- Ban new coal licenses and fracking permanently
- Restore plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030
- Plant “millions of trees” and create new woodlands
- “Put failing water companies under special measures to clean up” polluted waterways
Liberal Democrats
- Achieve net zero by 2045.
- Launch a 10-year program for free insulation and heat pumps for low-income households
- Expand incentives for households to install solar panels
- Ensure 90% renewable electricity by 2030
- Ban domestic flights with rail alternatives under 2.5 hours
- Restore the requirement for every new car and small van sold from 2030 to be “zero-emission”
- Maintain the ban on fracking and introduce a ban on new coal mines
- Plant at least 60 million trees a year
- Set legally binding targets to stop sewage dumping in sensitive waters by 2030
Green Party
- Aim for zero carbon society before 2050
- Target 70% wind energy by 2030
- Ban new oil and gas licenses and subsidies
- Implement a fossil fuel tax
- Cease new nuclear power station development
- Nationalise water and major energy companies
- Ban short domestic flights with train alternatives under three hours
- Increase productive forestry and woodland
Jobs and taxation policies 🏢
Conservatives
- Cut National Insurance by 2%, aiming to abolish it for the self-employed when financially feasible
- Maintain the National Living Wage at two-thirds of median earnings
- Offer 30 hours of free childcare weekly for children aged nine months to school-age
- Reform disability benefits to better target genuine needs
- Merge all benefits into Universal Credit
Labour
- No tax increases for working people, including National Insurance, income tax, or VAT
- Ensure the minimum wage is a genuine living wage for all workers
- Ban exploitative zero-hours contracts
- Support more disabled and health-challenged individuals into work
- Guarantee training, apprenticeships, or job support for all 18-21-year-olds
Liberal Democrats
- Ensure apprentices receive at least the National Minimum Wage
- Set a 20% higher minimum wage for zero-hours contracts
- Allow agency and zero-hours workers to request fixed-hours contracts after 12 months
- Increase the tax-free personal allowance when financially feasible
- Guarantee flexible working rights
- Abolish the two-child benefit cap
- Reduce the wait for Universal Credit payments to five days
Green Party
- Uplift disability benefits by 5%
- Increase Universal Credit and other benefits by £40 weekly
- Abolish the two-child benefit cap
- Introduce an annual wealth tax on assets above £10 million and 2% over £1 billion
- Raise the minimum wage to £15 per hour for all workers.
- Implement a maximum 10:1 pay ratio in the private and public sectors
- Repeal anti-union laws and introduce a Charter of Workers’ Rights
- Ensure equal rights for all workers, including those on zero-hours contracts and in the gig economy
Equality and human rights policies ✊
Conservatives
- Introduce legislation to “clarify that the protected characteristic of sex […] means biological sex”
- Legislate for individuals to legally have only one sex
- Ensure schools and teachers follow guidance on how to support gender-questioning students, including a requirement to inform and involve parents in any decisions
Labour
- Reform the gender recognition process, retaining the need for a gender dysphoria diagnosis
- Ban trans-inclusive conversion practices
- Reduce the gender pay gap
- Implement disability and ethnicity pay gap reporting for large employers
Liberal Democrats
- Make misogyny a hate crime
- Give every disabled person the right to work from home where possible.
- Ban all forms of conversion therapies and practices
- Increase the number of refuges and rape crisis centres
- End the gender price gap, where women are sometimes charged more than men for “practically identical products or services”
- Provide free period products to anyone who needs them
- Reform the gender recognition process to remove the “spousal veto” and the need for medical reports, and to recognise non-binary identities in law
- Require large employers to publish data on employment levels and pay gaps
- Introduce a comprehensive “Race Equality Strategy”, including a reduction in Stop and Search and action to address the “disproportionately high” maternal death rates among Black women
Green Party
- Support self-ID, meaning trans and non-binary people can legally be recognised in their chosen gender
- Change the law so an ‘X’ gender marker can be added to passports for any non-binary or intersex people who wish to do so
- End the “spousal veto” so trans people can receive a gender recognition certificate without needing the permission of their partner
- Make misogyny a hate crime across the UK
- Require pay audits for large and medium companies to address inequalities
- Defend the Human Rights Act
When is the UK general election? 🗳️
The next UK general election is July 4th 2024. Voting opens at 07:00 and closes at 22:00. If you have registered to vote, you will have received a polling card in the post indicating where you’re nearest polling station is.
Do I need ID to vote? 🪪
Yes. You need a photo ID to be able to vote. Accepted forms of ID include a UK or Northern Ireland photocard driving licence (full or provisional), a UK passport and a Blue Badge. For the full list of accepted photo IDs head to the government website.
We hope this summary has helped you understand which party manifesto benefits students the most. Of course, there are many other policies these parties are campaigning for, and there are also many other parties running in this election, so it’s best to do other research too.
The most important thing you can do is vote! Remember to take the relevant ID on Thursday 4th July and go out and vote!
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