Following the publication of our Heritage Manifesto 2017, the Labour Party Manifesto, and Liberal Democrat Manifesto have been published. We will analyse the Conservative Party manifesto in the next update. We attended the CIF Conservative Party hustings at which Matt Hancock respond to our question on heritage to stress the importance of the synthesis of the best of old and new and of state and lottery funding. However, he stated that there was ‘more to do’. Mr Hancock went on to say, “we’re the Conservative party. We like our heritage.”
We pull out some pledges from the Labour and Liberal Democrat manifestos which relate to the Heritage sector below.
The Labour Manifesto states that Labour will, among other things:
- Maintain free entry to museums and invest in our museums and heritage sector
- Properly resource and bolster planning authorities with fuller powers to put people and communities at the heart of planning. We will update compulsory purchase powers to make them more effective as a tool to drive regeneration and unlock planned development
- Introduce ‘new migration management systems, working with businesses, trade unions, devolved governments and others to identify specific labour and skill shortages, based on our economic needs, balancing controls and existing entitlements. This may include employer sponsorship, work permits, visa regulations or a tailored mix of all these
- Give communities more power to shape their town centres, by strengthening powers to protect
post offices, community pharmacies, high street banks, sports clubs, pubs and independent shops, and promote measures to decrease high-street vacancies - Support tourism at the heart of government. The tourism industry represents 9.6 per cent of UK employment, 4.9 per cent of export and 9 per cent of GDP, but its importance is too often forgotten. Labour will ensure that tourism becomes a national priority again. We will reinstate the cross-Whitehall ministerial group on tourism, and ensure that government ministers across departments understand how their roles fit into the national tourism agenda
- Create a £1 billion Cultural Capital Fund to upgrade existing cultural and creative infrastructure to be ready for the digital age and invest in creative clusters across the country
- Establish a new Department for Housing
- Invest to build over a million new homes
- Prioritise brownfield sites and protect the green belt
- Ensure that the UK maintains our leading research role by seeking to stay part of Horizon 2020 and its successor programmes and by welcoming research staff to the UK
- Introduce a package of reforms to business rates…while reviewing the entire business rates system in the longer run
- Ensure libraries are preserved for future generations and updated
- Give local Government extra funding next year
- Scrap quarterly reporting for businesses with a turnover of under £85,000
- Reintroduce maintenance grants for university students, and abolish university tuition fees
- Free, lifelong education in Further Education colleges, enabling everyone to upskill or retrain at any point in life
- Bring in a 20-point plan for security and equality at work including banning zero hours contracts, four new public holidays, raising the Minimum Wage to the level of the Living Wage, and banning unpaid internships.
The Liberal Democrat manifesto states that the party will, among other things:
- Maintain free access to national museums and galleries
- Protect sports and arts funding via the National Lottery
- Create creative enterprise zones to grow and regenerate the cultural output of areas across the UK
- Examine the available funding and planning rules for live music venues and the grassroots music sector, protecting venues from further closures
- Directly build homes to fill the gap left by the market, to reach our housebuilding target of 300,000 homes a year
- When the terms of our future relationship with the EU have been negotiated we will put that deal to a vote of the British people in a referendum, with the alternative option of staying in the EU on the ballot paper
- Protect the right to work, travel, study and retire across the EU. Any restrictions sought
by the government must take account of the vital importance of EU workers to the British economy, including public services - Reverse the damage to universities and academics by changing the country’s course away from a hard Brexit
- Recognise the value of international staff to universities and promote international collaboration
- Fight to retain access to Horizon 2020
- Work with the Apprenticeship Advisory Group to increase the number of apprentices from BAME backgrounds
- Aim to double the number of businesses which hire apprentices, including by extending apprenticeships to new sectors of our economy such as creative and digital industries
- Identify and seek to solve skills gaps
- Aim to meet all basic skills needs including literacy, numeracy and digital skills by 2030
- Create individual accounts for funding mature adult and part-time learning and training, and provide for all adults individual access to all necessary career information, advice and guidance
- Hold an annual debate in parliament on skill and labour market shortfalls and surpluses to identify the migration necessary to meet the UK’s needs
- Continue to allow high-skilled immigration to support key sectors of our economy.
In addition to the Heritage Manifesto 2017 others have been published:
The CPRE [Alliance member] has published its own manifesto,
RICS: Priorities for the Built Environment
RTPI: Manifesto for the 2017 General Election
Cultural Learning Alliance: Manifesto for Arts and Cultural Learning
Town & Country Planning Association: Building the future – the TCPA’s manifesto for the 2017 general election
The National Campaign for the Arts has produced a prompt sheet which suggests three questions to ask your Parliamentary candidates, to gauge how knowledgeable and committed they are to issues facing the arts in the UK.