Labour's Electoral Programme (Part 1)

The General Election is only six months away. If Labour is to make an impact, it needs to start pressing its electoral programme now. It has no problem in doing this, for after considerable inner-party discussions it came up with a final version of its agreed proposals at its recent Annual Conference. The document containing these proposals is entitled "National Policy Forum Report 2014" and it can be found here.  It is, however, 218 pages long and needs sorting out into more manageable chunks. This needs doing before it can be distilled into an even easier-to-handle electoral manifesto. In case no-one is sorting out these matters at the moment, I will try my hand at doing this in a series of items on this blog. Each of these will normally cover a single broad aspect of Labour's Programme and I will give the page references for each of the sub-points I refer to.  My intention is only to give the general thrust of Labour's proposals, so sometimes extra items could have been added. I will start with this area -

(1) Improving Wages and Working Conditions.

1. Strengthen the National Minimum Wage (see page 9).

2. Expand the Living Wage (9).

3. Advance the role of Pay Review Bodies (9).

4. Stamp out Zero Hours abuse (10).

5. Review TUPE's rules to avoid a race to the bottom on pay (10).
    (TUPE applies when workers are transferred to a new employee).

6. Pursue equal pay for equal work (10).


7. Expand the work of the Low Pay Commission to tackle in-work poverty (27)

8. Ensure there is an employee representative on renumeration committees (28).

9. Support flexible working for parents (28).


10. Provide proper health and safety in the workplace (29).

11. Also ensure that self-employed workers are protected. (29)

12. Use a European Court of Justice's ruling to assist in calculating holiday pay (30).