Cameron pledges to double free childcare launching election manifesto

By The Press Association14th April 2015News EnglandChildcare, Families, General Election, News England

David Cameron promised 30 hours a week of free childcare for three and four-year-olds as he insisted the Tories were the “real party of working people”.

Launching the Conservatives’ election manifesto, the Prime Minister said the existing provision would be doubled – saving parents £5,000 a year.

He also declared that no one earning the minimum wage would pay tax, with the personal allowance uprated in line with the basic wage in future.

“At the heart of this manifesto is a simple proposition,” Mr Cameron said at the launch in Swindon, Wiltshire.

“We are the party of working people, offering you security at every stage of your life.”

In an upbeat address, Mr Cameron said a Conservative government would use the next five years to turn “the good news in the economy into a good life for your family”.

He said that providing free childcare was a key measure for many working families.

“A good life should mean that raising your family feels like an incredible and joyful and, yes, sometimes exhausting journey but it shouldn’t be a struggle with the bills,” he said.

“For families with young children, this is not one issue among many – it is the issue. They’re asking ‘How can this work? How can we afford it?’ It shouldn’t have to be this way.”

He said that passing legislation to ensure no-one on the minimum wage had to pay income tax was a “modern compassionate Conservative version” of a previous reform to help low-earners.

“This is a landmark change,” he said. “It means that we can proudly say that this is the party of working people.”

Mr Cameron confirmed plans announced overnight to grant 1.3 million housing association tenants the right to buy their homes in an extension of Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme.

After a campaign which has been criticised as too negative, the Prime Minister was relentlessly positive, insisting that his plans offered renewed hope after the years of austerity.

“They’re about realising the potential of Britain, not as a debt-addicted, welfare-burdened, steadily declining, once-great nation, which is what we found, but a country where a good life is there for everyone who is willing to work for it,” he said.

“In Britain we’ve always shown that we have the ingredients, the will, above all the people, to overturn what is inevitable. And with a strengthening economy behind us, this buccaneering world-beating can-do country we can do it all over again.

“This is a great country and we can be a greater country still.”

During a question and answer session with reporters, Mr Cameron said Labour’s “death bed conversion” on fiscal responsibility is “so totally unconvincing in every way”.

In reference to his repeated mentions of the “good life”, Mr Cameron was asked if he viewed himself and wife Samantha as the Tom and Barbara of Britain or the Gerry and Margo – a nod to the BBC sitcom of the same name.

Mr Cameron replied: “I will leave that for Samantha to tell me privately later.”

Asked about the funding for the £8 billion NHS pledge, the PM said: “All our commitments are fully funded as part of our fiscal plan. That is the difference between the parties.”

On Labour’s fiscal plan, Mr Cameron said: “They haven’t even reached, as it were, the foothills. They haven’t even got to base camp. In fact, I think they’re stuck at Gatwick trying to work out what sort of suncream to buy.

“They haven’t really done the work and they’ve had five years to do it. This is a total contrast.”

Asked what was in the manifesto for those people thinking of voting Ukip rather than Tory, Mr Cameron said: “To people who have not yet made up their mind, I would say I know there are sometimes things that have bothered you over the last five years, things you’d like us to have done differently or better or what have you, and I understand that and we always learn from the things we’ve done, the things we need to do even better.

“But the key thing is this is a choice. We’re heading in the right direction. We’ve got a real choice in this country to turn the good news in the economy to a good life for people in our country.”

Danny Alexander, Liberal Democrat Chief Secretary to the Treasury, said the Conservative Party manifesto was a “total con”.

He told BBC News: “The big issue with the Tory manifesto is they’re trying to keep the massive cuts to public expenditure that they want to make in the next parliament entirely secret.”

People will see the manifesto as a combination of “secret cuts and unfunded policy commitments” until funding details emerge, Mr Alexander added.

He added he believed the minimum wage would need to increase above £9 an hour for the Tory pledge to exempt minimum wage workers from income tax to have “any bite”, adding this rise was not scheduled to happen until at some point in the 2020s.

Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, told Sky News: “One thing the Prime Minister didn’t make too much of but did say was that he was reaffirming a commitment to getting the overall budget into surplus by 2018.

“That implies something really dramatic – and we’re talking tens and tens of billions of pounds worth of spending cuts or tax increases even before you start to think about some of the promises that we’ve heard on the National Health Service, on increasing the personal tax allowance.

“So what you got was a lot of the good stuff of course – more money for childcare, more money for the health service and so on – but absolutely no detail on the bad stuff, which is there’s going to have to continue to be really big cuts on welfare spending, really big cuts in local government spending, really big cuts in all the other bits of spending which haven’t been specifically protected.”