Economy

Rebuilding Our Broken Economy

Gordon Brown said he'd abolished boom and bust, but he's given us the longest and deepest recession since records began. He said we were the best-placed country to deal with the global downturn, but we're still in recession while our major competitors are in recovery. He says only he can lead Britain to recovery, but his policies have failed and he has no serious plan for our economic future.

We desperately need a change of direction. A Conservative government will take three key steps to rebuild our broken economy:

First, we still face a financial crisis. So we need to get banks lending again. For nearly a year, we have been calling for a National Loan Guarantee Scheme to underwrite bank lending to businesses, to save businesses and protect jobs. And we think that instead of paying our significant cash bonuses, retail banks should be rebuilding their balance sheets so they can start lending to businesses again.

Second, we face a debt crisis. To restore investor confidence, we need a credible plan to get the £175 billion annual deficit under control. That means taking the tough choices in public spending we have set out, such as a one-year public sector pay freeze except for the lowest paid.

Third, we face a jobs crisis. So we need a plan for growth. We will abolish all tax on jobs created by new companies for two years; we will introduce a radical new programme for everyone who is unemployed so we can Get Britain Working again; and we will create a high-skill economy by building a new generation of technical schools, creating 100,000 new apprenticeships, and funding 10,000 extra university places.

Britain has the resources, people, ingenuity and ideas to get us out of recession. We just need a government that will help, not stand in the way.

News

25 January 2010

Government U-Turn on Childcare Vouchers

Parliamentary Candidate, George Lee, and Conservative campaigners across Holborn & St Pancras have been celebrating after the Government performed a u-turn on its plans to remove tax relief for employer-based childcare vouchers. These currently save parents up to £2,400 a year on the cost of nurseries and nannies and are a vital source of financial support for hard working families. Gordon Brown announced that he was scrapping the support at Labour’s annual conference in September. However, following a backlash from his own backbenchers and opposition from the Conservatives, he has now said that the relief will be applied to all vouchers at the standard income tax rate of 20%.

George Lee, who campaigned against the move, said, “This is welcome news for hundreds of thousands of families across the country. We need people to be at their most productive as we try to emerge from the current recession and stripping them of thousands of pounds a year is not the way to do this. As a father with two young children I am happy that common sense has prevailed.”

23 November 2009

Emergency Budget Within 50 Days

If we are elected as the next government, David Cameron has promised that he would hold an emergency budget. This budget would have two purposes. First, it would set out a credible plan for getting the deficit under control. As we have been saying for some time, and as the CBI, OECD and others agree, we cannot begin a proper recovery until we address the record deficit Labour has created. Second, and equally importantly, it would be a budget which goes for growth and which sets out a series of measures to get the economy moving again.

Link to story.

19 November 2009

Tough Choices

We all know that the state of our public finances is appalling.

Britain has the largest deficit in the G20. Labour's debt crisis is a threat to our economic recovery. The Conservatives have been honest about the scale of the crisis and set out some of the tough choices we would make, while the government is still in denial. What we have today is an opposition behaving like a government and a government behaving like an irresponsible opposition.

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