MSE Leaders' Debate 2017

Stagnating incomes have forced many to take on more debt and in–work poverty is at record levels. Labour will ensure that work pays by raising the minimum wage to the level of the living wage for all workers aged 18 or over.

We will introduce a version of Scotland's debt arrangement scheme to give breathing space to households struggling with high debts. This has proved successful in averting evictions and county court judgments, which can exacerbate the stress and mental health issues associated with debt.

We will also reverse the damage done to mental health services under the Conservatives. By ring–fencing mental health budgets and directing funding to the frontline, we will ensure everyone who experiences a mental health problem, 1 in 4 people each year, can access the support they need.

We will introduce new consumer rights for tenants so they can call time on rogue landlords, with new legal minimum standards to ensure properties are fit for human habitation, a ban on letting agency fees and a landlord licensing scheme.

We will also introduce controls on rent rises and make secure three–year tenancies the norm. There are particular pressures in London, so we will look at giving the Labour mayor Sadiq Khan powers to offer renters in the capital extra security.

We will also reverse the cruel decision to abolish housing benefit for 18 to 21–year–olds.

Social care is in crisis. The Conservatives have cut £4.6 billion from social care, despite rising demand. Around 1.2 million older people have care needs that are going unmet.

A Labour government will immediately lay the foundations of a National Care Service for England, alongside our NHS.

We will put an extra £8 billion into social care over the lifetime of the next parliament, with an additional £1 billion for the first year. This will allow us to end the scandal of 15–minute visits and provide care workers with paid travel time and access to training.

Labour will also increase the carer's allowance by £11 a week to the level of jobseeker's allowance.

Labour will scrap university tuition fees entirely and lift the debt burden from future graduates' shoulders. We will legislate to end fees altogether from the 2018 academic year and write off the first year of loans for students planning to start university this September.

As well as abolishing tuition fees, Labour will restore the maintenance grants the Conservatives abolished in 2016 and, under our transformative plan for a free National Education Service, we will scrap college fees for adult learners.

We urgently need to tackle the shortage of affordable homes in this country. Everyone deserves a decent home but, for far too long, we have failed to build enough houses to make that a reality.

The Liberal Democrats will double the rate of house-building to 300,000 new homes a year. Where the market doesn't deliver, we will step in and use government direct commissioning to get them built. We'll make sure that at least a third of these are affordable, energy-efficient homes, so that we have 500,000 more affordable homes by 2022.

We'll also give local authorities and housing associations the power to borrow more to build the council and social housing communities badly need.

As well as the lack of affordable homes, one of the biggest challenges facing first-time buyers is saving enough for a deposit. We'll take that out of the equation by introducing a new 'Rent to Own' model, whereby your monthly rent payments steadily acquire you an increasing stake in the property, until you own it outright after 30 years.

There are other steps we need to take to bring an affordable home within reach for everyone, including giving councils the power to double council tax on second homes, conducting thorough leasehold reforms and tackling land banking by charging developers council tax on homes not completed after three years.

As well as being disastrous for jobs, the economy and our public services, the extreme form of Brexit being pursued by Theresa May could also jeopardise many of the rights and protections we enjoy as workers and consumers. Many of those protections are currently based on EU law and the judgments of the European Court of Justice. The Liberal Democrats will fight to ensure that consumer rights are not undermined by Brexit.

The truth is that we don't yet know what Brexit will look like. The decisions Theresa May makes in these negotiations will affect the life of every single person in our country for decades to come. That's why we think you should have the final say on the Brexit in a referendum. And if you don't like that deal, you should have the choice to remain in the EU. It's about giving you your choice about your future.

It's important that, at school, we prepare young people for the big decisions they'll have to make throughout their lives regarding their finances. I've long supported financial literacy's place on the curriculum – before I became leader of the Liberal Democrats, I was a member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Financial Education for Young People – and am glad that we put it there in coalition government.

Of course, the quality of financial education relies on the Government giving schools the money they need and valuing our teachers properly. That's why the Liberal Democrats will invest an extra £7 billion in schools and colleges, to make sure funding rises in line with both inflation and pupil numbers. We'll also end the Conservatives' public sector pay freeze, so that teachers finally receive the raises they deserve.

We'll introduce a slimmed-down core curriculum that every state-funded school must teach, including academies and free schools. That core curriculum will include financial literacy, as well as other important life skills such as first aid, mental health education and age-appropriate sex and relationship education.

First and foremost, we must end the inequality between mental health care and the standards we rightly demand for physical health. I'm proud of the strides the Liberal Democrats made towards parity for mental health in coalition. We introduced the first waiting time standards, doubled the number of people receiving talking therapy and secured an extra £1.25 billion for children and young people's services. But, despite that progress, frontline mental health services are still terribly underfunded, and too many people simply don't have access to the care they need.

The Liberal Democrats will ring-fence £1 billion for mental health services from the £6 billion raised by putting an extra 1p on income tax. That £1 billion will be used to increase access to treatment, so that no one has to wait more than six weeks to start therapy for anxiety or depression, as well as to improve emergency care for those experiencing a mental health crisis.

But we also need to understand and tackle the link between mental ill-health and financial difficulties. We need to bring down the particular barriers many people with mental ill-health face when it comes to accessing bank accounts and other financial services. The Liberal Democrats will act to tackle financial exclusion, including by making it a key objective of the Financial Conduct Authority. In addition, the practice of charging patients for letters confirming to creditors that they have mental ill-health – a practice that only serves to exacerbate these problems – must end.

For too many people, it's not just home ownership that's out of reach, but even the prospect of renting a home of their own. More than a third of people in their 20s now live with their parents – and the need for a sizeable deposit is a significant barrier to renting. The Liberal Democrats will establish a new Help to Rent scheme that will offer government-backed tenancy deposit loans to first-time renters under 30, of up to £1,500 outside London and £2,000 in London. We'll also remove another unfair barrier to renting by banning lettings fees for tenants, something we've been campaigning on extensively.

Too many people who rent privately get a bad deal. We will raise the minimum standards that landlords have to meet, and give tenants more security by promoting longer tenancies of three years or more. We'll also protect tenants against rogue landlords, through mandatory licensing and access to a database of rogue landlords and property agents.

Our care system is in crisis. The Liberal Democrats would invest an extra £2 billion into social care services a year, funded by our 1p rise in income tax rates. We'll also establish a cross-party health and care convention to integrate the NHS and social care and put them on a sustainable financial footing for the future.

We are strongly opposed to Theresa May's heartless dementia tax, which would see elderly people having to sell their homes when they die to pay for care. Instead, we will cap care costs at £72,000 and take on the recommendations of the Dilnot Commission.

We also need to support the millions of people around the country who care for others. The Liberal Democrats will raise the amount people can earn before losing carer's allowance from £110 to £150 a week, and reduce the number of hours' care per week required to qualify. We'll also introduce a carer's passport that will make sure carers' rights are respected in the NHS, including as flexible visiting hours and access to support.

Our priority is to make sure that Britain's world-class universities are open to all, no matter their background. The Liberal Democrats will reinstate maintenance grants for the poorest students, so that living costs are not a barrier to going into higher education.

We'll also reinstate bursaries for student nurses. The Conservative Government's short-sighted decision to cut them has led to a drastic fall in the number of people applying to study nursing, at a time when we desperately need more nurses. The Liberal Democrats will reverse it.

Finally, we'll conduct a comprehensive review of university finance, with a focus on increasing access, widening participation and improving quality. We'll make sure there is no more retrospective raising of rates, or selling-off of loans to private companies.

We should all have a safe, affordable, secure and warm place to call home and the Green Party would take action to give renters a fair deal, make social housing widely available and bring the housing market under control. We would do this in part by ending mass sales of council houses and scrapping Right to Buy at discounted prices.

To help first-time buyers we would aim for house price stability, getting rid of buy-to-let tax breaks, and backing community-led approaches to building affordable homes. We'd also lift the local authority borrowing cap to facilitate building 100,000 affordable homes a year by 2022.

Green MPs in Parliament would back legislation to stop the sale of new-build developments under leasehold. The practice of property developers using leasehold to rip people off should be stopped with freehold and commonhold used in their place, as appropriate.

The Green Party supported the Remain campaign and continue to believe that membership of the EU makes our future more hopeful and secure. We will demand that the terms of the final deal are closely scrutinised and a ratification of the final deal including an option to remain. Nobody voted to tear up our consumer protections and if these are not part of any Brexit deal, we should have the democratic right to stay part of the EU. We do not accept that either a "hard" Brexit or an exit from the EU without a deal is in the interests of the British people. We will be actively campaigning to safeguard jobs, uphold basic rights, and put environmental protection and consumer rights at the heart of any future trade deals. We'd very much support the creation of a consumer-focused group working across departments to embed consumer and other rights in the Brexit negotiations.

Caroline Lucas, Green MP from 2010-17 and candidate in this election, has led the parliamentary campaign for personal, social, health and economic education to be made compulsory. There has been some recent legislative success following this campaign, but it now must be implemented. Green MPs in Parliament would work hard to ensure that economic and financial education for all young people would be implemented by 2019 at the latest, and that teachers get high-quality ongoing training in this vital subject.

Green MPs would bring mental health care in line with physical health care and ensure people experiencing mental health crises are supported close to their home and support networks – and we will always vote for a fairer tax system that helps those at the bottom to get out of debt, and onto a secure financial footing.

More and more of us are in the private rented sector and the Green Party wants to make renting more affordable by ensuring more homes are built to keep pace with demand. We'd give renters real security with a living rent for all, through rent controls, and more secure tenancies for private renters. We would end letting fees and mandatory licensing for all landlords, as well as supporting the development of renters' unions to give tenants a voice.

We would work towards bringing social care into the public sector and integrated with the NHS, starting with a major investment in social care for the elderly and all those who need it. 2015/16 state expenditure on adult social care was £17 billion in England, with an estimated £7.4 billion spent by those funding their own care.

Greens would invest at least £7.5 billion a year to deliver universal free social care. This could be funded by scrapping pension tax relief for example, which could generate just over £7 billion a year, and reforms to inheritance tax. We would also invest in significantly increasing the carer's allowance in recognition of the hard and vital work those who care do.

Education is a right not a commodity to be bought and sold, and we need a level playing field so everyone has the chance to go to university or college. We would get rid of tuition fees and reinstate maintenance grants with immediate effect.