What are the key policies of the Liberal Democrats with an emphasis on how their policies will affect business, especially smaller businesses?
Taxation
- Cutting business rates seen as a ‘priority’, and have also vowed to support entrepreneurship with a new scheme that would pay selected entrepreneurs £100 a week for six months to support their living costs.
- Propose a ban on zero hours contracts and want to ensure rights derived from EU law, such as parental leave, continue post-Brexit.
The UK has one of the lowest levels of output per hour in the G7 – only in Japan is it lower, which may explain the glut of minimum wage jobs.
- Want to double the number of businesses that hire apprentices, develop national colleges to deliver high-level vocational skills, and increase advice in schools about entrepreneurship and self-employment.
- Set an aggressive target of 2020 for FTTP to be the standard technology, and they are the only party to say that SMEs are a priority. However, they make no mention of 5G.
- For more, see Immigration to UK falls
- Reverse cut to universal credit.
- Make cannabis legal but regulated.
- Cannabis tax to raise £1 billion a year.
- Ban sale of diesel cars.
- Generate 60 per cent of electricity by renewables by 2030 – this may happen anyway.
- Extra £6 billion in funding.
- Restore bursaries for nursing students.
- Guarantee triple lock: guaranteeing pensions to rise either with inflation, earnings or by 2.5 per cent a year, whichever is the higher.
- A Housing Investment Bank – builders often complain that lack of finance is holding them back
- £7 billion extra in funding.
- Free school meals for all primary school children.
- Get rid of snoopers charter.
- Proportional voting.
- Lower voting age to 16.
- Democratically elected upper chamber to replace House of Lords.
