Tag: Liberal Democrats

The press release issued by the Liberal Democrats on 5 February 2023.

A major cause of the terrible NHS crisis afflicting our country is the crisis in social care. Thousands of people are stranded in hospital beds because there aren’t enough care workers to look after them at home or in a care home.

Only two in five people are able to leave hospital when they are ready to do so, contributing to record-breaking waits in A&E and dangerous ambulance handover delays.

Everyone in this country deserves high-quality social care when they need it. At whatever point of life we find ourselves in need of care, whether that’s in later life or, as is the case for an increasing number of people, during their prime working years, everyone should be able to live in dignity.

Sadly that is not the case in Britain today. Social care services in this country are in such a state that people are not getting the care and support they need.

The press release issued by the Liberal Democrats on 4 February 2023.

Each year, thousands of grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings and family friends step up to support a child who is unable to live with their birth parents.

Liberal Democrat MP Munira Wilson has introduced the Kinship Care Bill in the House of Commons. This bill calls on the Government to provide all friends and relatives who look after a child who cannot live with their birth parents with an allowance of at least £137 a week: the same level as for foster carers.

Every child that goes into kinship care instead of local authority care could save the taxpayer more than £35,000 a year. Yet Government policy treats kinship carers as a Cinderella service, denying most of them the support received by foster carers or adoptive parents.

Munira’s Kinship Care Bill would:

• Provide a weekly allowance to all kinship carers at the same level as for foster carers;
• Give kinship carers the right to paid leave when a child starts living with them;
• Support the education of children in kinship care, such as by giving them Pupil Premium Plus funding and priority for their first choice of school.

Liberal Democrats will stand up for carers, so we can provide their children with a better start in life, no matter their background.

The press release issued by the Liberal Democrats on 2 February 2023.

A typical family has been left almost £1,200 poorer in the 100 days since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister.

Rishi Sunak’s first 100 days in office have been a crushing disappointment, with a worsening cost of living emergency and NHS crisis.

The cost of Conservative chaos is hitting families who are seeing their incomes squeezed while local health services are stretched to breaking point.

The new analysis by the Liberal Democrats has revealed that a typical squeezed middle household with a mortgage will have seen extra costs of £1,170 in the 100 days since Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister on 25th October.

This is made up of £822 in extra mortgage interest payments, £132 in extra taxes due to the freezing of income tax thresholds and £216 in additional food bills.

The press release issued by the Liberal Democrats on 26 January 2023.

292 Conservative MPs voted to allow sewage dumping by water companies in our rivers, lakes and coasts for at least 15 more years.

New regulations passed by Conservative MPs will allow water companies to continue dumping sewage into our rivers and seas for another 15 years.

In the last two years water companies in England dumped raw sewage 775,568 times lasting 5,768,679 hours.

The new legilsation set a target of an 80% reduction in phosphates in rivers by 2038. Phosphates are naturally occurring minerals found in human waste and can lead to a dramatic growth in algae and deplete oxygen levels when they are dumped in rivers.

This is a pathetic target which allows water companies to get away with a staggering 15 more years of shameful sewage dumping. This is a betrayal of the British public who rightly want tougher action against water companies.

The water companies that are responsible for dumping sewage into our rivers, lakes and coastal waters every day, now have 15 years to clean up their act. Meanwhile their top execs have paid themselves £51 million, including £30.6 million in bonuses over the last two years.

Conservative MPs should be ashamed of themselves. It will be swimmers and treasured wildlife which pay the price for today’s flimsy target. Water company execs will be cheering this through parliament.

Liberal Democrats proudly voted against these unacceptably weak targets.

The press release issued by the Liberal Democrats on 17 January 2023.

This Conservative government is in non-stop firefighting mode because of their gross incompetence, from the botched EU trade deal to the unforgivable mistakes made during the pandemic.

Almost 2,300 HMRC tax compliance staff were moved to managing the impact of Covid or Brexit last year, an investigation by the Liberal Democrats has revealed.

It means thousands of staff who would usually be working on recovering unpaid taxes were instead redeployed to managing the government’s mishandling of the pandemic and Brexit deal.

Civil servants are being moved from one crisis to another in a constant game of whack-a-mole.

This is allowing criminals to get away with dodging paying millions of pounds in tax, while hard-working families see their taxes hiked and public services are on their knees.

The figures also show that a third fewer tax compliance cases were closed last year than pre-pandemic, while the revenue clawed back by HMRC through compliance activity fell by a staggering £7 billion.

The figures were uncovered by Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesperson Sarah Olney through a series of parliamentary questions. The investigation found that:

• In 2021-22, almost 1,250 tax compliance staff were redeployed to work on Covid-19 schemes administered by HMRC. Another 1,040 were assigned to work on matters relating to the UK’s departure from the EU.
• It means almost one tenth (9%) of HMRC’s 25,450 tax compliance staff were deployed in 2021-22 to issues related either to Covid or Brexit.
• HMRC closed just 256,000 tax compliance cases in 2021-22. This is down a third from the 390,000 compliance checks closed in 2018-19.
• £30.8 billion of tax revenue was recovered through compliance efforts in 2021-22, similar to the previous year but down a staggering £6 billion from the tax recovered in 2019-20.

The press release issued by the Liberal Democrats on 12 January 2023.

As Liberal Democrats, we are proud of the outstanding economic, social, and cultural contribution the Windrush Generation have made to the United Kingdom.

On this 75th anniversary of the arrival of HMT Empire Windrush – which brought over dedicated Caribbean people who wanted to help rebuild Britain – we should be celebrating this contribution.

The Conservative Government should be working tirelessly to right the wrongs of this country’s treatment of people who have given so much to us.

The recommendations which came out of Lessons Learned Review in the wake of the Windrush Scandal are essential to prevent making the same mistakes again.

Yet, there are now reports that Suella Braverman is considering scrapping these recommendations.

In the House of Lords, Liberal Democrat Floella Benjamin has been challenging the Conservatives to keep the comitements they made.

Liberal Democrats will keep fighting for the rights of those impacted by the Windrush Scandal – and to scrap the cruel, ineffective Hostile Environment policies that caused the scandal in the first place. We will keep standing up to bigotry, hate and racial injustice that is far too commonplace in our country.

The Conservative Government must start by guaranteeing they will stick to the commitments they made in the aftermath of the Windrush Scandal.

The press release issued by the Liberal Democrats on 1 January 2023.

Ambulance services are set to face a huge £70m fuel bill this year, a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from the Liberal Democrats has revealed.

The FOI asked ambulance services for their spending on fuel in the last 3 financial years and their projected spending for the 2022/23 year.

All nine of the ten ambulance services in mainland England that responded have said that they are expecting to pay more than a million pounds or more in fuel over the next year.

The hardest hit is the Yorkshire Ambulance service which is set to pay an extra £2.3million by the end of the financial year. Meanwhile, the service with the highest projected amount was the West Midlands at a staggering £9.5 million in projected spending.

Overall ambulance services across the country are set to pay an extra £14 million over the next year compared to 2021/22, up to £69 million from £54 million in the year prior.

In light of the news, the Liberal Democrat Health Spokesperson Daisy Cooper MP is now calling for all ambulance services to have universally discounted rates on fuel costs paid for by oil and gas giants.

Commenting Liberal Democrats Health Spokesperson Daisy Cooper MP said: 

“Right across the country, our ambulance services are on the brink. And now, every ambulance service is being hit by a hugely inflated fuel bill, stretching vital funds even further.

“The Conservative Government is to blame: on their watch, fuel bills have sky-rocketed. But the public shouldn’t have to saddle the bill for their failure.

“Our ambulance service is in dire need of any kind of support it can get, reducing these soaring fuel bills by properly taxing the big oil and gas companies should be a priority.”

The press release issued by the Liberal Democrats on 30 December 2022.

Squeezed middle earners are facing a staggering £20,000 stealth tax hike over the next decade, new research commissioned by the Liberal Democrats has revealed.

The House of Commons Library analysis shows that someone on a salary of £60,000 will pay an extra £20,440 in income tax over the next ten years due to Jeremy Hunt’s freezing of income tax thresholds. This is equivalent to nearly four months of work going unpaid, or 111 days.

The Liberal Democrats accused the Conservatives of betraying Britain’s hard-working middle, warning that families are facing a “lost decade” of tax hikes and soaring inflation.

The research is based on someone earning £60,000 in 2021/22, whose earnings then rise in line with average earnings growth in subsequent years. It looks at the additional tax paid compared to if income tax thresholds had increased in line with inflation each year, as they would do if the freeze wasn’t in place.

In total, the squeezed middle earner would pay over £134,000 in income tax over the next decade. It means their income tax bill will be almost a fifth higher (18%) than it would have been if the thresholds had not been frozen.

The figures also show that someone on an average salary of around £33,000 will pay an extra £4,040 in income tax due to the freezing of the personal allowance. This is equivalent to six weeks of unpaid work (42 days).

While families are seeing their taxes hiked, the government is giving £18 billion in tax cuts to the banks over the next five years, through a reduction in the bank levy and surcharge.

Liberal Democrat Leader Ed Davey said:

“Britain’s squeezed middle is facing a lost decade of unfair tax hikes and soaring inflation. Families are watching aghast as their paycheques fall while mortgage costs soar. Why should the hardworking middle be forced to pick up the bill for the Conservative party crashing the economy?

“It is deeply shameful that the Conservative government has chosen to slash taxes for the big banks whilst hiking them for the public. This could have all been avoided if the Conservative party hadn’t crashed the economy and sent interest rates spiralling with their botched budget.”

The press release issued by the Liberal Democrats on 21 December 2022.

Responding to this morning’s ONS debt and deficit statistics, Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesperson Sarah Olney MP said:

“This Conservative Government has put our economy between a rock and a hard place, by failing to get inflation under control and pushing the UK’s borrowing costs even higher with their catastrophic mini budget. It’s an outrage that hard-working families will be picking up the tab for their incompetence for years to come.

“Ministers can’t use these figures as an excuse for hitting households with tax rises and cutting public services, when they caused this crisis in the first place. The Government should put a proper windfall tax in place to boost the public finances, and finally set out a proper plan to grow the economy.”

The press release issued by the Liberal Democrats on 20 December 2022.

Liberal Democrat Deputy Leader and Health Spokesperson Daisy Cooper has demanded Health Secretary Steve Barclay must resolve the nurse and ambulance strikes or resign, she said:

“We are in the 11th hour to stop these strikes and if the Government doesn’t negotiate properly with nurses and ambulance services it’s real people who will pay the price.

“Steve Barclay must get round the table and resolve these strikes now.

“A Health Secretary that can’t keep ambulances running during a winter crisis is not fit for office and must resign.”