The Purple Book urges Labour to ‘rediscover its decentralist tradition’. But what might that mean? Progress profiles the book’s top five priorities

Universal child and elderly care

As Sweden and Denmark show, the provision of universal, high-quality childcare helps promote higher employment levels among women. This, in turn, is crucial to supporting the long-term sustainability of the welfare state as the population ages, reducing the gender pay gap and allowing more women to provide for their own old age. Similarly, services that promote the health, wellbeing and independence of older people, and which prevent or delay the need for higher-intensity or institutional care, have been shown to improve the quality of life of older people and deliver significant savings in reduced NHS spending.

To tackle the ‘care crunch’, we propose:

— Labour should place a greater emphasis in terms of investment on early years services and care for the elderly, which are crucial for improving working opportunities, reducing poverty and increasing living standards for those on low-to-middle incomes.

— We should have as our goal the transformation of childcare and elderly care into universal public services.

— The Teach First model – which brings the brightest graduates into some of Britain’s poorest schools and communities – should be applied to childcare with the piloting of Teach Early Years First.

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‘Something-for-something’ public services

Labour did not just lose an argument about the efficiency of the state at the 2010 general election, it also lost one about its fairness. Public services need to respect the values of the public: providing opportunity for all, demanding responsibility from all, and helping to strengthen communities.
To build ‘something-for-something’ public services, we propose:

— The welfare state should more clearly combine an attack on poverty with the rejuvenation of social insurance principles. We should move towards a salary-based insurance system where higher salaries require higher contributions, but also provide higher benefits to those who lose their jobs. This would help people to protect their incomes in the first period when they are out of work, as in Denmark. We could also consider the costs of long-term care as a part of the new insurance-based system. National insurance would be converted from a state-run scheme into one which is mutually owned by its members.

— We should consider other ways in which public services can reward those who contribute in the widest sense. As innovative Labour local authorities like Newham and Manchester are doing, we should see how social housing could be allocated on the basis of rewarding good tenants and good neighbours.

— We should provide legally enforceable rights for the victims of crime, with a sentencing framework that gives victims a greater say in determining the nature of community sentences, while exploring the possibility for them to make recommendations on the length and type of sentence, within clearly defined ranges. We should also consider ‘Hasbo’ eviction orders against antisocial neighbours: a simple mechanism for the police to employ to prevent a household that repeatedly commits antisocial or violent behaviour from living within a defined range of former neighbours.

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Empowering England’s big cities

Half of England’s population lives in the major conurbations. Yet outside of London, these conurbations lack strong political institutions and voice and are largely poor.

To empower England’s cities and local government, we propose:

— Elected mayoral authorities for the six major city-conurbations beyond London: Greater Manchester, Greater Birmingham, Greater Leeds, Greater Liverpool, Greater Newcastle and Greater Bristol. Powers should be handed down from Whitehall to the mayors of these city-conurbations, on a par with the mayor of London and the Greater London authority, in respect of transport, policing, planning and economic regeneration.

— City councils with weak leadership and a poor record of promoting jobs and growth should also adopt the mayoral model. Alongside mayors, there should also be pilots of ‘city parishes’ with their own councillors, budgets and responsibilities within city and large urban authorities. Outside of urban areas, upper-tier local authorities, or groupings of them, should take over areas currently managed by quangos, like regional health authorities, national parks or planning authorities.

— Local authorities in England should have the power to vary the basic and higher rates of income tax by 3p in the pound, subject to a popular mandate through a local referendum. Greater tax and fiscal incentives to foster new businesses and encourage the building of more homes should be granted to local government.

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Education credits for parents

Better-off parents can afford to move house to get their children into a good school. They can afford extra tuition or private education. The more wealth you have the more choice over a good education you can buy. No one should decry those parents. They are merely doing what all parents want to do – get their child into a really good school. The problem is that, despite all the progress that has been made, there still are not enough such schools and poorer parents, because they lack the market power of their better-off counterparts, invariably find themselves at the back of the queue. That cannot be right and it has to change.

To empower parents, we propose:

— A new right to choose an alternative state school when their current school’s performance is officially assessed as consistently poor. Parents would be given an education credit weighted to be worth perhaps 150 per cent of the cost of educating the child in their current school. They could then use the credit to persuade the better-performing school to admit their child. The admitting school would have a positive financial incentive to do so. Indeed, for children holding an education credit the alternative school would be free to go above its planned admission numbers – although of course it could decide to cap its expansion.

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Predistributing power in the market

With public spending severely constrained, the days of big state ‘tax and spend’ redistribution to correct flawed market outcomes are over. Instead, we need to focus on ‘predistribution’ – or how the market distributes rewards in the first place, and ensure they are distributed fairly.

To predistribute power in the market, we propose:

— The encouragement of new models of ownership to empower employees in their workplaces. We should actively encourage the formation of mutuals and cooperatives through tax breaks, incentives and reducing the regulatory burden for new mutual start-ups or spin-outs.

— Furthering employee share-ownership by reintroducing the tax break on creating employee benefit trusts which was abolished in 2003, but hardwiring in progressive principles by ensuring the tax break only applies where a significant threshold of shares have been distributed to all members of staff.

— We should encourage a new generation of financial cooperatives and mutuals by committing to the remutualisation of Northern Rock; providing incentives for other banks to capitalise fledgling mutuals and community investment tax relief for people who use them; and expanding the Share Incentive Plan so that it benefits all members of the firm rather than merely enhancing executive salaries.

— We should ensure that the 600 branches of Lloyds TSB whose sale were ordered by the interim report of the Vickers commission on banking are sold to new or existing mutual organisations.