165 great policies in the Green Party’s manifesto

The Green Party of England and Wales launched its manifesto today. And it’s packed full of fantastic policies. So many that there’s at least 165 that would transform Britain. Here they are:

1. Ending privatisation of the NHS by repealing the Health and Social Care Act and abolishing the internal market.
2. Increasing the minimum wage to £12 an hour for all workers over the age of 16.
3. Abolishing the Home Office, replacing it with a Ministry for Sanctuary and a Ministry for the Interior.
4. Providing 35 hours a week of free child care for all from the age of nine months.
5. Introducing rent controls for private tenants to tackle the rising cost of housing.
6. Ensuring all forms of birth control are free.
7. Abolishing tuition fees for undergraduate students.
8. Ending the academies project and bringing all state schools into the control of local authorities.
9. Legislating for a right to food – giving access to healthy and locally sourced food to all.
10. Scrapping Trident nuclear weapons.
11. Legalising and regulating all drugs.
12. Scrapping Universal Credit.
13. Delivering an £89 a week Universal Basic Income to all – with additional payments for those who need it.
14. Giving refugees the right to work while their applications are considered.
15. Ending the Hostile Environment policy.
16. Increasing schools funding by at least £4 billion per year.
17. Providing free social care for the over 65s who need support in their homes.
18. Bringing all of the railway into public ownership within 10 years.
19. Abolishing OFSTED.
20. Investing £2 billion a year in training and skills to create new jobs for a transition to a low-carbon economy, including through apprenticeships.
21. Creating a network of regional mutual banks to provide funding for start ups, especially co-operatives.
22. Abolishing council tax, replacing it with a land value tax.
23. Ending no-fault evictions.
24. Ensuring climate change is properly embedded into the curriculum.
25. Increasing NHS funding by £6 billion a year per year until 2030.
26. Requiring every single employer to recognise a trade union.
27. Replacing the first past the post voting system with a proportional system for both national and local elections.
28. Taxing income from investments and assets at the same level as income.
29. Making cannabis available to purchase from licensed small businesses with minimum pricing regulations and plain packaging.
30. Ensuring legal and safe abortion is accessible across all European Union countries.
31. Creating a government owned rolling stock company that would invest in new electric trains.
32. Increasing and ringfencing the Rape Support Fund and reverse cuts to rape crisis centres.
33. Providing free sanitary products to pupils in schools.
34. Ensuring that the highest paid worker of any organisation is paid no more than ten times that of the lowest paid worker.
35. Ensuring everyone can access mental health therapy within 28 days on the NHS.
36. Introducing participatory budgeting in local government, allowing citizens to decide how the council spends its money.
37. Retrofitting 10 million homes by 2030, ensuring 1 million homes reach the highest energy efficiency standards each year, radically reducing heating bills and energy consumption.
38. Delivering free PrEP on the NHS to prevent HIV infection.
39. Creating a right for private renters to buy and run their home as a housing co-operative.
40. Increasing funding for trans healthcare, gender identity clinics and HIV treatment.
41. Creating 100,000 social houses with pioneering environmental standards.
42. Banning fracking.
43. Removing charitable status from private schools.
44. Raising the school starting age to six years old.
45. Giving gig economy workers the minimum wage, sick leave, holiday pay and pension provisions.
46. Prohibiting commercial advertising of alcohol.
47. Funding local government to a tune of an extra £10 billion a year.
48. Abolishing the House of Lords and replacing it with a fully elected chamber with members elected for 10 year terms with half the house being elected every five years.
49. Requiring councils and other public bodies to divest their pension funds from fossil fuels.
50. Abolishing school league tables.
51. Ending minimum income rules for migrants applying for visas.
52. Abolishing the Ministry of Defence and replacing it with a Ministry for Security and Peace.
53. Ensuring all new housing developments are within 1km of a train, tube or tram station or 500m from a high frequency bus service.
54. Banning planned obsolescence of manufactured products.
55. Legislating for a legal right to independent living for disabled people.
56. Prohibiting a single individual or company from owning more than 20% of a media market.
57. Replacing short term prison sentences with restorative justice projects.
58. Exploring offering menstrual and menopausal leave to workers.
59. Scrapping NHS charges for migrants.
60. End the opt out of LGBTIQA+ inclusive PHSE lessons.
61. Providing more public toilets – fully accessible for disabled people.
62. Giving the right to vote to all 16 and 17 year olds.
63. Closing the gender pay gap through equal pay audits and legislating to make it easier to take action against employers in equal pay cases.
64. Allowing all local authorities to bring their bus services under public control, ending the rigged system that currently only benefits private bus companies.
65. Stopping the building of all new airport runways.
66. Restoring arts and music education in all state schools.
67. Adopting a housing first approach for tackling homelessness.
68. Re-establishing a European sea-rescuing mission to save lives of migrants in European waters.
69. Guaranteeing the rights of indigenous peoples by supporting autonomy and land rights.
70. Raising corporation tax to 24%.
71. Granting at least 15% of government contracts to small and micro businesses.
72. Writing off student debt.
73. Decommissioning North Sea oil and phasing put coal plants.
74. Funding local authorities to create new council homes.
75. Enshrining freedom of movement as a core principle of the European Union
76. Ending oil and gas subsidies.
77. Planting 700 million new trees.
78. Allowing those over the age of 16 to stand for parliament.
79. Making employers pay the cost of heating, electricity and Wi-Fi for low paid workers who work at home.
80. Suspending all deportation flights.
81. Embedding the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
82. Delivering a £3 billion Climate Adaption Fund for local councils.
83. Introducing a frequent flyer levy to ensure the small elite that fly the most can’t continue wrecking the planet.
84. Pardon everyone previously convicted for possession and small scale supply of drugs.
85. Ensuring migrants can access public services without threat of immigration enforcement or deportation.
86. Refocusing farm subsidies towards organic farming and away from intensive livestock agriculture.
87. Ending indefinite detention and closing UK detention centres.
88. Reinstating the Health Secretary’s responsibility for the health service.
89. Ending UK government arms sales activities.
90. Legislating to allow women to make formal complaints about media coverage that encourage misogyny.
91. Abolishing the Islamophobic PREVENT strategy
92. Protecting the BBC as a publicly owned institution.
93. Rolling out solar panels on homes, with 1 million households per year given the means to generate their own energy.
94. Reforming the Gender Recognition Act to allow legal recognition on the principle of self-identification.
95. Ending factory farming across Europe.
96. Implementing the recommendations of the Leveson Report to ensure media outlets are accountable and held to high standards.
97. Creating a new international law of ecocide to prosecute crimes against the national environment.
98. Introducing a binding lobbying register for all EU institutions.
99. Spending £2.5 billion a year on new cycle ways and footpaths.
100. Developing infrastructure to enable near 100% recycling of items used by individuals and corporations.
101. Reverse the cuts to domestic violence support centres and women’s refuges.
102. Ensuring major company boards are made up of at least 40% women.
103. Delivering reliable broadband and mobile internet to rural communities through local councils.
104. Strengthening transparency rules on political lobbying.
105. Delivering a £3,200 Carers’ Allowance with an additional £4,630 Universal Basic Income payment for all full time carers.
106. Allowing job-sharing at all levels of government.
107. Opening up new routes for electric coach travel.
108. Requiring UK companies to abide by UK environmental and labour standards, or those in which they are operating – whichever is higher.
109. Increasing international development to 1% of Gross National Income.
110. Delivering a “right to repair” so manufacturers are required to keep goods operational years after purchase.
111. Reducing school class sizes to below 20.
112. Requiring manufacturers to pay for recycling and disposal of packaging they produce.
113. Ending all subsidies for the arms industry.
114. Re-orienting the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy to promote sustainable farming.
115. Ensuring 8 million rented homes are A rated for energy efficiency by 2030.
116. Delivering 70% of the UK’s electricity from wind by 2030.
117. Ensuring Think Tanks are transparent by creating a new legal entity for political foundations.
118. Banning all forms of hunting.
119. Reversing cuts to legal aid which force gender-based violence survivors to represent themselves in court.
120. Introducing state funding for political parties and reducing the political influence of corporations and the super wealthy.
121. Ensuring trade deals maintain and enhance environmental standards, workers’ rights and food standards.
122. Ending the rules which allow non-domiciled residents to pay no tax on foreign income.
123. Creating a government department tasked with delivering a Green New Deal, led by a Carbon Chancellor.
124. Reinstating free TV licenses for over 75s.
125. Introducing a Future Generations Act for England to ensure the needs of future generations are included in government decisions.
126. Clamping down on tax avoidance and evasion across the European Union.
127. Re-opening closed rail stations and investing in extra rail capacity in the South West, Midlands and North.
128. Restoring public rights of way to the countryside.
129. Providing better housing for disabled people and increasing the number of homes built to mobility standards.
130. Making misogyny a hate crime.
131. Increasing transparency of European institutions – including the European central Bank – through live streaming and publicly published minutes.
132. Creating neighbourhood libraries for tools and equipment.
133. Ensuring strong railway connections to all ports, allowing more freight to be carried by rail and less by road.
134. Removing the spousal veto enabling married trans people to acquire their gender recognition certificate without spousal permission.
135. Protecting the right to protest.
136. Investing £1billion a year in nursing in higher education, and reinstating nursing bursaries.
137. Providing grants to local news publishers.
138. Holding a referendum on the establishment of a Cornish assembly.
139. Ending the development of new road capacity.
140. Delivering resilience in energy supply by partnering connecting our grid to Europe, including through a sub-sea connection to Norway and Iceland to benefit from their rich geothermal and hydro resources.
141. Electrifying all rail lines.
142. Restoring peatlands, ending the burning of peatlands and banning the use of peat in compost.
143. Protecting whistleblowers by introducing a public interest defence for breaching the Official Secrets Act.
144. Allowing communities the first chance to buy local land that comes up for sale.
145. Requiring all political parties to report on the diversity of their candidates.
146. Deliver mass energy efficiency training free of charge to small businesses and co-operatives.
147. Removing the cap on fines for political parties which have broken electoral law.
148. Investing in research and development for alternatives to plastic.
149. Pricing fossil fuel extraction out of existence by taxing carbon at a progressively higher rate over a decade.
150. Reducing pesticide and fungicide use by at least 50% by 2022.
151. Creating thousands of new jobs in small scale farming.
152. Giving pensioners a Universal Basic Income of £178 per week
153. Allowing communities to develop and own their own renewable energy projects.
154. Investing heavily in solar, geothermal, tidal and hydro power.
155. Subsidising the replanting of hedgerows lost in the last 50 years.
156. Creating apprenticeships in the repair and reconditioning sector.
157. Guaranteeing a Universal Basic Income payment of £70 per week for the first two children and £50 per week for each additional child to all families with an income under £50,000 per year.
158. Ending the badger cull.
159. Ending the sale of personal data such as health records.
160. Developing Carbon Capture and Storage to absorb CO2 emissions from iron, steel and cement manufacturing.
161. Making “Windrush Day” a bank holiday to celebrate migration.
162. Increasing powers for the Welsh Assembly.
163. Investing in energy storage infrastructure including solar batteries.
164. Ending the sale of new diesel and petrol cars by 2030.
165. Banning the production of single use plastic for packaging

Header image credit – YouTube screengrab