Manifesto

The detailed programme of the United Kingdom Justice Party, an independent think-tank: what it believes, turned into specific and costed proposals.

1. Borders and immigration

Small boats

• End small-boat crossings. Border Force and the Royal Navy, under a single command, intercept every boat, and everyone aboard is brought safely ashore, as the law of the sea requires. No one who arrives by boat, or by any other illegal route, is allowed to stay or to claim asylum here: they are held and returned to France, the safe country they crossed from. When crossing no longer gets anyone into Britain, the boats stop.
• A full returns agreement with France, so that everyone who crosses can be sent back, not a few hundred a year. Britain funds French patrols and cooperates with France on security and defence; that cooperation is made conditional on France taking back those who set off from its shores. Anyone France will not accept is removed to a safe third country.
• If France will not cooperate, Britain polices its own waters. The money now paid for French patrols goes instead to Border Force and the Royal Navy, patrolling British waters up to the boundary with France and intercepting every boat that enters them.

Asylum

• Proper channels only: asylum is claimed through capped, safe routes applied for from abroad, within the limit Parliament sets each year.
• An end to asylum hotels within twelve months of taking office, not by the end of a decade. Communities have been made to absorb them without being consulted, and trust in their safety has suffered for it.
• In their place, secure reception centres on government land, sited away from towns and residential areas, with a residence requirement and curfew while a claim is decided, so that the authorities know where every applicant is. Faster decisions and removals mean far fewer people in them than are in hotels today.
• Fewer people needing accommodation at all: asylum claims decided within a fixed statutory timetable, and those refused removed promptly.
• No site opened without consulting the local council and publishing its safety arrangements; incidents at and around every site recorded and published.
• Claims decided on site: caseworkers, interview rooms and remote tribunal hearings in every centre, so that people are decided where they are housed and removed from where they are housed.
• Anyone charged with a serious offence while their claim is pending is held; anyone convicted has the claim refused and is removed.

Removals and deportation

• Everyone in the UK illegally is removed, including those who have overstayed their visas.
• Deportation at scale. An estimated 700,000 to 900,000 people lived in the UK without the right to be here in 2017, on the Pew Research Center’s revised estimate, the latest available. Removals rise to at least 100,000 a year by the third year of the Parliament, at least 425,000 in all, against about 31,000 voluntary returns and fewer than 10,000 enforced returns a year now. Paid voluntary return is offered first; those who do not take it are detained and removed. With no right to work, rent, bank or claim benefits, staying stops being an option.
• Deportation of foreign nationals convicted of serious offences. The UK Borders Act 2007 already requires it for sentences of twelve months or more; the threshold should be lower, and the routes that block removal in practice should be closed.
• On the European Convention on Human Rights, three steps, in order. First, Parliament legislates so that the removal of those with no right to be here proceeds under UK law. Second, the UK works with allied states to change how the Convention is applied in migration cases, building on the declaration adopted by all 46 member states of the Council of Europe in May 2026. Third, if the Strasbourg court still prevents those removals, the UK leaves the Convention, and rights are protected in UK law and decided by UK courts.

Legal migration

• Net migration at or below zero: arrivals no greater than departures, and fewer arrivals than departures is welcome. An annual cap, voted on by Parliament, published and enforced, brings net migration down from 171,000 in 2025 over the Parliament.
• Work visas only for the skilled and the wealthy: within the cap, places go first to skilled workers in occupations Britain is short of, to exceptional talent, and to investors. Recruitment from abroad for low-paid work ends wherever British workers can be trained to do it.
• A seasonal agricultural route, the one exception to the rule on low-paid recruitment and kept outside the cap because its workers leave: up to six months, no dependants, no path to settlement, the employer answerable for departure, and a quota that falls every year as farms mechanise and recruit at home.

Settlement and citizenship

• Settlement closed to new arrivals. Everyone who already holds indefinite leave to remain keeps it. Those who arrive from now on come on visas renewed every five years on strict conditions, and the only route to permanent status is British citizenship.
• Citizenship earned: a longer qualifying period, proven English, and knowledge of how the UK is governed.

2. Tax: low, simple, enforced

• Abolish the “£100,000 trap”, where the withdrawal of the personal allowance creates a 60% marginal rate on income between £100,000 and £125,140. It penalises doctors, engineers and senior staff, and is the first thing a skilled newcomer notices.
• End tax rises by stealth. Thresholds frozen until 2031 raise more from more people every year without a vote. Once the savings set out under how it is paid for are proven, thresholds rise with prices again; until then, any freeze is voted on by name.
• Wealth welcome when it builds here: a new investor visa, requiring substantial investment in productive British businesses and strict checks on where the money came from. The UK has had no investor visa since 2022; Greece, among others, ties residence to investment. Investors pay tax on the same rules as everyone else, and count within the annual migration cap.
• Simpler tax for small firms, so honest businesses are not undercut by dishonest ones, and a larger share of HMRC's effort aimed where most of the unpaid tax is.

3. Cost of living

• Tax: no rises by stealth, and the “£100,000 trap” abolished (section on tax).
• Energy: no new subsidy contracts for wind and solar added to household bills, where policy costs already make up about 9% of a typical electricity bill; the Renewables Obligation taken off household bills for good, the quarter still charged removed and the three-quarters the government has lifted only until 2029 kept off; data centres paying their own grid costs; and security of supply from nuclear and the North Sea (section on energy).
• Water: companies were allowed to raise average bills in England and Wales by 36% before inflation between 2025 and 2030, including those polluting rivers and seas, and five, among them Thames Water, have since been provisionally allowed to raise them further. Any company failing its legal duties pays no dividends and no bonuses, building on the bonus bans already imposed on six firms for 2024–25, and directors are personally liable for serious breaches.
• Water companies that persistently fail are placed into special administration: the state takes temporary control, shareholders and lenders bear the losses rather than the taxpayer, and the company is returned to the market once it is fixed.
• Housing: more homes, and less added demand (section on housing).
• Motoring: fuel duty frozen, and roads repaired to a published standard (section on transport).

4. Families

The birth rate

• Britain’s future is its own children. England and Wales recorded 1.39 children per woman in 2025, a record low, and Scotland 1.23, the lowest since records began; births in England and Wales fell to their lowest since 1977. With net migration at or below zero, tomorrow’s workers and taxpayers are the children of British families today.
• Homes first. Research across countries finds that affordable housing, childcare and the ability to combine work and family do more for family life than cash payments, which mostly change when people have children rather than how many. The housing commitments in this manifesto are family policy as much as housing policy.

Tax and benefits

• Support for children follows work. The restored two-child limit applies to benefits; the help that working families receive through the tax and childcare systems is not limited by how many children they have.
• Child benefit made fair. It is now clawed back when one parent earns £60,000 to £80,000, however little the other earns and however many children they have. The charge moves to a household basis, and its thresholds rise with prices. Child benefit is £27.05 a week for a first child.

Childcare

• Childcare kept and made flexible. The 30 hours of funded childcare for working parents in England is kept, and grandparents caring for their own grandchildren can register through a simple route so that the funding can follow the family’s choice.
• The childcare cliff edge ended. A family loses all 30 hours of funded childcare the moment one parent earns £1 over £100,000, the same trap the tax section abolishes for income tax. The entitlement is instead withdrawn gradually above £100,000, which analysis finds would more than pay for itself.

5. Defence

Spending and equipment

• Defence spending of at least 3% of national income by the end of the Parliament, sooner than the current government plans, and the NATO commitment of 3.5% by 2035 met in full.
• Paid for first from the foreign aid budget, cut to emergency relief alone: Britain's interests first.
• British-built equipment first, so that defence spending sustains British shipyards, steel and engineering.

Veterans

• Veterans: no repeat investigation or prosecution of those who served in Northern Ireland unless a senior judge rules that there is new and compelling evidence. The legislation replacing the Legacy Act is amended to say so.
• Veterans given priority in social housing, through the contribution rule set out under housing, and guaranteed access to mental health care.

6. Welfare and work

Who welfare is for

• Welfare protects, properly and without apology, those who genuinely cannot provide for themselves: pensioners, carers, and people unable to work through illness or disability.
• Pensions: the triple lock kept for this Parliament, followed by an independent review of how the state pension should rise in the next, because its long-term cost is highly uncertain. The state pension age rises to 67 by 2028, as already legislated.
• Benefits are for British citizens and those who already hold indefinite leave to remain. Those arriving on visas from now on become eligible on becoming British citizens.
• Refugees, who arrive only through capped, safe and legal routes, may work from the day they arrive and receive basic support in kind, a place in a reception centre and essentials, until they can support themselves; cash benefits wait until they become citizens. No one is left destitute.

Contribution

• The contribution principle: entitlements weighted towards a person's National Insurance record.
• Caring counts as contributing: time spent caring for someone is credited to a person's record as if it were paid work.

Work and the cost of welfare

• A work requirement for able-bodied adults of working age, with real support to meet it.
• Verification that can tell genuine need from ability to work: face-to-face assessment for long-term incapacity claims, regular reassessment, and firm penalties and recovery for fraud. Checks are targeted at claims, not at the private affairs of every citizen.
• Bring the cost of sickness benefits under control. Spending on working-age incapacity benefits is forecast to pass £91bn a year by 2029–30, and PIP, the main disability benefit, is set to roughly double. The reforms above aim to bring that down by £3bn to £6bn a year by the end of the Parliament. Pensions are not touched.
• The two-child limit restored. Its removal in April 2026 costs about £3bn a year by 2029–30; families should be able to plan on what they earn, as families in work already do.

Employment law

• The Employment Rights Act 2025 repealed. It makes every new hire a greater risk: from January 2027, protection from unfair dismissal after six months rather than two years, with no cap on compensation, and from 2027 a duty to offer guaranteed hours to zero-hours and low-hours workers. The government puts its cost to employers at £1bn a year, a figure the British Chambers of Commerce calls “likely to be a massive underestimate”. It arrives as vacancies fall to their lowest level since 2014, outside the pandemic, after youth unemployment reached its highest level since 2014 earlier this year, and with payrolled jobs falling, particularly in hospitality and retail, where the young and the low-paid find their first jobs. The law as it stood before the Act is restored, including the 2016 rules on strikes set out below. The Fair Pay Agreement for care workers is kept, by separate legislation, because care pay must rise as recruitment from abroad ends.
• The 2016 rules on strikes restored. A strike needs a turnout of at least half of those balloted and, in important public services such as health, education, fire, transport, border security and nuclear decommissioning, the support of at least 40% of all those entitled to vote; 14 days’ notice to the employer; a mandate that lasts six months; and a supervisor for every picket. Ballots are by post, as they have been since 1993. The Employment Rights Act 2025 removed the 40% requirement, cut notice to ten days, doubled mandates to twelve months, abolished picket supervisors and introduced electronic balloting, and it repeals the 50% turnout threshold from a date not yet set. A strike that closes a hospital ward or a school should carry the clear support of those who strike.

7. Policing

Priorities

• Police time on the crimes that harm people: violence, burglary, theft, fraud and drug dealing.
• Visible neighbourhood policing restored: 5,000 more warranted neighbourhood officers than the government currently plans.
• Lawful speech is not a police matter, as set out under free speech.

Powers and accountability

• Officers backed when they use lawful powers, including stop and search, arrest and reasonable force, with clear legal protection when they act in good faith.
• Misconduct investigations held to a fixed time limit: vexatious complaints dismissed quickly, real misconduct dealt with firmly and in public.
• Body-worn cameras switched on for every use of force, which protects officers and the public alike.

Money laundering on the high street

• Money laundering on the high street pursued without let-up. The National Crime Agency estimates that £1bn of criminal cash a year is laundered through high-street businesses such as barbers, vape shops, mini-marts and sweet shops. Its national operation against them, Operation Machinize, has led to more than 950 arrests, yet it runs in occasional phases, and the government’s new High Street Organised Crime Unit has £30m over three years. The operation is made permanent: police, HM Revenue and Customs, Immigration Enforcement and trading standards work as one team in every force area, and every force publishes, each quarter, the premises inspected, the arrests made and the money recovered.
• Trading standards rebuilt. Some areas have fewer than one officer per 100,000 people. 1,000 more trading standards officers are recruited, and the proceeds of crime confiscated in high-street cases stay in full with the teams that recovered them, rather than the share of up to half returned today, so that enforcement increasingly pays for itself.
• Shops that break the law closed, and kept closed. Premises found selling illegal goods, employing people illegally or unable to account for their takings can be closed by court order for up to six months, as premises used for antisocial behaviour can be today. The order runs with the premises, not the company, so that it binds any new occupier and the landlord who lets to them: a shop cannot close on Friday and reopen under a new name on Monday. Directors of a business closed in this way are disqualified from running another, and Companies House identity checks are enforced so that the same people cannot return behind a new name.
• HM Revenue and Customs uses the information it already holds, such as card takings set against declared cash, to find businesses whose takings are implausible for their trade, and inspects them. The checks are on businesses, not on the private affairs of citizens.

8. Justice

• Trial by jury protected in full. The jury provisions of the Courts and Tribunals Bill, which would end jury trials for either-way offences likely to carry a sentence of three years or less and remove the right to choose a jury, are opposed and, if enacted, repealed. The right to be judged by one's fellow citizens is the oldest check on the power of the state, and the legal profession stands against its removal.
• The Crown Court backlog of more than 80,000 cases cleared without taking juries away: Crown Court sitting days, uncapped since February 2026, kept uncapped until it is cleared, and existing courtrooms used to their full capacity within the courts budget already set.
• Foreign prisoners deported first. 10,134 foreign nationals were held in custody in June 2026, 12% of all prisoners; every one removed is a place freed at no building cost.
• The prison building programme delivered on time. England and Wales held about 86,000 prisoners in June 2026, and the prisons have run at close to full capacity for years. The building programme is behind schedule: the National Audit Office found the commitment to 20,000 new places by the mid-2020s unrealistic.
• Victims' rights in law: to be told when an offender is released, and a statutory right to challenge any decision not to prosecute.

9. Grooming gangs: justice for the victims

• Every perpetrator pursued and prosecuted, however long ago the crimes were committed, and foreign nationals convicted of them deported.
• Those who failed the victims held to account. Police officers, council officials and others who ignored, dismissed or covered up abuse face misconduct proceedings, prosecution for misconduct in public office where the evidence supports it, removal from office, and forfeiture of pensions where the law allows.
• No one protected by fear of being called racist, which the national audit by Baroness Casey found had stopped authorities acting.
• The national inquiry chaired by Baroness Longfield supported to its conclusion, and its findings acted on in full.
• Specialist support for survivors, and the right to have cases that were dropped re-examined.
• Every similar case met with the same treatment. Wherever children are exploited by organised groups and those in authority fail them, whoever the abusers and wherever it comes to light, the same pursuit of the perpetrators, the same accountability for those who failed the victims and the same support for survivors apply. This is the standard, not a single exception.

10. Self-defence

• Your home is yours to defend. Where someone has forced entry to your home, you may use whatever force is necessary to remove the threat. Today the law protects a householder only if the force used was reasonable in the circumstances as they believed them to be, and not “grossly disproportionate”; the UKJP would not ask a family woken by an intruder to measure their response.
• Beyond forced entry, the stronger householder standard extends to anyone defending against an intruder on their own property, including gardens, outbuildings and farms, and at their place of work, including shops, pubs and businesses.
• No arrest where the evidence clearly shows someone defending their home or business against an intruder. Where investigation is needed, it is concluded within 28 days, not left hanging for months.
• Self-defence spray legal for adults, sold as an approved product, and recommended to women as a means of protecting themselves. It is now a prohibited weapon under section 5 of the Firearms Act 1968, punishable by up to ten years in prison. Misuse of a spray to commit or threaten a crime is punished severely, and anyone convicted of violence is barred from buying one.
• Criminals cannot sue the people they were committing a crime against, or anyone who lawfully stopped them, for anything that happens while they commit it. Unlawful force by the police remains answerable, as accountability requires.

11. Free speech and the freedom to speak up

Speaking up

• Speak up without fear. Anyone who reports a crime or a safeguarding concern in good faith is protected in law, whatever the ethnicity, religion or background of the person reported. No one may be disciplined, dismissed, investigated or recorded as the subject of a hate complaint for making such a report.
• Act without fear. A public official who fails to act on a report because of the ethnicity or religion of those involved, or for fear of being called racist or bigoted, commits misconduct. The national audit by Baroness Casey found that this fear had stopped authorities acting on the abuse of children.
• Facts stated plainly. The ethnicity and nationality of offenders are recorded in every criminal case and published. Baroness Casey found them unrecorded for two-thirds of grooming gang perpetrators, and a fact that is not recorded cannot be discussed honestly.

Lawful speech

• Opinion is not a crime. Police made more than 12,000 arrests in 2023 under laws against “grossly offensive” messages, while convictions under them have fallen. The offence of sending a grossly offensive message is repealed; threats, harassment, incitement to violence and indecent images remain offences.
• Hate crime on evidence, not perception. An offence is currently recorded as a hate crime if the victim or any other person perceives it to be motivated by hostility. It is recorded as one only where there is evidence of hostility.
• No record of lawful speech. The non-crime hate incident system is being replaced after police leaders found it had undermined free speech. Under whatever replaces it, no record of lawful speech is kept against anyone’s name.
• No one sacked for lawful opinion. Lawful views expressed outside work are not grounds for dismissal or discipline.

Online safety

• The Online Safety Act reformed, not repealed. Its duties to remove child sexual abuse material, to stop the grooming of children, and to act against terrorism and threats of violence are kept and enforced in full. The internet must be no refuge for those who prey on children.
• Lawful speech left alone. A platform must now treat a post as illegal wherever there are merely “reasonable grounds to infer” that it is, a test that obliges platforms to remove lawful content in order to be safe. The test becomes whether the content is manifestly illegal. Anyone whose lawful post is removed, or whose account is suspended for it, is entitled to have it restored on appeal within seven days, and Ofcom publishes each year how much lawful content was removed and restored.
• Private messages stay private. The power in the Act to require companies to scan private messages, which ministers said would not be used until it was “technically feasible”, is repealed. Private communications are examined only under a warrant naming a suspect, as for any other interception.
• Age checks without identity checks. Pornography sites continue to verify that users are adults, but no method may require a user to hand over identity documents that are kept, or create any record linking a person to what they view; age estimation and single-use tokens are used instead. Age checks may not become a digital identity by another route, as set out under liberty.
• Proportionate for small sites. Community forums, clubs, charities and small businesses with fewer than one million users in the UK a month, unless they are aimed at children or host pornography, are freed from written risk assessments and Ofcom’s codes of practice. They keep the duty to remove illegal content promptly once told of it, and a route for complaints.
• Ofcom answerable to Parliament. Its codes of practice take effect only when approved by a vote of both Houses, and every duty in the Act is subject to the five-year renewal set out under liberty.

The BBC

• Not paying the licence fee becomes a civil matter, not a crime. Evasion has been the offence for which women are most often prosecuted: 72% of those prosecuted in 2017 were women. No one should acquire a criminal record for failing to pay for a broadcaster. Unpaid fees are pursued as a civil debt, with a capped penalty.
• The licence fee frozen at £180, with no household levy, broadband charge or other new tax put in its place.
• Editorial failures answered for. Where the BBC breaches its own standards or Ofcom’s code, a named executive answers for it in public, and every upheld complaint and Ofcom finding is published with the action taken. The BBC’s director-general and head of news resigned in November 2025 over a misleading edit of a presidential speech, and Ofcom found a serious breach in a documentary whose narrator, undisclosed to viewers, was the son of a Hamas deputy minister. A broadcaster funded by compulsion owes the public that account.

12. The NHS

Who the NHS is for

• The NHS stays free at the point of use for British citizens, those who already hold indefinite leave to remain, and those who have paid the Immigration Health Surcharge with their visa. Emergency treatment is never refused to anyone.
• Overseas visitors pay. Charges for non-urgent treatment are collected upfront and unpaid debts are pursued; the National Audit Office found that hospitals recover only around half of what they charge, and later figures suggest less.

Waiting lists

• Failures answered for. Every hospital trust publishes its waiting times against a single national standard, with a named chief executive accountable for them, and persistent failure means that chief executive is replaced. The waiting list stood at 7.33 million in July 2026.

Staff

• Train our own. Medical school places reach 15,000 a year by 2029/30, two years sooner than the current plan, with nursing places expanded alongside. Today 24% of registered nurses trained overseas.
• Doctors and nurses whose training is publicly funded, about £220,000 for a medical degree, work in the NHS for five years after qualifying or repay part of the cost.
• Doctors and nurses are a named priority within the migration cap until domestic training meets the NHS's needs, and the priority then ends. Care work, which is lower-paid, follows the rule for all low-paid work: recruitment from abroad ends wherever British workers can be trained to do it. Care workers' pay is set through the national Fair Pay Agreement, kept when the rest of the Employment Rights Act 2025 is repealed, with its first settlement due in April 2028.

13. Housing

Affordability

• Homes people can afford. The median home in England costs 7.6 times median full-time earnings, and 10.6 times in London, against a long-standing benchmark of five; private rents have risen to an average of about £1,450 a month in England. Success is measured by that ratio falling in every year of the Parliament, to below 7 by its end and on course for 5, and published each year: prices brought down steadily, as earnings outpace them, not through a crash that traps families in negative equity. Since 2021, across England and Wales, earnings have risen 25% and prices 5%, which shows the ratio can fall without prices collapsing.

More homes

• At least 300,000 homes a year in England, the rate the government's own target of 1.5 million requires and has not reached: new homes numbered about 190,000 to 205,000 in 2025–26, on Savills’ estimates. Every council's completions are published each quarter.
• Use it or lose it. The Local Government Association found more than a million homes granted planning permission over the previous decade still unbuilt in 2021. Developers who have not built within three years of permission pay full council tax on each unbuilt home, and councils gain the power to buy the land and build it out.
• Brownfield first: building on previously used land is fast-tracked.
• A local vote on large developments on green fields, of 500 homes or more. A council whose residents vote no must meet its housing numbers on brownfield land instead: you can say no to the field if you say yes to the brownfield.
• Built by British workers: construction trades are part of the adult skills entitlement, so that homes are built by apprentices trained here.

Less added demand

• Stop adding demand faster than homes can be built. Migration has been a major driver of housing demand. National studies reviewed by the Migration Observatory find that immigration has raised house prices, and the effect may be largest in private renting, where most recent arrivals live. Net migration at or below zero is housing policy as well as border policy.

Social housing

• New social housing tenancies for British citizens only. In 2024–25, 11% of new lettings in England, some 30,000 homes, went to households led by a foreign national. Existing tenants keep their homes. Two exceptions follow from the UK’s international commitments and are honoured: Irish citizens, under the Common Travel Area, which gives British citizens the same right in Ireland; and EU citizens settled here before 2021, under the Brexit withdrawal agreement. Those who have served in His Majesty's armed forces are also eligible, whatever their nationality.
• Among those eligible, social housing is allocated by length of local connection and by contribution: years in the area, work, caring and service in the armed forces. No one jumps the queue: those who refuse a reasonable offer go to the back of it. 1.34 million households are on waiting lists, and councils spent a record £2.93bn on temporary accommodation in 2025–26.

14. Energy

Affordable, secure and British

• Energy judged by three tests: is it affordable, is it secure, and does it create British jobs? Net zero targets no longer override those tests.
• Generate Britain's own energy, so that power for homes and industry is not hostage to foreign supply. In 2025 British production met only about 30% of the gas the country used; the rest was imported.

Nuclear

• Nuclear power as the backbone of British electricity. Sizewell C and the first three small reactors at Wylfa are delivered, and then a continuous programme of British-built small reactors follows, so the factories, skills and supply chain are never allowed to disappear again.
• A target of 30% of Britain's electricity from nuclear by 2045, Sweden’s level today, up from 12% in 2025 and above the EU average of 23%. The government's own ambition, 24 GW by 2050, reaches roughly a quarter, five years later.
• Faster, simpler approval for new nuclear: the same safety standards, without the years of process that have made British reactors among the most expensive in the world.
• Great British Energy, the state energy company, refocused on nuclear, with its other spending scaled back.

Oil, gas and wind

• New North Sea oil and gas licences, as the bridge to nuclear: British gas rather than imported gas while the reactors are built. The permanent ban on new licences announced in May 2026 is reversed.
• The North Sea windfall tax ended. The Energy Profits Levy takes producers’ total tax on North Sea profits to 78%, discouraging the very investment in British gas that the bridge to nuclear needs. It is due to expire in March 2030 and then to be replaced by a permanent Oil and Gas Price Mechanism, a 35% tax on revenues above set price thresholds. The levy ends at the first Budget, and the permanent replacement is not introduced: a tax that returns whenever prices rise is a windfall tax made permanent. The ordinary North Sea taxes, corporation tax at 30% and the supplementary charge of 10%, remain.
• Britain's offshore wind stays. Farms already built or contracted keep operating and their contracts are honoured: a country that tears up contracts cannot attract the investment its own nuclear programme needs. New public money goes to nuclear rather than to new wind and solar subsidy contracts.

Net zero and the cost of energy

• The Climate Change Act 2008 is amended, not repealed. The legally binding 2050 net zero date is removed, so that courts can no longer direct energy policy through it. Net zero remains an aim, with 2060 as its target date, the date China has set. Every five-year carbon budget continues to require a vote of Parliament and is now published alongside its cost to households, and the Climate Change Committee remains advisory.
• A carbon price on power stations kept, but what it raises returned to households. The UK-only Carbon Price Support ends in April 2028, as the government has already decided. The emissions trading scheme remains: the trade agreement with the EU commits the UK to a carbon price on electricity, and abandoning it would leave British exports paying the EU's carbon border charge instead of the British Treasury. The scheme raised about £2.4bn in 2025, largely from power stations, which receive no free allowances. In return, the whole cost of the Renewables Obligation, a closed subsidy scheme for older wind, solar and biomass generation, is taken off household bills and paid from general taxation. The government has moved 75% of it off bills until 2029, after which it returns to them; the UKJP moves all of it, permanently, until the scheme's payments end in 2037.
• Deepen and widen the government's electricity relief for manufacturers, since manufacturing cannot compete without affordable power.

15. Industry and investment

Making things in Britain

• Make here what Britain can make competitively, and always make here what it would be a strategic risk to import: food, energy, steel, defence and medicines. That is where the jobs are.
• Welcome foreign investment that builds production in Britain: factories, research and infrastructure. Faster planning decisions for investment that makes things here.
• Critical infrastructure and sensitive technology stay under accountable control, with screening under the National Security and Investment Act 2021 used in full.
• Public money buys British first, wherever trade law allows, and publishes the share it achieves.

Data centres and artificial intelligence

• Britain as Europe's compute capital. The UK is already Europe's largest data centre market, and the demand that artificial intelligence brings must be won here, not lost abroad. What holds it back is power: viable projects face years of waiting for a grid connection, and British industrial electricity costs far more than in France or the United States.
• Data centres free to build their own power, connected directly to their own generation, including small nuclear reactors as they arrive, so that they bypass the grid queue and take load off the network households rely on.
• The grid queue cleared of speculation. Connection offers go to projects with finance and planning in place, and applications that are not progressing lose their place.
• Households never pay for it. Data centres meet the full cost of the grid reinforcement they need.
• Former power stations and industrial sites first, since they already have grid connections and are brownfield land.
• Closed-loop or air cooling required where water is scarce: 84% of proposed UK data centres are planned in areas projected to be water-stressed by 2040.
• Sovereign capacity. Data about British citizens held in the UK under UK law, national security screening applied to foreign ownership of the largest sites, and a share of capacity kept for British research and public services.

16. Farming, food and nature

Food security

• Food security treated as national security, with a target for how much of what Britain eats is grown here.
• Schools, hospitals and the armed forces buy British food first.
• The seasonal agricultural route set out under borders, so that British crops are picked here rather than imported instead.

Standards

• Food that would be illegal to produce on a British farm, such as hormone-fed beef or chlorine-washed chicken, cannot be sold in Britain under any trade deal.
• Every animal stunned before slaughter. The exemption that allows slaughter without stunning for religious reasons is removed, as in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland and Belgium’s Flemish and Walloon regions; the EU’s highest court upheld the Flemish ban in 2020. Meat slaughtered without stunning may still be imported, clearly labelled, for those who want it.

Family farms

• Full relief from inheritance tax restored for working family farms: land that is actively farmed and passed to family who keep farming it pays no inheritance tax, whatever its value. Since April 2026, agricultural property relief has been capped at £2.5m per person, with tax due at an effective 20% above it. Land bought as a tax shelter gets no special treatment.

Nature and rivers

• Environmental targets reviewed, then tracked closely. The Office for Environmental Protection finds that only three of the thirteen targets under the Environment Act 2021 are on track, and that the commitment to protect 30% of land for nature by 2030 is largely off track. Within the first year, every target is reviewed for whether it can be met and what it costs. Those that are kept are tracked closely: each has a named minister responsible, progress is published every year target by target, and a minister whose target falls off track explains to Parliament what will be done.
• Fines restore the rivers that were polluted. Every fine paid by a water company is spent restoring the river it damaged, rather than being absorbed into general spending. Storm overflows spilled 291,492 times in 2025, a fall owed in large part to a dry year rather than to repairs.
• A water regulator with teeth. The replacement of Ofwat by a single water regulator is supported, and the directors of companies that pollute are personally liable, as set out under the cost of living.
• Farmland stays farmed. Nature schemes pay farmers to restore hedgerows, field margins and wetlands alongside growing food, and no rewilding scheme takes the best and most versatile farmland out of production.

17. Skills and education

Schools

• Schools built on knowledge and firm discipline, with compulsory civics: how Parliament, the courts and elections work.

Special educational needs

• Support for children with special educational needs given earlier, in ordinary schools, so that families do not have to fight for it. Education, Health and Care Plans, now held by almost 720,000 children and young people, more than double a decade ago, are kept for those with complex needs. No child loses support already in their plan without a fresh assessment by someone independent of the council’s budget.
• Specialist places built close to home. Home-to-school transport cost councils £2.3bn in 2023–24, up 70% since 2015–16, much of it carrying children with special needs to distant placements. Every county gains the special school places it needs, so that children are taught near home and the money goes on teaching rather than taxis.
• Special needs funded nationally, not from council tax. Deficits on special needs budgets would have left most county councils at risk of effective bankruptcy, and the government has now accepted that the cost moves to central budgets from 2028. Until then the OBR expects a further £8.7bn of deficits to build up, which is why support must come earlier and closer to home.

Skills and apprenticeships

• An adult skills entitlement: every adult can train for a qualification in a trade Britain is short of. It is funded by ring-fencing the Immigration Skills Charge that employers already pay to recruit from abroad, so hiring abroad pays for training at home.
• Apprenticeships given the same standing, funding and prestige as university.

Universities

• Free speech duties in universities enforced in full.

18. Young people and work

• A first job before a high wage. Youth minimum wage rates are kept, and the plan to merge the 18–20 rate into the adult rate is stopped. The 18–20 rate stays at about 85% of the adult rate, where it is now, and the rate for 16–17-year-olds and apprentices stays separate. The Low Pay Commission's first test for youth rates becomes whether young people are getting jobs. 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 are not in work, education or training, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned that rising wage floors and taxes may reduce opportunities for them. The 18–20 rate rose to £10.85 an hour in April 2026.
• The Saturday job brought back. Employment among 16–17-year-olds has fallen from 48% in the late 1990s to about 25% by 2017–19. Council-by-council work permits for 13–16-year-olds are replaced by a single national online registration and one national set of rules on hours. With the Employment Rights Act 2025 repealed, part-time, weekend and holiday jobs for under-18s carry no guaranteed-hours duty, and small firms taking on a teenager face simpler insurance and paperwork.
• Work experience without risk to employers. Unpaid work experience of up to four weeks for young people still in education is made clearly lawful, and structured work experience is restored in every secondary school, so that no one leaves school without having seen a workplace.
• Employer National Insurance stays as it is, including the existing relief on earnings of employees under 21.

19. National identity

• The Union Flag and the national flags of England, Scotland and Wales, the Cross of St George, the Saltire and the Red Dragon, flown with pride. Public bodies and councils are free to fly them, and none may remove them for fear of giving offence.
• British law and British customs come first. No other legal or religious code has authority in the United Kingdom, and no religious court or council’s ruling has legal force. Those who come here adapt to British ways, not the other way round.
• Britain’s Christian heritage recognised and protected as part of the national story: the established Church of England and the monarch’s place within it, Christmas and Easter as national holidays, and collective worship in schools that is broadly Christian in character, as the law already requires.
• Faces shown in public. Covering the face in a public place is banned, including the burqa and the niqab, with exceptions for health, safety, weather and celebration, as France has done since 2011. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the French law in 2014. In a free society people meet one another face to face.
• British citizenship is shared by all who earn it, whatever their background: the same law, the same language and the same flag.

20. Liberty

The citizen and the state

• No national identity card or digital ID, mandatory or otherwise. The government announced in July 2026 that it will scrap the scheme it proposed in 2025; the UKJP would legislate so that it cannot return without a vote of Parliament.
• Every new power the state takes lapses after five years unless Parliament votes to renew it, including the powers in this manifesto.

Sex and gender

• Two sexes. There are two biological sexes, male and female, and in law a person’s sex is their biological sex. The Supreme Court held in 2025 that this is what sex means in the Equality Act 2010; the same meaning applies throughout the law.
• Gender is a personal matter, with no legal standing. Everyone is free to describe themselves as they wish, but a declared gender does not change a person’s sex in law. The Gender Recognition Act 2004 is repealed and no further certificates are issued. Those who already hold one keep the protection of their privacy that the Act gives them.
• Free to live as you choose. Adults may dress, present and live as they please. That is their own affair, and no one is penalised for it.
• Separate facilities for men and women kept. Male and female toilets and changing rooms exist for protection, above all of women and girls, and are kept wherever they are provided. A unisex facility may be added as a third option, but it never replaces them, and no one is required to provide one. The code of practice in force since August 2026 already requires single-sex facilities to be run by biological sex.
• Women’s sport protected. The female category in competitive sport is for biological women and girls, for fairness and for safety. The governing bodies of football and cricket have already decided this; every sport receiving public money does the same, and may offer an open category to everyone else.
• Pronouns are not a police matter. Using a pronoun someone objects to is not a crime and is not recorded by the police. Harassment and threats remain offences, whoever they are aimed at. A comedy writer was arrested by armed officers in 2025 over posts on this subject; the police later apologised and paid him £25,000.
• Children’s care led by evidence. The Cass Review found the evidence for medical treatment of gender distress in children weak. Care begins with psychological support, and every service publishes its waiting times.
• Puberty blockers only within research. Their use outside research is already banned indefinitely, subject to review in 2027. The clinical trial continues only under independent oversight, and its results are published in full.
• No cross-sex hormones for under-18s. NHS England has proposed that they no longer be routinely prescribed to children. That becomes law: no new prescriptions for anyone under 18. Those aged 16 and 17 who are already receiving them continue under specialist NHS care.
• Schools’ duties put into law. The rules in the statutory guidance in force since September 2026 become law. Parents are always told when their child raises questions about their gender, except where telling them would put the child at risk of serious harm, as in any safeguarding case. No school begins a child’s social transition, whether a change of name, pronouns or dress. Toilets, changing rooms and sport are separate for boys and girls.

21. Democracy

• A proportional voting system for the House of Commons that keeps a local MP for every constituency, such as the additional member system used for the Scottish Parliament. It is put to the people in a referendum before it is introduced, as the last proposed change was in 2011.
• The House of Lords kept as a revising chamber.
• Assisted dying decided by the people. It is a question of conscience on which Parliament has voted both ways: the Commons approved a bill in 2025 by 314 votes to 291, which then ran out of time in the Lords, and rejected its successor by 286 votes to 270 in September 2026; the Scottish Parliament rejected its own bill by 69 votes to 57 in March 2026. The UKJP takes no side. The question is put to the voters of England and Wales in a referendum, on a specific proposal whose safeguards are published in full before the vote, so that people decide on what would actually become law, and Parliament gives effect to the result. Scotland and Northern Ireland, where the criminal law is devolved, decide for themselves.
• Recall by voters. The Recall of MPs Act 2015 allows a recall petition only after a prison sentence, a suspension from the Commons of at least ten sitting days, or a conviction for false expenses claims. Instead, a petition signed by 20% of a constituency's registered voters within eight weeks triggers a by-election, whatever the reason, so that voters, not officials, judge whether an MP has kept the promises they were elected on. British Columbia has run citizen-initiated recall since 1995.
• Parliament votes on the numbers that shape the country: the annual migration cap and every carbon budget, each published with its cost.
• Local votes on large developments on green fields, as set out under housing, and on major council decisions and reorganisations, as set out under local councils.

22. Local councils

Services and council tax

• The basics first. Bins collected, streets kept clean, roads repaired and care delivered: every council sets a published standard for each core service and reports its results against it every quarter, in one national format so that residents can compare their council with its neighbours. Discretionary projects come second to the basics.
• No rise above the limit without a vote. The average Band D council tax in England reached £2,392 in 2026–27, up 4.9% in a year, and ministers allowed seven councils to raise it by up to 9% without asking residents. Those exceptional permissions end: a council that wants to go above the referendum limit must put the rise to its residents.

Council finances

• No gambling with public money. Woking ran up debts of more than £2.1bn on property and regeneration schemes, and Thurrock left itself with a debt of almost £500m, mainly from solar energy investments. The rule against councils borrowing to buy assets for profit, now only a condition of Treasury lending, is put into statute and applies whoever the lender is.
• Failure answered for. Thirty-five councils need £1.5bn of exceptional support from the government in 2026–27. Where a council needs a bailout or declares itself unable to balance its budget, an independent inquiry names those responsible and publishes its findings, and no senior officer receives a pay rise or bonus until the council stands on its own feet. A record 4,733 council staff received total pay and benefits of more than £100,000 in 2024–25.
• Accounts that can be trusted. At the February 2026 deadline, auditors could not give an opinion on about 45% of local bodies’ accounts. Every council’s accounts are audited within a year of the year end, and a council whose accounts cannot be audited two years running is inspected by the new Local Audit Office.
• Every pound visible. The spending over £500 that councils already publish is gathered into one national register, searchable by council, supplier and service, alongside that of departments and quangos.

Local democracy

• Local people decide. Council elections are held on time and never postponed to suit a reorganisation, as ministers planned for 30 areas in 2026 before withdrawing on legal advice. No council is abolished or merged without a local referendum. A petition signed by 5% of local electors triggers a binding local referendum on a major council decision, held alongside scheduled elections wherever possible, and councillors face the same recall as MPs.

23. The Union

• No second independence referendum in this Parliament. The 2014 referendum was described by its own campaigners as a once-in-a-generation vote, and the SNP fell short of a majority at Holyrood in May 2026.
• Northern Ireland fully part of the United Kingdom's internal market, with checks removed on goods that stay in Northern Ireland, including through any agreement with the EU that Parliament approves on the terms set out under Britain in the world.
• The Barnett formula, which sets funding for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, reviewed and replaced with one based on need.
• The institutions that belong to the whole United Kingdom, its flag, armed forces and NHS, treated as shared and not devolved identities.

24. Britain in the world

• The Chagos Islands stay British. The 2025 treaty handing them to Mauritius, at an average of £101m a year for 99 years, is not ratified, and the money is not paid.
• Trade with the EU, not rule by it. Britain aligns with EU rules only where a specific agreement brings a clear trade benefit, agreed case by case and approved by a vote of Parliament. No automatic adoption of future EU law, including under the food and farming agreement now being negotiated.
• Foreign aid cut further and faster, and directed to defence. Beyond the fall to 0.3% of national income the government has already planned, aid is reduced to emergency disaster relief alone, capped in law at 0.05% of national income. The 0.7% target in the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015 is repealed, and aid can never again rise above that ceiling without a vote of Parliament.

25. Transport

Motoring

• Fuel duty frozen. The temporary 5p cut ends in 2027, as already planned, and duty then does not rise with inflation for the rest of the Parliament.
• The ban on new petrol and diesel cars repealed. The government would end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars in 2030, and of new hybrids in 2035, enforced through the zero emission vehicle mandate: a rising share of every manufacturer's new cars must be electric, 33% in 2026 and 80% by 2030, with a fine of £12,000 for every car short of the quota. The mandate and both dates are repealed, for cars and vans alike. Electric vehicles remain welcome and compete on price and merit; what the public drives is decided by the public, not by a sales quota set in Whitehall.
• Subsidies for buying electric vehicles ended. The Electric Car Grant, which takes up to £3,750 off a new electric car and has been extended to 2030 at a cost of £1.95bn, closes to new applications, as do the other purchase grants tied to the mandate. Grants already promised are paid. Public money for charging points and for research continues, because both serve drivers whatever they choose.

Roads

• Roads fixed, and failures answered for. The backlog of local road repairs has reached a record £18.6bn, which would take 12 years to clear. Every council publishes the condition of its roads against a single national standard, in a league table anyone can check.

HS2

• HS2 finished between London and Birmingham, and no further. Its estimated cost now stands at £87.7bn to £102.7bn, with £44.2bn already spent. The government’s own review found that poor oversight, political interference and weak cost control had added an estimated £37bn.
• HS2's contracts subjected to an independent forensic audit. Suspected fraud has already come to light: labour suppliers on the West Midlands section were suspended and referred to HMRC for charging inflated rates, and HS2's own team detected £5.2m of fraud in 2024/25 and recovered only £2.4m. Every overpayment is pursued, evidence of crime goes to the Serious Fraud Office, and firms found to have defrauded the taxpayer are barred from public contracts.

26. Sport and an active nation

• Opportunity, not prohibition. Three in ten adults are obese, and 22% of children by the end of primary school, rising to 29% in the poorest areas. The answer is to make being active easy and affordable at every age, not to ban or restrict what adults choose to eat.
• Every pound of the sugar tax spent on sport. The Soft Drinks Industry Levy, which raised £327m in 2024–25, is ring-fenced in full for grassroots sport and physical activity for all ages: school sport, community clubs, and activity for adults and older people, so that a tax on sugary drinks visibly pays for the country to be active.
• Pools and leisure centres saved first. 500 swimming pools have closed since 2010, and many of those that remain are more than forty years old. Government money for grassroots facilities goes first to reopening and repairing pools and leisure centres, not to new showpiece projects.
• Two hours of PE a week guaranteed in every school, and every child able to swim 25 metres by the end of primary school, with lessons funded where they are not happening. Only 49% of children meet the recommended hour of activity a day.
• School sports halls, pitches and pools opened to the community at weekends. The country already owns them, and they stand empty when school is out.
• Playing fields protected: none sold unless an equal or better facility replaces it locally.

27. Cannabis: legal, licensed, taxed

• Cannabis legal for adults aged 21 and over, sold only through licensed shops and grown only by licensed British growers. The illegal market, estimated in 2018 to be worth £2.5bn a year, becomes a taxed British industry.
• For use at home. Using cannabis in public remains an offence; carrying it in public is legal up to 10g per person, well below the 25g Germany allows.
• A cap of 15% THC on anything sold, and plain packaging with health warnings. The greatest harm comes from high-strength “skunk”, which is linked to a markedly higher risk of psychosis; a legal market can limit strength where the illegal one does not.
• No advertising. Home growing is not permitted, so that the market is regulated, tested and taxed.
• Still offences: sale or supply outside a licence, supply to anyone under 21, use in public, and driving under the influence. “Drug dealing” means criminal supply, and police time moves from possession to the dealers who remain.

28. Leaner government

Savings verified before they are spent

• An independent Office for Public Value, set up in law, reporting to Parliament's Public Accounts Committee and publishing every finding. No saving is claimed until the National Audit Office has verified it: in the United States, a department of government efficiency claimed savings many times larger than independent analysis could find.
• Pay as you save, in law. No tax cut or new spending in this manifesto begins until the savings that pay for it have been verified by the National Audit Office and entered in a public savings register, published every quarter. Forecast savings do not count. If a saving falls short, the next commitment waits and the shortfall is published; nothing is borrowed to fill the gap. Parliament may set the rule aside only by a named vote in a genuine emergency, with the vote and its cost published. Switzerland’s debt brake, approved by 85% of its voters, and Sweden’s spending ceiling show that rules like this hold; the American version failed because Congress routinely exempted its own bills, which is why this one cannot be waived without a public vote.

A smaller state

• Every quango earns its existence. Each of the some 300 arm’s-length bodies is renewed by a vote of Parliament every three years, or it closes. Where a decision belongs to a minister, the body is folded back into its department, so that a named minister answers for it rather than an unelected board.
• A smaller civil service. It has grown to 524,000 full-time equivalent posts even after cuts were announced. It is cut by 30%, some 157,000 posts, over the Parliament, to about 367,000: smaller than in 2016, before a decade of growth. Most of the reduction comes from not refilling back-office posts when staff leave, as some 38,000 a year do; the rest from voluntary exit schemes, without compulsory redundancies. Frontline roles, including Border Force, asylum caseworkers, prison officers, jobcentres and tax compliance, are still filled.
• No golden goodbyes. Every payment on leaving public employment, including redundancy pay, pay in lieu of notice and top-ups to pensions, is capped at £95,000 across the public sector, as it was under regulations Parliament approved in 2020 before the government revoked them in 2021. No senior official leaves a failing body with a payment larger than most families earn in two years.
• Less red tape: for every pound of cost a new regulation puts on business, two pounds of existing cost are removed; overlapping regulators are merged; and a business gives government any piece of information once, not separately to each body that wants it. The government itself aims to cut the paperwork cost of regulation by a quarter, nearly £6bn; the UKJP goes further.

Equality of opportunity

• Equality of opportunity, without positive discrimination. The Public Sector Equality Duty is rewritten so that every public body must not discriminate, and must give every individual an equal opportunity whoever they are. The parts that direct public bodies to treat groups differently are removed: the duties to meet the needs of particular groups, to encourage their participation, and to “foster good relations” between them. Services are designed for individuals, not categories, and no equality impact assessment is required to show that the duty has been met. The specific duties to publish equality objectives and information end, except gender pay gap reporting, which is kept. Reasonable adjustments for disabled people, which put them on an equal footing rather than ahead, are unaffected.
• Every appointment on merit. The positive action provisions of the Equality Act, which allow an employer to prefer one candidate over another because of a protected characteristic, are repealed. No targeted recruitment: no job advertisement, recruitment campaign, training scheme or internship may be addressed to, reserved for or directed at people because of their race, sex, religion or any other protected characteristic, whether in its wording or through the audience it is shown to online. An employer may advertise in any publication or place it chooses, but every advertisement is open to all on the same terms, and every post is filled by the best candidate. Genuine occupational requirements, such as a women’s refuge employing women, are unaffected.
• Dedicated diversity, equality and inclusion posts ended across government departments, quangos and the wider public sector. The civil service alone spent £27m on diversity in a year. Equal treatment is the law, and is the duty of every manager and every court, not of a separate profession.
• Diversity and inclusion reporting by business cut back to the gender pay gap alone. Three obligations end: the equality action plans on the gender pay gap and the menopause, due to become mandatory in 2027, which end with the Employment Rights Act 2025; the ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting the government intends to impose through its Equality (Race and Disability) Bill, which is abandoned, or repealed if it has by then been enacted; and the Financial Conduct Authority’s targets for the sex and ethnicity of listed companies’ boards. Discrimination remains unlawful, and every employer remains answerable for it in the courts. What ends is the obligation to sort employees by race and disability and to publish the result, and to draw up plans on top of the figures. Gender pay gap reporting, required of every employer with 250 or more staff since 2017, is kept: it is established, simple, and tells the public a plain fact without prescribing what a business must do about it. Any business remains free to publish whatever else it chooses.

Waste and fraud

• Every pound visible. Every government department and quango publishes its spending over £500, as councils already must.
• Fraud against the public purse pursued. The National Audit Office estimates that £55bn to £81bn a year is lost to fraud and error across government, including billions in contracts, grants and procurement. A counter-fraud unit matches data across contracts, invoices and payments to find duplicate, inflated and fictitious claims. Its checks are aimed at contracts and claims, never at the private lives of citizens: the Dutch system that did otherwise was struck down in 2020. Firms found to have defrauded the taxpayer are barred from public contracts.

29. How it is paid for

A think-tank that says failures must be answered for should answer for its own sums. Every figure below is taken from an official or independent source and linked to it. Each saving is stated as a cautious range, and none counts money the current government has already claimed.

Where the money comes from, each year

• Benefit fraud and error: £1bn to £1.9bn. DWP overpaid £9.5bn in 2024–25. The range assumes cutting that by a tenth to a fifth through the verification in section 5, beyond what is already planned.
• Asylum, net of enforcement: £1bn to £2.5bn. The Home Office spent £4.36bn on asylum in 2025–26. Once boat arrivals stop and the backlog is decided, the number housed falls by 60% to 80%. Not all of that spending is accommodation and support, and it is already falling, so the saving is taken as £1.6bn to £3.2bn a year. Against that, enforcement costs £0.6bn to £0.7bn a year: extra Border Force and Navy capacity, and returns agreements, which the UK already funds (it paid France £476m over three years for patrols). The saving builds over the Parliament rather than arriving in year one. Detention is counted once, under deportation.
• Working-age welfare: £4bn to £8.5bn, built up over the Parliament. Welfare cost about £334bn in 2025–26, but the largest part is pensions, which are protected, so the saving has to come from working-age benefits. Reassessment, the work requirement and support into work aim to bring sickness and disability spending £3bn to £6bn below its forecast. The government's own attempt at this was scaled back under pressure from its MPs and, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found, now saves nothing this Parliament; the UKJP's figure is in addition to anything it does achieve. Limiting benefits to citizens and those who already hold indefinite leave to remain adds an estimated £1bn to £2.5bn, pending published figures by immigration status. About one in six Universal Credit claims involved a non-British citizen in 2024, but many are EU citizens whose rights are protected by the Brexit withdrawal agreement, so the rule can apply only to people arriving from now on.
• Net zero spending scaled back: £1bn to £2bn. Mainly Great British Energy's non-nuclear budget; the Conservatives estimate scrapping most of it saves £1.6bn a year. Existing wind and solar contracts are honoured, so they are not counted.
• Electric vehicle purchase subsidies ended: £0.3bn to £0.5bn. The Electric Car Grant carries £1.95bn of committed funding to 2029–30, and the government would be expected to renew it. The Conservatives put the saving from ending such subsidies at £3.8bn over ten years. Grants already promised are paid, so the saving begins with new applications.
• Cannabis tax: £0.3bn to £0.6bn once licensed sales begin. The Institute of Economic Affairs estimated in 2018 £690m a year in tax if the legal market took 95% of sales; the range allows for the age limit and strength cap keeping some buyers on the illegal market. Savings in police and court time are not counted.
• Two-child limit restored: £2.3bn to £3bn, the Office for Budget Responsibility's cost of removing it, rising from £2.3bn in 2026–27 to £3bn by 2029–30.
• Foreign prisoners deported: £0.1bn to £0.25bn. Of the 10,134 foreign nationals in custody, about 6,400 are serving sentences. Removing a third to two-thirds of them saves less than the average cost of about £60,000 a place a year, since much of a prison’s cost is fixed.
• Chagos payments not made: £0.12bn to £0.17bn. The 2025 treaty would pay Mauritius £165m a year for the first three years and £120m a year after. The treaty is not ratified and the payments have not begun; under the UKJP they never do.
• Leaner government: £2.5bn to £5bn, built up over the Parliament. About 157,000 fewer civil service posts at a full employment cost of roughly £55,000 each, or £8.6bn a year once complete, salary averaging about £40,000 plus pension and National Insurance, together with quangos closed or merged. Part of the £2.2bn a year the government already expects from its own cut to administrative budgets will come from fewer posts, so the range is set well below the full cost, to count only what goes beyond it, and is counted only as the Office for Public Value’s findings are verified. Leavers not replaced account for most of the cut; the 40,000 to 50,000 posts they do not cover are closed through voluntary exit, at up to 21 months’ pay under the Civil Service Compensation Scheme (one month’s pay a year of service), an estimated £1.2bn to £2.5bn once, with no payment above £95,000.
• Fraud against the public purse: £0.5bn to £1.5bn, built up over the Parliament. The National Audit Office puts losses to fraud and error across government at £55bn to £81bn a year, much of it in tax and benefits, which are counted in other lines; the range assumes recovering a small part of the losses in contracts, grants and procurement, beyond the savings the government’s own counter-fraud programme already claims.
• Diversity posts ended: £0.07bn to £0.4bn. Published estimates of public-sector spending on dedicated diversity roles range from £70m a year to about £427m, on the estimate of Conservative Way Forward. Larger claims, such as £7bn, have not stood up, and are not used here.
• Consultants: £0.2bn to £0.5bn. Government spends between £1.4bn and £2.2bn a year on consultants and has pledged to halve it; Parliament’s spending committee doubts the pledge will be met. The range counts only what goes beyond it.
• Unpaid tax: £1bn to £3bn, on top of the £10bn a year the government already expects from its own measures. The tax gap was first estimated at £46.8bn in 2023–24, since revised upwards, and small businesses accounted for 60% of it.
• Bank of England interest: £0.9bn to £2.5bn. Commercial banks earn interest at Bank Rate on all the reserves created by quantitative easing. Paying nothing on a required minimum, as the European Central Bank does, was estimated in 2023, when Bank Rate was 5.25%, to save £1.3bn at a 1% requirement, rising to £11.5bn at 10%. Bank Rate and the Bank’s bond holdings have both fallen since, and the range is reduced to match. The range assumes a modest requirement, examined first by Parliament's Treasury Committee. See the Commons Library briefing. The saving shrinks as the Bank sells its bonds.

Total: about £15.3bn to £32.3bn a year.

What it pays for

• Abolishing the £100,000 trap: about £4bn a year (Institute for Fiscal Studies).
• The adult skills entitlement: about £0.6bn to £0.7bn a year, by ring-fencing the Immigration Skills Charge (about £559m in 2024–25, before its 32% rise) for domestic training instead of general spending.
• Ending the threshold freeze early: £8bn in 2029–30, about £12bn in 2030–31 (Office for Budget Responsibility). Affordable once the welfare and asylum savings have arrived, which is why it waits until they are proven.

Reallocated, not saved

Foreign aid, cut to emergency relief, is directed to defence. That moves money; it frees none for tax cuts, and it is not counted above. About 18% of today’s aid, some £2.4bn, pays for asylum support inside the UK; that cost moves to the Home Office, where its fall with asylum numbers is already counted in the asylum line.

What the rest of the programme costs, each year

• North Sea windfall tax ended: up to £1.5bn, once, in the final year of the levy, 2029–30, before it was due to expire. Forecast receipts from all oil and gas taxes are falling as North Sea output declines, and the levy is only part of them. Not introducing the permanent replacement costs nothing at the prices forecast, since it applies only when prices are high. Industry analysis finds that reforming the levy now rather than in 2030 would bring £15.7bn more in taxes over ten years, through investment and jobs kept, though part of that comes from the replacement tax the UKJP would not introduce; none of it is counted.
• Referendum on assisted dying: up to £0.08bn, once. The 2011 referendum on the voting system cost just over £75m across the whole United Kingdom; this one covers England and Wales and is held alongside scheduled elections.
• Reception centres: cheaper to run than hotels in total, plus £0.35bn to £0.9bn once to build, including detention. Hotels held 16,021 people at the end of June 2026, at an average of £199 a night, a figure the Home Office says is inflated by paying for rooms left empty as hotels close. Wethersfield runs at about £135 a night when full, so each place is cheaper than a hotel room, and with the boats stopped and decisions made quickly, far fewer places are needed. The cost is in building them, and in running them half-empty: Wethersfield’s set-up costs had risen to £49m by 2024, and the National Audit Office found the last large-sites programme would cost more than hotels overall. So centres are built to the numbers expected, not to today's. Boat arrivals are held for removal, not housed, so centres serve far fewer people. The build range assumes 3,000 to 5,000 places at £30,000 to £80,000 each, plus up to 5,000 more detention places at £50,000 to £100,000 each.
• Deportation at scale: £1.2bn to £2.2bn a year at full pace, plus £0.5bn to £1bn once for 5,000 to 10,000 further detention places. The range assumes the minimum of 100,000 removals a year, and rises with any removals above it, 60% by paid voluntary return at an assumed £4,000 each and 40% enforced at £15,000 to £30,000 each once charter flights, averaging about £5,000 a person between February 2025 and January 2026, detention at about £122 a day, escorts and casework are counted; together with more enforcement officers and returns agreements with the countries people are returned to. Reform UK has claimed a net saving of more than £7bn from 600,000 removals; this estimate is deliberately more cautious. Savings from removals are not counted, beyond those in the asylum line.
• Industrial energy: £0.3bn to £0.6bn. The government's British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme will be worth up to £600m a year from April 2027, cutting eligible firms' electricity bills by up to a quarter. The range is for widening it to more manufacturers or deepening the relief, up to doubling it.
• British-first procurement: £0.3bn to £1.4bn. The public sector spends about £395bn a year on procurement, but trade agreements limit where a British preference can apply. The range assumes a price premium of 5% to 15% on the public food bill beyond the government's current 50% target, and 2% to 5% on £10bn to £20bn of other contracts where a preference is lawful. It is an estimate, and the first thing to be tested.
• Nuclear programme: £1bn to £2.5bn a year of public investment, on top of the £2.5bn already committed to small reactors, to reach 30% of electricity by 2045 rather than a quarter by 2050. As with Sizewell C, much of the cost of each reactor is financed privately and recovered through bills over its working life, rather than paid by the taxpayer up front. The range is an estimate and will be tested against the programme's first contracts.
• Defence to 3%: £7bn to £11bn a year beyond what the aid budget provides. Reaching 3% by 2029–30 needs roughly £13bn to £17bn a year more than the current path of about 2.6%: the Institute for Fiscal Studies puts it at £13bn to £14bn, and the Office for Budget Responsibility at £17.3bn in 2029–30. Cutting aid from the planned 0.3% of national income, about £9.2bn, to emergency relief alone frees about £6bn for defence once the £2.4bn of asylum support now counted as aid has moved to the Home Office. The fall in that asylum cost is counted once, in the asylum line above, not again here.
• NHS training: £0.2bn to £0.5bn a year by the end of the Parliament, for reaching 15,000 medical school places two years early and expanding nursing places. A medical degree costs the taxpayer about £220,000 over five years; the five-year service commitment keeps more of that investment in the NHS. Recovering unpaid charges from overseas visitors is not counted, because no reliable national figure is published.
• Working family farms: £0.05bn to £0.15bn a year. The government expects its whole reform of farm and business reliefs to raise £300m in 2029–30, with up to 185 farm estates a year paying more. Restoring full relief only for land that stays in active family farming costs a small part of that.
• Renewables Obligation off household bills: about £3.1bn a year from 2029–30. The government puts the cost of moving 75% of it at £2.3bn a year, but funds that only until 2028–29, when it would return to bills; the UKJP pays all of it from then on. The cost is broadly matched by what the carbon price raises, and falls as the scheme's payments expire, ending in 2037.
• Fuel duty frozen: £1bn to £2.5bn a year by 2029–30. The 5p cut ends in 2027 as planned; the cost is of not raising duty with inflation from then on, about £1bn in 2027–28 rising to £2bn to £2.5bn by 2029–30, estimated from the forecast of fuel duty receipts and the inflation assumptions in PolicyEngine’s analysis.
• Sport ring-fence: about £0.3bn a year. The £327m the sugar tax raises goes to sport for all ages rather than to general spending.
• Child benefit on household income: about £1.4bn a year by 2029–30, the government’s own costing when it abandoned the same reform in 2024, with a little more for raising the thresholds with prices.
• High-street enforcement: £0.05bn to £0.1bn a year for 1,000 more trading standards officers at £50,000 to £60,000 each all told, together with the Treasury’s share of proceeds confiscated in high-street cases, which is left instead with the teams that recover it. Across all cases, the agencies received £129.6m in 2025–26. The net cost falls as recoveries rise.
• Neighbourhood policing: £0.3bn to £0.35bn. The government plans 13,000 extra neighbourhood personnel, a mix of officers, PCSOs and specials. 5,000 more warranted officers, at about £60,000 to £70,000 each a year, all told.

The order in which savings are spent

Under the pay-as-you-save rule, verified savings are allocated in a fixed order of priority:

• First, immigration: the reception centres, detention places and enforcement that end small-boat crossings, and deportation of those here illegally.
• Second, income: abolishing the £100,000 trap, the fairer child benefit and childcare taper, and the fuel duty freeze.
• Third, public safety: 5,000 more neighbourhood officers, and the enforcement against money laundering on the high street.
• Fourth, defence: rising to 3% of national income by the end of the Parliament, with the foreign aid budget moved to defence from the start.
• Then everything else, as further savings are verified: the Renewables Obligation taken off household bills, the nuclear programme, NHS training, the adult skills entitlement, sport, working family farms, industrial energy relief and British-first buying.
• Last, further tax cuts, including ending the threshold freeze early, only once savings are well ahead.

How it balances

The programme costs about £20.8bn to £30.8bn a year, against savings and new revenue of about £15.3bn to £32.3bn. The four priorities cost £15bn to £21.6bn. In the best case everything is covered, with about £11.5bn left, enough to end the threshold freeze early. In the middle case the four priorities are covered in full, and about £2bn of everything else waits until further savings are verified. In the worst case, with the lowest savings and the highest costs, immigration, income and public safety are still covered in full, and defence, the fourth priority, has about £4.7bn of the £11bn it needs beyond the aid budget; the rise to 3% then takes longer, and everything else waits. These figures were corrected in September 2026 after a check of every source. The largest savings, from welfare, asylum and the civil service, build over the Parliament, so commitments start in the order above as they arrive: none is promised before it is paid for. One-off costs, for building reception centres and detention places, for voluntary exits from the civil service, for ending the North Sea windfall tax a year early and for the referendum on assisted dying, are met from the falling cost of asylum and from the sale of surplus government property, of which a civil service 30% smaller will leave a good deal.

Every commitment here is open to challenge in the Principles & Manifesto category of the forum.