General Election:

Top 10 Reasons To Vote Liberal Democrat in Wales

• Put patients first - Cut hospital waiting times.
• Free personal care when you need it – no one forced to sell their home to pay for care.
• No tuition fees, no top-up fees – university affordable for every student.
• More investment in rural and urban schools – spend the CTF money where it matters most.
• Axe the Council Tax – Local Income Tax is both fair and affordable.
• £100 extra monthly on your pension when you are 75 – a million pensioners off means-testing.
• 10,000 more police on the streets across the UK – cutting crime and the fear of crime.
• We should not have gone to war in Iraq – it’s time to restore trust in the Government.
• Take environment seriously – cut pollution, cut congestion, and boost renewable energy.
• A Welsh Parliament - giving Wales the tools to do the job.

Freedom, Fairness, Trust - The Liberal Democrat Vision

Liberal Democrats believe that freedom is a basic human right.  Everybody should be able to make independent choices about how they live their life, provided those choices don’t harm anyone else.  Everybody should have the opportunity to make the most of their life in a diverse society that values individuals and their differences.

Freedom is underpinned by fairness.  To give everyone a fair chance to make the most of their potential, we need a high quality National Health Service and excellent education, so they are not unnecessarily held back by ill health or a poor education, regardless of how much money they have.

At the same time, people need to be able to trust government.  They need to trust that government will listen to them and be honest and open about what it is doing.  People deserve a government that tells the truth and keeps its promises.  Liberal Democrats want to make government more open, more democratic and closer to the people it is meant to serve.

But trust also works the other way – the government must trust the people of Britain.  That means giving people as much freedom as possible, trusting local communities to make decisions about their own local services, and listening to the views of ordinary people about what their communities, jobs and families need most.

So our policies are all about freedom, fairness and trust.   And all our policies also have a green thread.  We want to see a society in which individuals and communities enjoy the freedom to run their own lives.  A degraded natural environment is a constraint on freedom – it damages personal health and quality of life, it impoverishes economies, and it weakens or destroys local communities.  This is as true for future generations as it is for present one.  But achieving sustainability cannot be done by one department acting alone because issues cross the boundaries of government departments and agencies.  So we will put the environment at the heart of every part of government.

Pre-manifesto Costings

Liberal Democrats have always been open and honest about how we will pay for our policies.  At the last three general elections, we set out full details of how much our policies would cost and how we would pay for them – none of the other parties did this.  Since Labour have now put up taxes, we don’t need to raise taxes for most of our proposals – we have detailed plans to fund them by savings in current budgets.  That will involve switching around £5 billion from lower priority programmes and unnecessary bureaucracy to our priorities.  Key proposals include:

• Cutting subsidies. We will abolish the DTI; reduce spending by DEFRA; adopt competitive procurement in defence; and abolish many local area initiatives.
  
  
• Scrapping the Chancellor’s Child Trust Fund and using the money for children’s early years education and support. The Child Trust Fund will cost £1.25 billion over a Parliament. A much better way to help the next generation is to invest in children’s early years.
  
  
• Not introducing ID cards. Hundreds of millions can be saved by not introducing ID cards.  That money would, we believe, be better spent on increasing the number of police on our streets and providing them with the latest technology to make them more efficient.

However, we also want to create a fairer distribution of the costs of paying for public services, because it cannot be right that – as at present – people on low incomes or in old age have to pay so much more of their income in taxes and government charges than those who are much better off.  Three of our key policies are about creating a fairer distribution of the costs of public services:

• Scrapping tuition and top-up fees for students. Cost: £1.2 billion.
  
  
• Introducing free personal care for elderly and disabled people. Cost: up to £1.4 billion.
  
  
• Keeping down the rate of local taxes. Cost: £1.7bn.

These three items add up to £4.3 billion and we will pay for them by one tax change, introducing a new 50% rate on very high individual income in so far as it exceeds £100,000 a year.

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