Cost of Living
Paul Ray, Liberal Democrat candidate for Lichfield, Burntwood, and the villages, has strong words regarding the cost of living crisis.
“Living standards will be worse at the end of this government than they were at the start,” he says. “This is the biggest fall in living standards on record. The Conservatives have failed to support people suffering from this, but their shambolic mismanagement of the economy has made an already bad situation even worse. We just have to look at the figures for Lichfield’s foodbank – over 1300kg of food given out each week, donated by ordinary people, and given to other ordinary people who find it difficult to survive.”
The Truss mini-Budget set interest rates soaring, meaning that millions of people, homeowners and renters alike, were hit with rising costs on their housing. The Tories’ freeze on income tax thresholds, Paul Ray points out, is equivalent to a “stealth” tax rise affecting millions when inflation and rising costs are taken into account. And the Conservatives’ botched Brexit deal has badly damaged the economy, leaving everyone worse off.
“The Liberal Democrats have realistic and practical answers,” adds Paul Ray. “Home insulation programmes would cut energy bills, and we would introduce realistic incentives to install heat pumps. A higher National Minimum Wage rate specifically for our care workers and scrapping the lower apprentice rate which is below the National Minimum Wage (that’s just so wrong) will mean that these workers will get a decent basic wage.
“And we would introduce a 20% higher minimum wage for people on zero-hour contracts to compensate them for the uncertainty of fluctuating hours of work.”
These are policies to give people a fair deal.
There’s much more in the Liberal Democrat manifesto, which you can find online at https://www.libdems.org.uk/manifesto/ explaining the details of our fair deal for everyone.