The Yorkshire Post Manifesto: Our ten key priorities for the next Prime Minister

Business

Consistency. Predictability. Reliability. Clarity. Trust. In the pages of this newspaper, business leaders, entrepreneurs and investors have lamented a breakdown between the political classes and wealth creators.

Those who make the nations tills ring crave confidence in the long-term national and international industrial strategy. One that holds true to its long-term deliverables – deliverables that are costed against hard-and-fast timelines in a way that uses public money to attract private finance in order to realise improvements to the benefit of the majority.

This can only be achieved via consensus between business and policy-makers; insightful leadership at Ministerial level informed by job creators from key sectors across the economy so that, from the ground up, business leaders can build meaningful, profitable long-term plans with confidence – starting with a UK labour market reform that supports ambitious business growth whilst affording protections to workers.

By listening to business, rolling the pitch for success – from planning laws to tax policy – we can ease the pressure on household pockets whilst restoring the confidence of inward investors.

Education & skills

In the summer of 2021, education recovery commissioner for England, Sir Kevan Collins, put forward to Government a proposal designed to help those children who lost learning through lockdowns to catch up.

The package of restorative learning measures needed for this job alone required additional investment from the Government totalling £15bn. His counsel was rejected and in the wake of that, he quit. The distance between the levels of investment he felt necessary and the level of investment the Government wanted to make too big a chasm to bridge.

Yet, world-leading investment levels are the start of reforming education and skills policy in this country. Not unlike business, teachers and school leaders crave long-term stability and consistency in order for them to design and deliver inclusive, engaging, value-adding curricula that draws out the talent before them on a daily basis over the long-term.

The incoming Education Secretary must demonstrate an immediate grasp of the workload pressures on teachers, the reward and incentive deficit, the toxic impact Ofsted has on the profession and the lack of resources to do the job. Schools can grow from there.

Climate & environment

In August 2016, this newspaper set out six priorities for the-then incoming Prime Minister, Theresa May. Conspicuous by its absence in that list of priorities: climate and the environment. It was a world where protest action groups Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion did not exist, where electric cars were a pipe dream for ordinary families and perhaps one where complacency trumped concern.

Now, almost a decade on, not only are climate and the environment on this list, it is the view of this newspaper that those things must preoccupy every waking moment of the next Government.

Too often, sealife is being washed up dead along Yorkshire’s coastline; too frequently our rivers are treated like toilets, pumped full of sewage (the River Calder was cited in a full council meeting as being the second most polluted in the country); too easily are homes and business submerged in filthy floodwater.

Today The Yorkshire Post calls for an incoming Environment Secretary of the highest calibre, whose sense of urgency matches that of the public’s concern about the harm being done to the environment, and who can galvanise international leaders to halt this existential decline.

Energy

Like so much of The Yorkshire Post’s Manifesto For The Future, energy creation and the establishment of a long-term plan to transition to a sustainable, secure, resilient energy system is a challenge woven through myriad other challenges and opportunities. By setting out ring-fenced investment for this imperative, the incoming Government can give investors confidence in the country’s strategies for energy, climate, business and the economy.

Manufacturers up and down domestic and international supply chains can be inspired to design for delivery now – provided the clarity and quality of Ministerial commitment is there for all to see, with cutting-edge technology and infrastructure to modernise the energy market, eliminate volatility of consumer prices, eliminate our vulnerability to foreign despots with their hands on the gas taps and forge a cheaper, kinder to the environment ecosystem of energy creation that is renewable in nature and regenerative in spirit.

This newspaper calls upon the Prime Minister-in-waiting to commit to working with partners from around the world in making net zero the new Space Race: a final frontier that unless we reach, we fail as a species.

Cost of living crisis

The term ‘cost of living crisis’ is an unwieldy instrument, grasped for ahead of interviews and broadcasts in order to project a sense of collective urgency and responsibility, without the need for nuance nor complexity.

That is why we are calling on the next Government to dissect the so-called cost of living crisis into discernible categories for direct and meaningful action so that by the end of the next Parliament there is never again the need for anyone to access a food or warm bank; so that never again do children go through their schooldays tormented by the pangs from their empty bellies.

Each dissected category must be assigned to a junior minister who reports to the Minister charged with working across departments to bring down the cost of energy – while reining in the profiteering done by the big energy companies.

The junior ministers must also drive down the cost of essential foodstuffs, prepare now for the millions of people whose mortgage rates will double during this Parliament, and work with landlords and developers in order to control rent prices and accelerate housing capacity.

It is an invidious brief for anyone.

Farming

Few sectors felt the shockwaves of exiting the EU as farming, with reverberations of discontent running through farms. From a shortage of pickers, packers and slaughterhouse workers to added bureaucratic complexities, increased input costs to insecurity caused by subsidy losses, a global pandemic and a war in Ukraine, those farmers who remain are perhaps more browbeaten than ever.

Yet, all of this illuminates a unique opportunity for the next Government to deliver a world-beating UK agricultural policy that simultaneously ensures robust food security, in the national interest, and flourishing growth into new markets and countries through global trade deals that exploit the quality of British produce made so by virtue of our farmers’ use of cutting edge technologies and methodologies, all trained upon creating a sustainable, environmentally compassionate sector that is the envy of the world.

Worth £120bn to the UK economy, farming is this country’s biggest manufacturing industry; it merits the most ambitious of policy commitments from an exemplar Minister who cares about the countryside. The NFU’s A Blueprint For The Future is an essential place to start.

Devolution

An undoubted success story has been devolution. Giving parts of the region a greater say over their future has started to bear fruit. However, this is only a partial success due to Westminster politicians refusing to truly devolve powers to the regions.

The Yorkshire Post is calling for greater fiscal devolution in particular, allowing regions to keep and reinvest more of the tax they raise locally. Leaders here are in a far better position to decide what is best for this region.

A lot of the talk in this election campaign has been centred around economic growth. Fiscal devolution can help promote that growth and help level up regions that have been left behind.

The battle royal encouraged by the current model of levelling up funding also needs to be ditched. It leads to a waste of resources and creates an environment where mayors start worrying about their own fiefdoms.

Yorkshire will achieve 100 per cent devolution after Hull and East Riding elects its first metro mayor in May. While it still doesn’t match the ambition of a One Yorkshire deal, there is still an opportunity for the next Government to give the region the tools it needs to start realising its potential.

Health & social care

The crisis in social care can no longer be ignored. It is having a knock-on effect on the rest of the healthcare system, which is already on its knees.

That is why The Yorkshire Post is calling for the establishment of a fully-funded National Care Service, that would put social care on a level footing with the NHS.

The challenge for the next Government will be how this would be funded.

It will require unpopular but necessary decisions. It may have to come through a Health and Social Care levy, such as the one that Boris Johnson proposed to “fix social care once and forall”.

It may be that the next Government takes a firm stance on future NHS budgets and funnels money into social care. Or even a mixture of the two.

But the one thing that the nation cannot afford is inaction, especially with an ageing population.

Yorkshire is a compassionate county and the people here are all too aware of the importance of looking after the most vulnerable.

And they are pragmatic enough to understand that something will have to give when it comes to financing such a commitment.

Economy

‘It’s the economy, stupid’: a phrase immortalised by James Carville, a campaign strategist for US President hopeful Bill Clinton in the ‘90s and so pinpoint accurate were those four pithy words that his insight remains as pertinent today as it was then. Like business, like schools, like the general public dizzied by scandal and lies: the economy needs stability and certainty in order to grow.

Industrial strategy must be index-linked to carbon neutrality; skills and labour requirements and opportunities must be visualised and mapped to the education curriculum; taxes and levies systematically engineered to stimulate growth; a technological upskilling roadmap that allows artificial intelligence to inject growth-through-efficiency into businesses everywhere whilst keeping the labour market one step ahead of the new and yet unseen opportunities this AI revolution will inevitably bring.

Crucially, hence having a category of its own in this manifesto, this cannot be achieved from the centre alone. If it really is the economy, stupid, then Ministers must diverge decision-making powers and pounds to those who are best informed about their communities in the regions around the country. Delegate, devolve, deliver.

Transport

HS2 has been, to the detriment of Yorkshire and the North, turned toxic by those with ideological prejudices and political agendas. When stripped of emotion and rhetoric, HS2 was intended to be a high-capacity railway that turned a leaf on Britain’s Victorian past and offered hope of a better-connected, more accessible and affordable future for public transport in this country.

Dedicating line space to rapid, cleaner, greener high-speed transit would in-turn release capacity for more frequent shuttle runs, increasing seat space, improving choice, driving up the movement of people and the spending and earning of money.

Critically, HS2 was the gateway to the North’s public transport holy grail: Northern Powerhouse Rail, a line that could connect Liverpool to Hull, and everything in between.

The next Government must not allow that opportunity to be shunted into the sidings. Britain needs a world-class, fully integrated public transport system.

This newspaper calls upon the incoming Transport Secretary to review the decision-making process behind cutting short HS2 whilst running the rule over mistakes that ultimately led to the project’s demise. We deserve answers.