Last week, the Green Party announced its manifesto with a clear and ambitious focus on building a fairer and greener economy.
There were plenty of policies that we look forward to seeing the Greens campaign for, especially the focus on mental health, for young people and those struggling to find work, and on rehabilitative practices in the criminal justice system. The importance placed on the emerging green industries is also something we want to see all political parties focus on when thinking about upskilling the UK’s workforce for the jobs of the future.
Children’s rights and safety online
Catch22:
- Commit to tackling online harms, enact Online Safety Bill, ensuring children’s safety online;
- Introduce measures that prevent vaping products being marketed to young people, such as plain packaging and banning sports sponsorship.
Green Party:
- Amend the Online Safety Act to protect democracy and prevent political debate from being manipulated by falsehoods, fakes and half-truths.
Youth services and violence
Catch22:
- Implement a national strategy to tackle Child Criminal Exploitation, including County Lines;
- Invest in youth workers;
- Mandate training for professionals on youth violence;
- Invest further in the presence of youth workers in communities, to ensure the impact of the National Youth Guarantee is sustained beyond 2025;
- Ensure School Exclusion Panels consult with local experts on child exploitation, ‘gangs’ and ‘serious youth violence’ before making an exclusion decision.
Green Party:
- Properly fund Local authorities to deliver youth services including the youth workers who play a key role in keeping young people safe;
- Youth workers rather than police officers to work with pupils in schools;
- Provide a trained and paid counsellor in every primary and secondary school, and every sixth-form college.
Criminal justice and rehabilitation
Catch22:
- Focus on rehabilitation;
- Prioritise victims’ rights;
- Widen access to restorative justice services by placing it as a right in the Victim’s Code;
- Drive better outcomes for victims of fraud through an increase in police investigations and reduction in revictimisation.
Green Party:
- Rehabilitation is the best way to reduce future offending;
- Expand restorative justice when crimes do take place, both to give victims a voice and to help offenders take responsibility for the harm they have done;
- Focus on the prevention of crime through restoring the funding withdrawn from youth services since 2010 and through community-based policing
- Focus on rehabilitation through investment in the probation and prison services;
- Rebuild people’s lives rather than condemning them to a downward cycle of crime and imprisonment.
Jobs, apprenticeships, digital skills, and inclusion
Catch22:
- Publish a digital inclusion strategy and invest in ‘digital skills for work’ programmes;
- Increase the apprenticeship minimum wage;
- Increase flexibility in the apprenticeship levy so that it can be spent on pre-apprenticeship training;
- Consult on an ‘AI for good’ strategy to help build a diverse workforce, eliminate bias in hiring processes and open up job opportunities to all.
Green Party:
- Investment in skills and training (including retrofitting) reaching £4bn per year, allowing workers to be prepared for the transition and the new roles they can take on.
Care experienced young people
Catch22:
- Ensure all care experienced people are made eligible for the over 25 Universal Credit rate from the age of 18;
- Introduce Corporate Parenting Responsibilities so that organisations and government service providers are expected to treat care experienced people up to the age of 25 as their own children;
- Make ‘care experience’ a protected characteristic under the Equalities Act 2010.
Green Party:
- n/a
Overall, this is a manifesto that is steadfastly centred on rebuilding the UK economy to be greener and fairer. The only area where we felt it was lacking was the experience of people who have left care. As with the Labour and the Conservative manifesto, it left much to be desired for a big part of our society that is often overlooked.