Foreword

We gave the world the Industrial Revolution, the NHS, the internet’s architecture, the English language, the common law, and more Nobel Prize winners per capita than almost any nation on earth. Our financial markets, our universities, our creative industries, our life sciences sector and our legal system are genuinely world-class. London remains one of the two or three most consequential cities on the planet. These are not myths. They are facts.

And yet Britain has talked itself into a malaise. The 2008 financial crisis, a decade of austerity, the divisiveness of Brexit, the trauma of Covid, the cost of living squeeze, and the slow erosion of public services have left the country frayed and the political conversation bitter. Too many politicians have exploited that bitterness rather than addressed its causes. Too many have offered grievance where they should have offered solutions.

We reject the idea that Britain is broken. But we accept that it is underperforming — badly and unnecessarily. The gap between what this country is capable of and what it is currently achieving is not inevitable. It is the product of political choices: choices to tax complexity over simplicity, to borrow instead of reform, to manage decline instead of driving growth, and to tell people what they wanted to hear rather than what they needed to know.

Future Forward Foundation was created to offer something different: comprehensive, costed policy ideas built not on class or envy but on opportunity, growth, and an honest assessment of Britain’s genuine strengths and real weaknesses. Every figure in this policy paper is drawn from public data. Every policy has been modelled against current baselines. We invite challenge and refinement — that is what serious policy debate looks like.

Our politics is not left. It is not right. It is just forward. It is not nostalgic and it is not revolutionary. We believe Britain has too much going for it — too much history, too much talent, too many global connections and too many unrealised opportunities — to keep having the same tired arguments about the same tired ideas.

This policy paper is our contribution to a different kind of conversation. One that starts from Britain’s strengths, is honest about its challenges, and offers a coherent path to a country that works better for everyone who lives and works in it.

It is time to get back on our feet.

Executive Summary

Twenty-two chapters. Fully costed. Honestly presented. Here is the whole programme in plain English — every number in this summary is backed by the full fiscal framework that follows.

The Goal

Growth. Everything in this document serves it — because growth is the only honest route out of Britain’s fiscal hole, and the only one that does not run through austerity or decline.

• Tax that is simple and transparent, designed to fund growth — never to social-engineer how people live

• Immigration built to benefit the economy, not cost it — open to the talent that grows Britain, closed to entry that bypasses the rules

• A state that builds the environment for wealth creation — and asks for a fair return to the society that built it

The Five Big Ideas

• One simple tax: nothing on your first £20,000, one rate above it — and National Insurance abolished, outright for employees; for employers, a levy at little more than half the old rate, with a point earned back by training the young

• Immigration built to benefit the economy — open doors for the talent that grows Britain, and the boats stopped by restoring the legal right to return Channel arrivals to France

• Back into the Single Market — without rejoining the EU

• The deficit falls from day one — and every tax cut is gated on the numbers holding

• A floor under extreme wealth, a pre-funded care account for every worker, and honesty about who pays what

One Simple Tax

• First £20,000 of income: completely tax-free

• One rate above it: 37%, cut to 35% in Year 4 if the OBR certifies the numbers allow

• Employee National Insurance: abolished outright, day one

• Employer National Insurance: abolished and replaced by an 8.5% Employer Levy — a 7.5% core at half the old rate, with a surplus-funded path to scrapping it, plus a 1-point Training Point that funds a National Training Fund — free apprentice training for small firms, a direct rebate for large ones that train

• Council Tax replaced by a 4% local income tax. The 2% Health Levy is the one new tax. Full combined rate: 43%, falling to 41% — printed on every example we publish

• Corporation Tax 30%, with the global minimum-tax floor closing artificial profit-shifting. Business Rates abolished — high street and schools first

• Stamp Duty on homes replaced by CGT with reliefs for movers and downsizers. Stamp duty on shares: scrapped

• Every threshold index-linked to CPI — fiscal drag ends

The Honest Numbers

• Year 1: the deficit FALLS by roughly £31bn — revenue arrives first, tax cuts come in four pre-legislated steps, each gated on OBR certification

• Year 5: deficit of £144bn (low), £134bn (central), £108bn (high) — every scenario beats the £157bn do-nothing path

• The fiscal rule is a glide path — under 4% of GDP by Year 5, 3% by Year 7, 1% structural within a decade — enforced automatically: if growth disappoints, the next tax cut waits

• Everything is in the scorecard: defence, the EEA fee, the NHS capacity welfare reform needs, the courts, the police. If a critic finds an uncosted promise, we correct the table in public

The National Wealth Credit

• A minimum contribution from net wealth above £10 million (CPI-indexed): 1% to £100m, 1.5% to £1bn, 2% beyond

• Every pound of tax already paid counts as credit — pay your share and you will never hear from it

• No exemptions and no forced sales: defer against illiquid assets, or pay in shares to the British Future Fund

• An exit charge and five-year trailing liability mean leaving does not dodge it. A ten-year runway means arriving talent is not scared off

• Scored at an honest £5bn a year — a third of campaign-group claims

Europe — Not Reversing Brexit

• Rejoin the Single Market and Customs Union. Stay out of the EU: our own laws, courts, currency and foreign policy

• Free movement returns and we say so plainly

• The small boats are a Brexit problem. Until 2021, EU rules meant anyone crossing from France could be legally sent straight back — France was obliged to take them. Brexit ended that right overnight, and every scheme since has failed without it

• Rejoining restores the legal power to return small-boat arrivals to the safe country they came from. No gimmicks, no Rwanda. That is how the boats stop

• Trade deals continue through EFTA. CPTPP and every existing deal kept

• The membership fee — about £3bn a year — is in the scorecard, set against a dividend worth many times more

• If Brussels says no, or slowly: Steps 1–2 are entirely unilateral, and even our no-deal scenario beats doing nothing

Health and Care

• NHS free at the point of use, funded by the 2% Health Levy — the one tax rise here, named as such

• Australian-style model: support to go private if you choose, public capacity freed if you do not

• NHS dentistry contract rebuilt. Free degrees for doctors, nurses and dentists, with five years of UK service in return

• Social care pre-funded at last: 2% of the employer pension contribution builds a Personal Care Account — roughly £97,000 over a career — with care credits for time spent unemployed, caring or unable to work, and the £86,000 Dilnot cap reinstated for today’s pensioners

Education and Families

• Free tuition for medicine, engineering, computing, maths, physics and life sciences — five-year UK service obligation, identical for British and EEA students

• The 18–22 Guarantee: an apprenticeship — professional, vocational, supported or military — or a further-education place for every young person. Leaving school into nothing stops being an option

• Parental leave made fully shareable between parents and flexible by the day — same pay, more freedom — answering the birth-rate challenge by removing rigidity, not by spending the country does not have

• Child Benefit becomes food, uniforms and holiday support delivered through schools

• Four-week summer holiday. £5bn capital programme for SEND schools

• Minimum wage, tuition fees and every tax threshold CPI-indexed

Housing, Planning and Land

• Presumption in favour of development. Affordable-housing quotas that kill schemes: scrapped

• A 2% Land Banking Tax on permissioned-but-unbuilt land — ring-fenced to build social housing directly

• 300,000 homes a year by Year 3 — with the honesty that immigration openness is reviewed if supply lags

Immigration

• EU free movement via the Single Market. £120k+ earners fast-tracked in 14 days. A US Talent Welcome programme

• Illegal entry: the restored legal right to send small-boat arrivals back to France (see Europe), plus first-safe-country reform — and a referendum on the Refugee Convention only if renegotiation fails

Energy and Transport

• Small modular reactors, deep geothermal with British lithium, gas as the bridge — and locational pricing so we stop paying wind farms to switch off

• One flat Road Charge replaces car tax and Labour’s pay-per-mile: £450 cars and vans, £100 motorbikes, £25 e-bikes (registered, and off the pavement), pedal bikes free, HGVs by weight — every pound published: free parking everywhere, the pothole backlog cleared in four years

• A £75/month national Rail Pass, funded by a levy on large employers. 80mph motorways. Fuel duty frozen for good — and no mileage tracking, ever

Defence and Security

• 3% of GDP this parliament — the day-to-day cost (£3bn rising to £8bn a year) in the scorecard, the equipment on Defence Bonds

• Buy British through the treaty exemption France and Germany already use

Pensions

• State pension: CPI uprating — it never falls in real terms — plus a five-yearly earnings review reported to Parliament: a review, not a ratchet, never a new lock

• 10% mandatory employer contribution: 8% pension + 2% Care Account — roughly 13% total saving with employee contributions, above Australia’s 12%

• £60,000 annual allowance. No taper. No lifetime cap. Salary sacrifice ends

Welfare

• PIP assessments back to face-to-face; awards time-limited by default

• Universal Credit taper cut from 55% to 45% — scored as the cost it is

• Mental-health treatment expanded BEFORE eligibility tightens — sequencing in statute

• Net savings of £4–6bn by Year 5 — half the usual headline claim, because we scored it properly

Justice

• £2bn court recovery programme. Legal aid up 20%. Police back to 2010 strength

• Medical cannabis on the NHS. No to decriminalisation

Technology and Society

• Algorithms transparent and opt-in — chronological feeds by default; firm under-18 protections

• Platforms jointly liable for what they are paid to promote and what their algorithms amplify — amplification is publication; neutral hosting keeps protection, with teeth. Liability for foreign-state interference. Digital literacy in every school

Economy and Markets

• VAT two-tier for small firms — full exemption to £90k, a simple 8% flat rate to £350k — so growth never hits a cliff edge

• A British Growth Exchange — a dedicated London market for high-growth companies, with listing rules built for scale-ups, so the next generation floats here instead of New York

• Inheritance tax: nothing below £3m; above it, the flat-tax rate — 37% falling to 35% with it. Family homes and most working farms out entirely

• Water renationalised case-by-case through court-supervised Special Administration at fair value

• Food standards non-negotiable in trade deals. Tourist VAT-free shopping restored. Farming moved from the ELMS cliff edge to simple public-goods payments

Every promise priced. Every loser named. Every critic answered before they speak.

Not left. Not right. Just forward.

Fiscal Framework: The Numbers

Every policy in this policy paper is costed against public data — including the items that are usually left out: the defence spending commitment, the EEA membership contribution, the NHS capacity investment that welfare reform requires, and the realistic first-year yield of every phased measure. The scorecard below shows two columns: the honest Year 1 position and the steady-state position once all phased measures are fully in force. The rows sum. Check them.

Current Position (2025-26 Baseline)

Total government receipts: ~£1,140bn | Total spending: ~£1,285bn | Current deficit: ~£145bn (4.9% of GDP) | National debt: ~96% of GDP | GDP: ~£2,950bn

The distinction every budget debate muddles, settled once: the DEFICIT is this year’s borrowing — the gap between what the state spends and what it raises — currently about £145bn, or 4.9% of GDP. The DEBT is the accumulated stock of every past deficit: about £2.8 trillion, or 96% of GDP. One is the overdraft; the other is the mortgage. Our rules bind the deficit, year by year. Our destination — debt below 60% of GDP within a generation — is what falling deficits eventually deliver.

The deficit is one year’s borrowing; the debt is the accumulated stock. F³'s rules bind the deficit.

The Architecture: Pre-Legislated Steps, Each OBR-Gated

F³ is not a single fiscal event. It is a sequence of pre-legislated steps, each of which proceeds only when the Office for Budget Responsibility certifies that the public finances are on track:

• Step 1 (Year 1): Employee National Insurance abolished entirely. Employer NIC begins its replacement — rate cut from 15% to 12.25%, including the 1-point earn-back Training Point. Business Rates abolished for retail, hospitality, leisure and schools. The 37% flat rate, Health Levy and all revenue measures take effect.

• Step 2 (Year 2): Employer NIC abolished and replaced by the 8.5% Employer Levy — 7.5% core plus the Training Point — its shape for the remainder of the parliament. Second tranche of Business Rates abolition. The National Wealth Credit begins.

• Step 3 (Year 3): Business Rates fully abolished. Single Market accession completes; EEA contribution begins.

• Step 4 (Year 4): Flat rate cut from 37% to 35% — proceeds only on OBR certification that the deficit is on its statutory glide path.

• Beyond this parliament: once the 1% structural deficit target is met, the core Employer Levy reduces in further OBR-gated steps — funded from realised surpluses, never from borrowing — with full abolition as the long-term destination.

If growth disappoints, the next step pauses — automatically, by statute, without a political crisis. This gating is the enforcement mechanism for the fiscal rules in Chapter 2, and the reason the LOW scenario below cannot run away: in that world, Step 4 simply does not fire until the numbers allow it.

We are deliberate about how this is presented, because an opponent will call a conditional tax cut a fictional one. The honesty is the point. Every other manifesto promises tax cuts as certainties and then quietly abandons them when the money is not there — breaking faith after the election. F³ does the opposite: it tells you in advance that the 35% rate is earned, not gifted, and names the exact test it must pass. A promise you can audit is worth more than a promise you cannot. If you want the rate cut guaranteed regardless of the public finances, no honest party can offer that — and the ones who say they can are the reason Britain keeps electing governments that miss their own targets. We would rather under-promise the rate and over-deliver the discipline.

F³ Tax and Spending Changes — Full Scorecard

Every scenario ends the parliament below the do-nothing path. The shaded gap is the Base-case dividend.

Year one reduces the deficit because revenue lands in full while tax cuts are phased and gated.

The Path Forward — Five Year Projections Across Three Scenarios

All scenarios use the OBR baseline (deficit rising to £157bn by Year 5 without reform) and the standard elasticity of ~£11bn of receipts per 1% of GDP. The Single Market dividend is phased honestly: accession completes in Year 3, so no SM growth is booked before Year 3 in any scenario — the 2-4% literature describes a long-run effect, and we treat it that way. We are deliberately conservative about the pace: the Low case books only 0.7% by Year 5, a fraction of the eventual gain, precisely because front-loading a fifteen-year effect into a five-year window is the commonest way fiscal plans flatter themselves. If even the Low trajectory is too quick, the gates do their job — the rate cuts that depend on the dividend simply wait until it arrives. The plan does not require the growth to be fast; it requires it to be real.

LOW SCENARIO — cumulative extra GDP of 1.9% by Year 5

Assumes: SM accession delayed or partial; NIC/Business Rates reform only modestly stimulative; welfare savings held to £4bn by legal challenge; gilt yields +75bp. Step 4 (the 35% rate cut) does NOT fire in this scenario — the OBR gate holds it, which is why Year 4-5 statics are lower than in Base.

Low scenario: even with every assumption against us, the deficit never exceeds the OBR’s own no-reform path, and Year 5 lands £13bn below it — because the step-gating holds back the unfunded cuts. This is what a fiscal rule with teeth looks like.

BASE SCENARIO — cumulative extra GDP of 4.3% by Year 5

Assumes: SM uplift of 0.7%/1.2%/1.6% in Years 3-5 (cumulative 2.2% — the bottom of the independent range, phased from accession); NIC/Rates reform adds 0.3% per year cumulative; welfare delivers £8bn; gilt yields +40bp. All four steps fire on schedule.

Base scenario: the deficit falls £31bn in Year 1, absorbs the pre-legislated steps through Years 2-4 without ever returning to today’s level, and ends the parliament at £134bn — £23bn below the no-reform path, with debt-to-GDP falling from Year 1.

HIGH SCENARIO — cumulative extra GDP of 6.5% by Year 5

Assumes: SM uplift at the top of the independent range once accession completes; strong hiring response to the Employer Levy cut; welfare delivers £12bn; no gilt repricing.

Summary Comparison

Key Sensitivities

Bond Market Management

The 2022 mini-budget demonstrated the cost of large unfunded announcements without independent validation. F³'s strategy is built so that the first thing markets see is a falling deficit:

• OBR pre-commitment — the full programme is submitted to independent OBR scrutiny before implementation and the results published in full, whatever they show

• Revenue first, cuts gated — Year 1 reduces borrowing by ~£26bn; every subsequent tax-cutting step is pre-legislated but fires only on OBR certification

• A credible fiscal rule — the glide path in Chapter 2 is met or enforced by the gates in every scenario, including LOW. A rule the plan itself would break is not a rule; ours holds

• A specified emergency brake — if gilt yields rise more than 100bp above the OBR forecast within 12 months, two pre-named measures trigger automatically: the next pre-legislated step is suspended, and a temporary 1p surcharge on the flat rate applies until yields normalise. Markets know the circuit breaker’s exact wiring in advance

• No leveraged state investment — the British Future Fund will be capitalised only from realised surpluses under the fiscal rule, never from gilt issuance. The state will not borrow to buy equities

Renationalisation event-risk is sequenced, not bundled: water acquisitions proceed through court-supervised Special Administration as insolvencies arise, on their own timetable, at independently determined fair value — not as part of a single fiscal event.

The Honest Summary

Year one, the deficit falls — because the revenue measures arrive in full while the tax cuts are phased and gated. The structural cost of the completed reform arrives in Years 4-5, by which time the growth dividend, welfare savings and compounding pension reform are at full strength. Every commitment in this paper — defence, the EEA contribution, the NHS capacity that welfare reform requires, the police, the courts — appears in the table above. If a future critic finds a spending promise we have not costed, we will correct the table in public. That is the standard.

Our long-term goal remains reducing national debt below 60% of GDP within a generation — through growth, not austerity.

Chapter 1: Tax Reform

One Simple Income Tax

We will replace today’s complicated income tax and National Insurance system — with its multiple bands, thresholds and rates — with a single, transparent tax:

• First £20,000 entirely tax-free — a single allowance that absorbs and replaces the thicket of reliefs below it

• 37% flat income tax on all earnings above £20,000 — cut to 35% at Step 4 (Year 4), pre-legislated and gated on OBR certification that the fiscal glide path is holding

• National Insurance abolished. For employees: outright, from day one — the largest single simplification in the system

• For employers: abolished and replaced by an 8.5% Employer Levy — a 7.5% core (half the old 15% rate) plus a 1-point Training Point paid into a pooled National Training Fund — phased via 12.25% in Year 1. Small firms draw fully-funded apprentice training from the Fund; large firms that train draw their point back directly. The surplus-funded path to scrapping the core stands; the Training Point is not money the state keeps

One honest sentence on the employer side: replacing NIC with a levy at half the rate is not the same as removing payroll taxation altogether, and we will not pretend otherwise. Unreplaced abolition leaves a £50bn-a-year structural hole that only heroic growth assumptions can fill — and every credible way of filling it lands on workers. So the core Employer Levy cuts the cost of employment by roughly £35bn a year — in full for every employer that trains — and carries a statutory, surplus-funded path to its own abolition: each future cut fires on OBR certification, written into the same statute as the glide path, exactly like Steps 2 to 4. The Training Point above the core is different in kind: an employer that trains pays nothing on it; an employer that does not funds the Guarantee for those who do (Chapter 6).

A worker earning £35,000 today pays income tax and NICs across multiple bands and thresholds. Under F³ they pay one published combined rate — 43% including the Health Levy and Local Income Tax, 41% from Step 4 — on income above £20,000, and nothing at all below it.

Duties and Excise — The Other £75bn

Duties raise roughly £75bn a year and most manifestos pretend they do not exist. Our positions, briefly and completely:

• Fuel duty (£24bn): frozen in cash permanently, withering as the fleet electrifies — never replaced by pay-per-mile (Chapter 11)

• Vehicle Excise Duty (£8bn): abolished and replaced by the flat Road Charge (Chapter 11)

• Alcohol duty (£13bn): CPI-indexed, draught relief for pubs kept, the band structure simplified

• Tobacco duty (£8bn): the escalator stays — a declining base we are content to see decline

• Vaping duty: raised from the planned £2.20 to £3.00 per 10ml — still one flat rate, no nicotine tiers. A statutory rule keeps vaping duty below half the equivalent cigarette duty, so switching stays the cheap option: priced for adults switching, not children starting. £100m of the proceeds funds Trading Standards enforcement against the illicit market

• Gambling duties (£4bn): the elevated online rates stay — consistent with Chapter 17’s approach to engineered addiction

• Air Passenger Duty and Insurance Premium Tax (£13bn): frozen and CPI-indexed; IPT — a stealth tax on prudence — reviewed once the glide path is met

• Customs duties (£5bn): retained in full under a Turkey-style customs union — Britain is not in the EU’s own-resources system (Chapter 4)

Local Government Finance

Council Tax is arbitrary, outdated and unfair — based on property valuations from 1991. A retired person in a large family home pays the same as a high-earning professional next door. We will replace it with a system that reflects actual ability to pay:

• 4% Local Income Tax, applied to income above £20,000 — the same threshold as the national flat rate

• Those earning below £20,000 pay no local income tax — a significant benefit for lower earners compared to Council Tax

• Collected alongside national taxation through PAYE and self-assessment — no new bureaucracy

• Revenue distributed directly to local councils based on their population and need

The full marginal rate on income above £20,000 — including the 2% Health Levy — is 43% in Years 1–3, falling to 41% at Step 4. Below £20,000: no income tax, no levy, no local tax. We publish the combined figure because it is the number that actually governs your payslip; manifestos that quote their taxes one at a time are hoping you will not add them up. Even at 43%, this is substantially more progressive than today’s system, where Council Tax bears no relationship to income at all.

Business Taxation

Britain’s businesses face a triple burden: Corporation Tax, Business Rates, and employer NICs. We will cut two of the three:

• Corporation Tax set at 30%, with the OECD Pillar Two global minimum closing the artificial profit-shifting that erodes the base — the brass-plate structures, royalty routing and transfer-pricing games that booked UK profit in near-zero jurisdictions. The £18bn yield is scored net of shifting

• Business Rates abolished in tranches matched to the fiscal steps — retail, hospitality, leisure and schools at Step 1, every remaining sector by Step 3 — ending a tax that penalises physical investment and punishes success on the high street

• Capital allowances simplified to encourage investment

What the Global Minimum Does — and What It Does Not

It is worth being precise, because the rule is often overstated. The OECD Pillar Two agreement, in force since 2024 across roughly 140 countries including the EU and UK, requires large multinational groups — those with global revenue above €750m — to pay an effective rate of at least 15% on profit in every country they operate in. Where a group books profit somewhere taxed below 15%, a top-up brings it to 15%; and if the low-tax country does not collect that top-up, another country where the group operates can. The floor is therefore enforced even against jurisdictions that would rather not enforce it.

What this does for Britain is real but bounded. It closes the artificial games — profit with no genuine activity behind it, parked in near-zero jurisdictions — because that profit now carries at least 15% wherever it lands. It does not, however, stop a country charging 15% while Britain charges 30%. Ireland is the obvious case: rather than lose the top-up to others, it raised its rate to 15% for large multinationals, keeping 12.5% only for smaller firms. So the floor did not end tax competition — it put a 15% floor under it.

We are honest about the consequence: a genuine 15-point gap with Ireland on real, mobile activity is a competitive disadvantage Pillar Two does nothing about, and a 30% rate must earn its keep against it. It does so on three grounds. First, profit shifting that is artificial — the bulk of the lost base — is now caught regardless of the headline gap. Second, what businesses actually locate for is rarely the rate alone: it is market access, talent, the rule of law and stability — which is precisely why Single Market re-entry, fast-track skilled visas and an OBR-gated fiscal framework matter more to a 30% Britain than a few points off the rate ever would. Third, the rate is gated like everything else: if the evidence shows 30% is costing more in lost activity than it raises, the structural surplus path that funds the rate cuts elsewhere in this paper applies here too. We set the rate where the revenue is needed and the base is now defensible — not where a race we have chosen not to run would pull it.

How Britain Compares — the United States

The fear that a 30% rate makes Britain uncompetitive against the United States rests on a misreading of American tax. The US federal corporate rate is 21%, but almost every state adds its own on top — averaging around six and a half points, and reaching a combined rate near 30% in states like New Jersey and California. America's true corporate rate is not 21%; it is a 25-to-30% range once the state is counted. F³'s 30% sits at the top of that band, not outside it.

Payroll is the same story. A US employer pays 7.65% in federal FICA on every salary — Social Security up to a cap, Medicare uncapped — and then federal and state unemployment taxes on top, which in a high-cost state push the real employer payroll cost into double digits. F³'s Employer Levy is a single 7.5% core with no separate unemployment tax bolted on. A British employer under F³ therefore faces a payroll-tax cost comparable to, or lower than, an American employer in a major state — and a corporate rate in the same range as New Jersey or California.

So the honest international picture is not a high-tax Britain undercut by a low-tax America. It is two economies in much the same band on headline rates — with F³ then handing its businesses things the US system does not: no tax at all on commercial premises, frictionless access to a market of 450 million on the doorstep, and a fiscal framework that does not lurch every budget. We compete on the things that compound, not on a race to the bottom on the rate.

Does 30% Drive Business Away? What the Evidence Shows

This is the right question to ask of any rate rise, and the evidence — including the evidence against parts of our own instinct — gives a clear answer. When Britain cut its corporation tax from 28% to 19% over the 2010s, two things happened, and they are usually confused. Company headquarters and booked profit did move to Britain: accountancy data at the time tracked roughly sixty multinationals considering UK relocation as a direct result, and the long run of corporate inversions away from Britain reversed. So the rate genuinely moves where profit is declared. But business investment did not rise — Britain had the lowest business investment in the G7 by 2019 despite having the G7’s lowest corporate rate, partly because the cuts were paid for by lengthening capital write-off periods, which quietly raised the effective tax on new investment even as the headline rate fell.

Two conclusions follow, and F³ is built on both. First, the corporate rate is mainly a tool for competing over where profit is booked — which is precisely why we pair a 30% rate with Pillar Two, so the booking game is closed and the rate can do its honest job. Second, investment responds to the cost of capital and to allowances far more than to the headline rate, which is why our growth strategy rests on investment incentives, Single Market access and stability rather than on a low number we know does not deliver investment on its own.

And 30% is not an outlier. Of the jurisdictions the OECD tracks, twenty-six levy headline rates at or above 30%. France sits at 36%. Germany — Britain’s closest competitor for serious industrial investment — reaches almost exactly 30% once municipal trade taxes are counted. Australia and several others sit at 30% flat. The economies Britain competes with for real operations, as opposed to brass-plate profit-routing, are clustered at or above the F³ rate, not below it. A 30% Britain with no commercial-property tax, frictionless access to its largest market, and a stable fiscal framework is more attractive to a business that actually builds things than a 19% Britain that taxed its premises, sat outside the single market, and changed its rules every year.

Abolishing Business Rates alone will transform the economics of retail, hospitality, manufacturing and logistics — sectors that have been hollowed out by a tax designed for a different era.

Property Tax Reform

Stamp Duty is one of the most economically damaging taxes in Britain. It freezes the housing market, prevents people from moving for work, and distorts property values. We will:

• Abolish Stamp Duty on all property transactions

• Introduce Capital Gains Tax on property sales, including main residences

• Allow full rollover relief when moving primary home — so ordinary families moving house pay nothing

• A downsizing relief: no CGT on gains released when moving to a cheaper main home — protecting the equity that funds later-life care, and removing the one tax that would have discouraged exactly the moves that free up family homes

• Full deduction of acquisition and improvement costs, as capital gains tax has always worked. The original purchase price, the Stamp Duty paid when the home was bought, conveyancing and survey fees, and the cost of extensions or capital improvements are all deductible — so tax falls only on the real gain, net of what it cost to acquire and improve the property. For anyone who bought in the last three decades, the historic Stamp Duty on that purchase is part of the deductible base: we abolish the tax going forward, and we credit what was already paid

This creates a fairer system where tax falls on real gains rather than transactions — encouraging mobility and unlocking a frozen housing market. Because rollover relief means movers pay nothing and downsizers are protected, the charge falls only on the narrow base of disposals that are never reinvested in another home — an estate, a second property, or an exit from the market. The revenue range below is scored on that residual base and net of allowable costs, including historic Stamp Duty; that is why replacing a £18bn transaction tax with a gains tax is modelled as a net cost, not a windfall.

Chapter 2: Fiscal Responsibility

Borrowing Rules: A Falling Path, Enforced by Our Own Tax Cuts

Fiscal rules fail in Britain because they bind future governments and never the present one. Ours binds us — visibly, automatically, from Year 1. We will enshrine in law a deficit glide path (the deficit being this year’s borrowing — 4.9% of GDP today — not the £2.8 trillion accumulated debt, which stands at 96% of GDP and falls only as deficits do):

• The deficit never exceeds today’s 4.9% of GDP — and falls in Year 1

• Below 4% of GDP by Year 5

• Below 3% of GDP by Year 7

• A 1% structural deficit by the early 2030s — the point at which debt falls decisively as a share of the economy

• Exceptions permitted only during formally declared recessions or national emergencies

• Any surplus in good years goes directly to debt repayment — not new spending

Enforcement is automatic: Steps 2, 3 and 4 of the tax programme (Chapter 1) are pre-legislated but gated — each proceeds only when the OBR certifies the deficit is on or below this path. A rule that pauses our own tax cuts is harder than a cap that pauses nothing. If growth disappoints, the next step waits; the path holds either way.

Office for Fiscal Honesty

The existing OBR will be strengthened and a new Office for Fiscal Honesty established to:

• Independently audit all government spending promises before they are made

• Publish annual debt reduction progress reports

• Provide fully transparent public accounts, accessible to every citizen

Long-Term Goal

Reduce public debt below 60% of GDP within a generation — the threshold at which debt becomes a structural drag on growth rather than a manageable tool of economic management.

Fair Taxes. Honest Spending. A Debt-Free Future.

Chapter 3: Small Business and Enterprise

Small businesses are the backbone of the British economy — employing more people than any other sector, anchoring high streets, and generating the innovation and dynamism that larger companies cannot. Yet the current tax and regulatory system treats small business creation as an afterthought and growth as something to be penalised.

The VAT Growth Cliff Edge — Fixed

The VAT registration threshold creates one of the most destructive growth disincentives in the British economy. Currently set at £90,000, it forces a binary choice: stay below the threshold and remain competitive, or cross it and immediately face 20% VAT on sales, significant administrative burden, and often a loss of price competitiveness against larger rivals.

The result is documented and damaging: businesses deliberately cap their turnover, decline contracts, and refuse to hire — not because they cannot grow, but because they cannot afford to. This is a government-designed brake on enterprise.

Single Market constraint: EU VAT rules cap the full VAT exemption threshold at €85,000 — approximately £72,000. Britain’s current £90,000 threshold is already above this level. F³ will negotiate to maintain the current threshold as an EEA accession condition, and introduce a two-tier structure that achieves the core goal of removing the growth cliff edge within EEA rules:

• Tier 1 — Full VAT exemption: maintain current threshold at approximately £90,000, negotiated as an EEA accession condition (Britain has the highest threshold in Europe and the strongest case for preserving it)

• Tier 2 — Expanded Flat Rate Scheme: businesses with turnover between £90,000 and £350,000 pay VAT at a simple flat rate of 8% on gross turnover — no input tax calculations, no complex accounting, one quarterly number

• Both tiers index-linked to CPI — ending the fiscal drag that repeatedly brings small businesses into the VAT system against the spirit of the policy

The Flat Rate Scheme already exists in the UK — F³ dramatically expands its coverage and raises the ceiling from £150,000 to £350,000. A business turning over £200,000 currently faces the full complexity of standard VAT. Under F³ it pays 8% on turnover in a single quarterly return. The compliance saving is substantial even though the liability is not zero. The core problem — the cliff edge that traps businesses — is eliminated through simplicity rather than full exemption.

The net revenue cost of this two-tier structure is approximately £0.8bn annually — lower than the original £150k full exemption proposal, reflecting the Flat Rate Scheme generating some revenue from businesses currently capping below £90k.

Simplified VAT Reporting

For businesses below the simplified scheme threshold:

• Quarterly VAT submissions only — no monthly filing

• Simplified flat-rate scheme with reduced administrative requirements

• Digital-first but not digital-only — no small business penalised for not having sophisticated accounting software

Entrepreneurs should spend their time serving customers, not filling in forms.

The Full Small Business Package

Taken together, the F³ programme delivers the most comprehensive package of small business support in a generation:

• Business Rates abolished entirely — the single tax most damaging to high streets, hospitality and physical retail

• National Insurance abolished — outright for employees; for employers an 8.5% levy: a 7.5% core at half the old rate, plus a Training Point that funds free apprentice training for small firms from a national pool — so the local plumber or hairdresser pays a wage, not a training bill, to take one on

• VAT two-tier structure — full exemption to £90,000, simple 8% flat rate to £350,000, eliminating the growth cliff edge

• Simplified VAT reporting — reducing compliance costs

• Faster planning approvals — making it easier to open premises, expand or change use

• Free town-centre parking — bringing customers back to the high streets where small businesses trade

• Single Market rejoining — restoring export access to 450 million European customers without the friction costs that currently make cross-border trade unviable for small operators

The combined effect of business rates abolition and the halving of employer NIC alone saves the average small employer tens of thousands of pounds annually. That is money that goes back into wages, investment and growth — not tax forms.

Chapter 4: Britain and Europe

What We Are Proposing — And What We Are Not

Let us be completely clear about what F³ proposes and what it does not, because this will be misrepresented.

This Is Not Reversing Brexit

Britain voted in 2016 to leave the European Union. F³ respects that decision entirely. We are not proposing to rejoin the EU, to restore EU citizenship, to accept the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice over British domestic law, or to hand back the political independence that Brexit delivered.

What Brexit did not require — and what we are restoring — is the economic relationship that made British businesses competitive. Norway is not in the EU. Iceland is not in the EU. Liechtenstein is not in the EU. All three have been in the Single Market for thirty years. None of them have surrendered their political independence. None of them fly the EU flag or sit in the European Parliament. They simply trade freely with their largest neighbour.

Britain had both political independence and economic access before 2016. We are not asking the British people to choose between them. We are asking them to recognise that we can have both — as three other independent nations already do.

The Five Things Brexit Promised — And What F³ Delivers

Brexit was sold on five promises. Here is the honest scorecard — and what F³ actually delivers on each:

The Small Boats — Solved By Rejoining, Not Despite It

The small boats crisis is a direct consequence of Brexit. Before 2021, Britain was part of the Dublin Regulation — which meant anyone arriving in France could be returned to France. France had a legal obligation to take them back. Brexit ended that obligation overnight.

Every attempt since to solve the boats problem outside the EU framework — Rwanda, offshore processing, endless legal battles — has failed precisely because Britain has no legal mechanism to return people to the safe country they came from. The EU has that mechanism. Rejoining gives us access to it.

Free Movement — Honest and Positive

Single Market membership means free movement of EU citizens. We are honest about this. What we are also honest about is what free movement actually means in practice — and what it does not mean.

Free movement means EU citizens can come to Britain to work, study and live — as they could before 2021. It does not mean open borders to the world. It does not mean uncontrolled numbers. EU citizens who come to Britain work, pay taxes, and contribute to public services. The evidence consistently shows EU free movement has been net positive for Britain’s economy, public finances and public services.

The problems people associate with immigration — pressure on housing, GPs, school places — are not caused by free movement. They are caused by a failure to build enough houses, train enough doctors, and fund enough schools. Our platform addresses all three directly. The answer to those pressures is supply, not restriction.

Trade Independence — The Honest Position

Farage will claim that Single Market membership means giving up independent trade policy. This is not accurate — but it requires a precise answer.

Norway, inside the Single Market, has concluded its own free trade agreements with India, Canada and many others — through the EFTA framework. Britain joining the EEA would mean coordinating future trade deals through EFTA alongside Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein rather than purely unilaterally. Britain’s existing deals — including CPTPP — are unaffected.

The trade-off is honest: Britain gives up some unilateral freedom on future trade negotiations in exchange for frictionless access to a market of 450 million people on its doorstep. The economic arithmetic is not close. The EU takes 42% of British exports. CPTPP countries take 8%. Frictionless EU access is worth far more than the marginal freedom to negotiate trade deals independently.

The Economic Case

The economic dividend from Single Market access is the single largest lever in this paper. Independent analysis consistently shows rejoining adding 2–4% to UK GDP over a parliament — £60–120bn of additional tax base. Ireland, with fewer natural advantages, built its prosperity on exactly this foundation. Britain can do the same.

The Rule-Taker Question: An Honest Answer

Norway’s own 2024 EEA Review acknowledged the democratic deficit of adopting EU legislation without a vote. F³ does not pretend this is ideal. We accept it as a worthwhile trade-off — and we will say so openly rather than hiding it.

F³ makes this choice with open eyes. Single Market access is worth accepting regulatory alignment in most areas. Where it is not — defence procurement, certain security matters — explicit treaty carve-outs exist and will be used.

Answering the Critics

Every serious political programme faces serious political attacks. This section sets out the strongest challenges from across the political spectrum — and our answers to them. We publish this because honest politics requires engaging with the best version of the opposition’s argument, not the weakest.

The Left Critique — Andy Burnham

The arithmetic does not support this — and we publish it levy-inclusive so the reader can check. A minimum-wage worker gains £1,114 a year from day one, a 4.9% rise in take-home pay, because employee National Insurance is abolished and the first £20,000 is untaxed. At £300,000 the gain is £5,798 — 3.3%. Proportionally, the largest gains are at the bottom.

Effective rates tell the story: 10.5% at £26,437 (down from 14.7% today); 21.5% at £40,000; 32.3% at £80,000; 35.8% at £120,000; 40.1% at £300,000 (down from 42.1%). A flat rate above a generous threshold produces a rising ladder — a progressive system by definition — without the 60% taper trap today’s ‘progressive’ bands hide in the middle.

Effective tax rates under F³ versus the current system — lower at every income, and a clean rising ladder.

And what we do not do is hide the middle. Between £40,000 and £100,000 there is a transitional cost of £18 to £53 a week in Years 1–3 — the visible price of a 2p ring-fenced Health Levy we name rather than disguise, and one most commuting households recover through the offsets we itemise. Trickle-down is when you cut taxes at the top and ask the bottom to wait. We cut them at the bottom first and ask the comfortable to read the bill.

The Red Wall Critique — Angela Rayner

Triple lock reform does not cut pensions — it uprates them with inflation every year — a real-terms guarantee — with a five-yearly earnings review reported to Parliament: a review, not a ratchet. The current triple lock transfers £12–15bn annually from working households — many of them struggling — to pensioners, one in four of whom is a millionaire. That is the regressive policy, not our reform.

Child Benefit is replaced, not removed. Free school breakfasts and lunches — universal for every child — plus uniform and holiday support for households under £80,000 deliver more direct benefit to children than cash that may or may not be spent on them. A lower- or middle-income family with two school-age children receives more under our provision model than under the current cash payment; higher-income households keep the universal meals their children eat every day.

And the charge that we shift the burden from employers to workers is arithmetically false. Employer NIC is replaced, not removed: an 8.5% Employer Levy remains on every payroll — 7.5% core plus the earn-back Training Point — with a mandatory 10% pension-and-care contribution on top of it. The biggest winners from Step 1 are the lowest-paid workers; the biggest new obligations fall on the largest employers.

On immigration — we are opening doors for talent while closing routes for illegal entry. A system that welcomes a doctor from India, an engineer from America and a researcher from Germany while firmly returning those who arrive illegally is not hostile to working families. It is what a functioning immigration system looks like.

The Brexit Populist Critique — Nigel Farage

Britain voted to leave the European Union. We are not proposing to rejoin it. We are proposing to rejoin the Single Market — the economic arrangement, not the political union. Norway has been in the Single Market since 1994. Norway is not in the EU. Norway has its own parliament, its own laws, its own foreign policy and its own supreme court. Nobody seriously argues Norway has surrendered its independence.

On free movement — yes, we are honest that Single Market membership includes free movement of EU citizens, as it did before 2021. What changed in 2021? Net migration hit record highs. The boats crisis exploded. EU doctors, nurses and workers left. Free movement of EU citizens was not the cause of Britain’s immigration problems. Its removal demonstrably did not solve them.

On the numbers — because this is the real question, not free movement as such. Britain’s net migration is already high; the failure is in its composition, not its absence. Our birth rate has fallen well below replacement, the working-age population that funds pensions and the NHS is shrinking relative to the retired, and the country genuinely needs people. What it needs is the right people: skilled workers who pay in more than they draw out, the doctors and engineers and founders who build the tax base. So F³ does the thing the slogans never manage — it raises skilled, contributory migration while bearing down hard on the two categories the public actually objects to: illegal entry and unmanaged asylum. More of the migration that pays for the state; far less of the migration that strains it. That is not a number you wave at; it is a composition you engineer.

On stopping the boats — our policy is the only one that actually works. Dublin returns require EU cooperation. EU cooperation requires Single Market membership. Every alternative — Rwanda, offshore processing, legal challenges — has failed. We are offering a solution, not a slogan.

On ‘four taxes dressed up as one’ — the combined rate above £20,000 is 43%: 37% income tax, 4% local, 2% health. We print that number in every household example in this document. Below £20,000: nothing. One payslip line, no NIC tables, no Council Tax bands, no taper. We will take a published 43% over today’s disguised 62% taper zone every single time — and so will anyone who has ever tried to read their own payslip.

On trade independence — Britain keeps CPTPP. Britain keeps all existing trade deals. Future deals are negotiated through the EFTA framework alongside Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. The EU takes 42% of British exports. CPTPP takes 8%. The arithmetic of where Britain’s trade interests lie is not ambiguous.

Three More Attacks — Answered Before They Are Made

An honest platform red-teams itself. Here are the three strongest attacks we expect that the sections above do not cover — and our answers.

“A pay cut for nurses to fund a pay rise for bankers”

The poster writes itself: a senior nurse on £80,000 pays £53 a week more in Years 1–3, while a banker on £300,000 gains £5,798. Our answer is printed in our own tables. The gains at the top come from abolishing the taper and allowance-withdrawal distortions — and even so, the top effective rate falls only from 42.1% to 40.1%, while the bottom falls from 14.7% to 10.5%. The middle’s cost is the Health Levy, ring-fenced and named, and the offsets — Rail Pass worth up to £3,200, school provision worth ~£850 a child, energy VAT — are real money against it. From Step 4 the £80,000 cost falls to £30 a week. And above £10 million, the National Wealth Credit guarantees — for the first time in British history — that no one can structure their way to a lower share than the nurse on the poster. And if the country judges the middle’s contribution too high, the honest lever is a Health Levy threshold — which we cost openly at roughly £8bn rather than pretending the choice is free.

“Seven takings from pensioners — and nothing given”

The list is real and we own it: triple lock, the universal winter fuel payment, universal bus passes, IHT at the flat-tax rate above £3m, the insurance surcharge for high earners. Now the other column, which the attack always omits: the £86,000 Dilnot cap on lifetime care costs, reinstated — the single largest pro-pensioner commitment on offer from any quarter, protecting every pensioner from the catastrophic costs that today consume entire family homes; a CGT downsizing relief so moving to a smaller home is never taxed; and a state pension guaranteed in law never to fall in real terms, with a five-yearly earnings review. We ask wealthier pensioners to give up universal perks. We give every pensioner the protection no government — including the ones that promised it — has ever actually delivered.

And there is a principle beneath the trade, not just a ledger. The pensioner perks were always a strange kind of policy: a benefit you qualified for by age, not by need. F³ replaces benefits-by-demographic with benefits-for-everyone. VAT comes off energy — for every household, including every pensioner. Trains and parking get cheaper — for everyone, including every pensioner. Disability support is protected — for the pensioners who actually need it. The question is whether the state should hand a universal payment to a millionaire because of his date of birth, or take that money and make energy, transport and care cheaper for the whole country. We think helping everyone beats subsidising one age group regardless of need — and most pensioners, asked plainly, think so too.

“The EU hasn’t agreed to any of this”

Correct — and the architecture assumes nothing. Steps 1 and 2 are entirely unilateral: employee NIC abolition, the Employer Levy, Business Rates phase-out, planning, courts, energy, schools and welfare reform proceed on Parliament’s timetable alone. Single Market accession is Step 3, on its own diplomatic track, with the consent of the EU and the existing EFTA states required and acknowledged — and the EEA fee of roughly £3bn a year costed openly in our scorecard. The LOW scenario in our fiscal framework is precisely the world in which Brussels says no or says slowly: no Single Market dividend, no Step 4 — and the parliament still ends £13bn below the do-nothing path. Our plan is not contingent on Brussels’ goodwill. It is improved by it.

Single Market Compatibility: What F³ Has Checked

A credible Single Market rejoining argument requires honest acknowledgment of which F³ policies need adjustment under EEA rules. We have conducted a full compatibility audit across all 22 chapters. Here are the findings:

The vast majority of F³ policies are fully compatible with Single Market membership. Three required adjustment: VAT threshold redesigned as a two-tier flat rate scheme, British ISA removed as stamp duty abolition achieves the same goal more powerfully, and STEM free degrees extended to EEA students on equal terms. This is what serious policy development looks like.

Sequencing: If Brussels Says No — Or Says Slowly

Nothing in Steps 1 and 2 requires anyone’s consent but Parliament’s. Employee NIC abolition, the Employer Levy, the Business Rates phase-out, planning reform, the courts programme, energy, schools and welfare reform all proceed unilaterally, on our timetable. Single Market accession is Step 3, on its own diplomatic track — and we acknowledge plainly that it requires the consent of the EU and of the existing EFTA states, whose concerns about admitting an economy ten times Norway’s size we will address directly rather than wish away.

The LOW scenario in our fiscal framework is the protracted-or-failed-negotiation case: no Single Market dividend is booked, the EEA fee never starts, and Step 4 does not fire — and the parliament still ends £13bn below the do-nothing path. Our plan is not contingent on Brussels' goodwill. It is improved by it.

The City: Equivalence, Autonomy and the Trade

Honesty about financial services cuts both ways. The 'equivalence' Britain was promised never arrived: Brussels granted only a time-limited decision on clearing — because EU firms need London’s clearing houses — and withheld the rest as leverage. Waiting for equivalence was a strategy of hoping the counterparty would be generous. It was not.

Meanwhile, regulatory autonomy delivered real wins we do not pretend away: Solvency UK released insurer capital for investment, the bonus cap went, the listing rules were rebuilt for founders, and the share-trading obligation was scrapped. The exodus never matched the forecasts — a few thousand roles moved, not seventy-five thousand — though EU share trading left for Amsterdam and some derivatives business for New York.

EEA membership replaces the equivalence mirage with the thing the City actually asked for in 2016: passporting — the right to sell from London into every EEA market without a subsidiary in Dublin or Frankfurt. The cost is re-adopting the EEA-relevant financial rulebook and constraining parts of Solvency UK. We name the trade rather than hiding it — and we make it, because passporting into the world’s largest capital market is worth more than autonomy over rules the EU’s own Listing Act is now copying from us. But the trade is negotiated, not swallowed whole: the EEA Agreement provides for adaptations and derogations, and the EFTA pillar gives non-EU members a distinct voice. Two specific carve-outs are named accession objectives — transition arrangements for capital already deployed under Solvency UK, and removal of the bankers’ bonus cap. On remuneration we have the stronger argument: the cap is contested even inside the EU as a matter of proportionality and member-state competence, several EEA states apply it only grudgingly, and Britain has already shown the sky does not fall without it. We will press that case rather than concede it by default.

Chapter 5: Healthcare

Universal Healthcare Guaranteed

Healthcare remains available to every person in Britain, regardless of income. The NHS continues to provide:

• Emergency and urgent care

• GP services

• Hospital treatment

• Essential medicines

Free at the point of use. Always. For everyone.

Funding Reform

We will introduce a dedicated 2% Health Levy on income — ring-fenced exclusively for healthcare. This gives the NHS a secure, transparent funding stream independent of annual spending reviews and political cycles.

Let us be plain about what this is: a new, additional 2p tax on income above £20,000. It is the one tax rise in this manifesto, it raises £22bn a year, and it appears — in full — in every household example we publish. We will not insult the reader by calling a tax rise a 'replacement'.

NHS Dentistry — An Urgent Repair Job

NHS dentistry has effectively collapsed as a public service. The 2006 dental contract pays dentists a fixed number of Units of Dental Activity regardless of complexity — making NHS practice economically unviable. The result: millions cannot access an NHS dentist. Adults are pulling their own teeth. Children are being hospitalised for preventable decay.

Free STEM degrees improve the dental pipeline over 10-15 years. Free EU movement restores access to European dental professionals in the short term. But the immediate problem is contract design, not workforce numbers.

• Replace the 2006 UDA contract with a capitation and quality model — dentists paid for registered patients and outcomes

• Minimum NHS commitment for all practising dentists receiving public subsidy

• Dental therapists and hygienists empowered to carry out a wider range of routine treatments

Dentistry and the Australian Model

Dentistry is the one place the Australian split already operates in Britain — and it shows what the model does and does not promise. Most adult dentistry is already co-paid through NHS bands; most Australians pay privately for dental care, which sits largely outside Medicare. So the dentistry rebuild is not about importing the Australian funding split — it is already more privately funded than the Australian norm. It is about making the public commitment that remains actually deliverable:

• Children, emergency, and clinically urgent dental care sit in the NHS guarantee — not the co-payment tier. A child hospitalised for decay is a public-health failure, never a billing event

• The capitation contract makes NHS list-dentistry viable again, so the guarantee has practitioners willing to deliver it — the binding constraint is contract design, not the funding model

• Banded co-payments for routine adult treatment continue, with the existing exemptions (under-18s, pregnancy, low income) preserved in full — the means-tested floor the Australian system lacks

The principle holds across the whole health chapter: the Australian model adds a private tier on top of a guaranteed public core — it never charges children, emergencies, or those who cannot pay. Dentistry is the proof that the line can be drawn and held.

Private Sector Partnership

Following the principles that make Australia’s Medicare system the envy of the developed world:

• Means-tested support for private hospital insurance — ensuring lower-income patients are never disadvantaged

• A 2% surcharge on higher earners who choose not to take private hospital cover — encouraging those who can afford it to use the private sector, freeing NHS capacity for everyone else

• Greater use of independent providers and private facilities to reduce waiting lists

This is not privatisation. It is intelligent use of all available capacity — exactly as Australia has done for 40 years.

The Expected Outcomes

• Shorter waiting lists

• Better patient outcomes

• More NHS capacity for those who need it most

• Long-term public healthcare cost reduction of £20–25bn annually as the private sector absorbs a greater share

Chapter 6: Education and Families

School Calendar Reform

Britain’s six-week summer holiday was designed for an agricultural economy. It no longer reflects modern family life, costs working parents thousands in childcare, and contributes to educational regression — particularly for disadvantaged children.

• Summer break reduced to approximately 4 weeks

• Holidays distributed more evenly throughout the year

• Schools encouraged and funded to run holiday clubs and enrichment activities

This directly improves productivity by keeping more parents — disproportionately women — in work at full hours throughout the year.

University Tuition Fees

University tuition fees have been frozen, cut and raised at political whim for two decades — creating uncertainty for universities, students and the sector as a whole. The result is institutions that cannot plan long-term and students who cannot understand what they are committing to.

• Tuition fees index-linked to inflation (CPI) from the point of this paper’s implementation

• No further political interference in fee levels — universities plan on a stable, predictable basis

• Student loan repayment terms reviewed to ensure graduates from lower-income backgrounds are not disproportionately penalised

Index-linking ends the cycle of political manipulation while giving universities the financial certainty to invest in teaching and research.

Education Is Not Taxed — Independent Schools

F³ holds a principle without exception: education is never taxed. Parents who choose independent education have already paid for the state system through their Local Income Tax — they take nothing from it and relieve it of a place. Taxing them again for educating their own child is double payment dressed as fairness, and it is precisely the social engineering through the tax system this paper rejects everywhere else.

• No VAT on school fees — education is VAT-exempt across Europe and will be in Britain, ending a tax that exists nowhere else in the developed world and aligning us with EEA norms

• Business rates abolished for schools in the first tranche — at Step 1, alongside the high street — because a school is not a warehouse to be taxed on its floor space

And there is a hard-headed economic case beneath the principle. British independent and boarding schools are a soft-power asset in the same class as our universities and the World Service: they educate the children of global elites who go home with a lifelong connection to Britain, they earn billions in export income, and they anchor a brand no competitor can copy. You do not tax a strategic export — you promote it. Britain spent years taxing its own advantage; F³ stops.

Free Degrees for Strategic Subjects

Britain faces critical shortages in medicine, nursing, engineering, computer science and life sciences — shortages that cost the NHS and the economy billions annually. The state already invests £230,000 per medical graduate, yet 52% of foundation year 2 doctors were unemployed in August 2025 while patients waited months for care. We train doctors at enormous public expense, then fail to employ them. This is a systemic failure of workforce planning, not a funding argument against free medical education.

F³ will introduce free tuition — no fees, no student loan — for degrees in the following strategic subjects:

• Medicine and dentistry

• Nursing, midwifery and allied health professions

• Engineering — all disciplines

• Computer science and AI

• Mathematics and physics

• Life sciences — biology, biochemistry, pharmacology

In exchange, all graduates in these subjects — British, EU or international — undertake an identical five-year service commitment in Britain. This is not indentured labour. It is a fair return on a significant public investment, applied without discrimination regardless of nationality. Equal treatment is a Single Market principle — and equal obligations is the same logic applied consistently.

The sliding scale repayment for those who leave early applies equally to all:

• Leave before completing year 1 of service: repay 100% of tuition

• Leave after year 1: repay 80%

• Leave after year 2: repay 60%

• Leave after year 3: repay 40%

• Leave after year 4: repay 20%

• Complete all 5 years: nothing owed

There is no nationality-based discount. A French medical student who trains free in Britain and immediately returns to Paris has received exactly the same public subsidy as a British student doing the same. The obligation is identical. This is also the strongest legal defence against any Single Market challenge — non-discrimination is a core EEA principle, and we apply it in both directions.

Single Market note: EU/EEA students are entitled to home fee status under EEA membership — meaning they qualify for the free degree programme on identical terms to British students. The cost rises from approximately £1.5bn to approximately £2bn annually once EU student uptake is factored in. This is offset by reduced recruitment of expensive overseas professionals, lower NHS agency spend, and the long-term economic return on a stronger STEM pipeline across Britain and Europe.

The 18–22 Guarantee: No One Leaves School Into Nothing

At eighteen, every young person in Britain holds a funded place — or has turned one down. The Guarantee is statutory: an apprenticeship or a further-education place for every 18-to-22-year-old, with four apprenticeship streams built so the offer covers everyone:

• Professional — degree-level apprenticeships in law, accounting, engineering, digital and health: earn, qualify, carry no debt

• Vocational — construction, manufacturing, energy, care and the trades this paper’s housing and infrastructure chapters will demand in volume

• Supported — apprenticeships designed for young people with physical disabilities, learning disabilities and autism: adjusted pace, job coaching, and a funding uplift that makes employers whole. Capability is the test; the format flexes

• Military — an expanded armed-forces apprenticeship intake across engineering, logistics, cyber and medicine, aligned with the 3% defence commitment: a trade and a service record by twenty-one

The alternative is a funded further-education place. What is not an option is nothing. The cliff edge at eighteen — where school ends and no institution catches those who do not go to university — is where NEET numbers, welfare entry and a lifetime of worklessness begin. The welfare chapter’s youth employment guarantee catches those who fall; this Guarantee is built so far fewer do.

Paid For By The Training Point

The Employer Levy is set at 8.5%: a 7.5% core plus a 1-point Training Point. The Training Point from every employer flows into a single National Training Fund — not millions of tiny per-firm pots, which is the design error that would otherwise leave a hairdresser with a £240 balance and no way to use it. The Fund pools the contributions of the whole economy and pays for the training itself. How an employer relates to it depends on size:

• Large employers that run their own apprenticeships draw their Training Point back from the Fund directly, pound for pound, to cover the cost — so a big firm that trains pays an effective 7.5%, and a big firm that does not leaves its point in the Fund for those who do

• Small employers do not self-fund and do not need a large balance of their own. They take on an apprentice and the National Training Fund pays the training and assessment in full for every apprentice under 25 — the apprentice costs the small firm a wage and a workplace, never a training bill. This mirrors the direction the current system is already moving, where small firms taking young apprentices have their training fully funded

• Firms too small to host a full apprenticeship can instead draw on Fund-supported group training schemes shared across a trade or locality, so the corner shop and the single-site garage are not shut out

So the plumber and the hairdresser are not asked to build a fund large enough to train from — an impossible ask on a small payroll. They are asked to give an apprentice a job, and the pooled Fund does the rest. The Training Point is the mechanism that fills the Fund; the entitlement it buys is free apprentice training for the small employer and a direct rebate for the large one. It never disappears into general revenue, and it is scored as fiscally neutral for exactly that reason.

One honest subtlety, because it is a fair challenge: if apprenticeship take-up surges — which is the aim — could the Fund pay out more in training than the Training Point raises? In principle yes, and we treat that as a feature with a funded ceiling, not a hidden hole. The Point is calibrated to fund the realistic take-up the 18-to-22 cohort can absorb; if demand runs ahead of that, the additional cost is met from the same place every other commitment in this paper is — scored openly, against the glide path, and gated if the money is not there. A surge in apprenticeships that strained the Fund would be one of the better problems a government could have, and we would fund it as a deliberate investment rather than pretend it away. What we will not do is the usual trick of scoring a training scheme as free by quietly assuming nobody uses it.

How the Earn-Back Is Policed

Because the Fund pays training providers directly rather than handing employers cash, the small-firm route is hard to abuse by design — there is no rebate cheque to inflate, only an accredited course delivered to a registered apprentice. The large-firm direct rebate is where reclassifying ordinary wages as ‘training’ could tempt, so that mechanism is built to make abuse expensive and easy to catch. Every apprenticeship claimed must be registered on an Apprentice Training Record: the apprentice’s National Insurance number, start date, the accredited qualification being worked toward, and the registered training provider. HMRC matches those National Insurance numbers automatically against the employer’s existing PAYE records. Two things follow. First, the age band does most of the work for free: the Guarantee covers 18-to-22-year-olds, so a claim for an existing mid-career employee fails on the date of birth before anyone even looks at it. Second, where gaming is found — a long-standing employee re-badged as a trainee, a qualification that does not exist, a provider that is not accredited — the penalty is deliberately punitive: the full amount repaid for every affected employee, plus a multiple of the sum wrongly reclaimed, plus director-level liability for systematic abuse. The honest firm gets its training funded or its point rebated with a single registration; the gaming firm pays several times what it tried to save.

Parental Leave — Flexible and Shareable

Chapter 9 makes the demographic case plainly: Britain’s birth rate has fallen well below replacement, and a country that needs more children cannot be silent on the support new parents receive. But the barrier to family life is often not only money — it is rigidity. The current system assumes the mother stays home, hands fathers a meagre fortnight on a use-it-or-lose-it basis, and forces an all-or-nothing choice between work and care. F³ reforms the structure rather than the cost: we keep statutory pay at its current levels — this is not an unfunded giveaway — and instead make the entitlement genuinely flexible and genuinely shareable, because that is what lets modern families actually use it.

• Full shareability: the total leave entitlement belongs to the family, to divide between two parents however they choose — all to one, split evenly, or any combination. We end the assumption that one parent is the carer and the other the earner

• Flexible by the day, not the block: leave can be taken in separate periods rather than one continuous stretch, so parents can overlap at the hardest moments, alternate around work, or phase a return gradually

• A genuine, non-transferable slice reserved for the second parent — paid at the same statutory rate, but ring-fenced so it is lost if not used, the one design that evidence shows actually gets fathers to take leave and normalises shared care

• Self-employed parents brought fully within the system — the entitlement follows the parent, not the employment contract, so a freelancer or company founder is no longer locked out of leave for their own child

• The right to return part-time: a parent may return to the same role on reduced hours for a defined period, dropping to one-and-a-bit household incomes exactly the situation the transferable allowance above is designed to cushion

The pieces are deliberately built to interlock. The demographic case explains why family formation matters; flexible, shareable leave removes the rigidity that deters it; the transferable allowance cushions the income drop when a parent reduces hours; and keeping pay at current levels means the whole package is a structural reform the public finances can carry, not a cheque the glide path cannot honour. Pro-family by design, not by spending.

Minimum Wage and Tax Thresholds

Two of the most important numbers in working people’s financial lives — the minimum wage and the income tax threshold — are currently set by political decision and changed at political whim. We will remove that uncertainty:

• National Minimum Wage index-linked to CPI inflation annually — ending the practice of below-inflation awards that erode real pay

• The £20,000 income tax-free threshold index-linked to CPI — so fiscal drag does not silently pull more workers into taxation over time

• One allowance replaces many: the £20,000 income threshold subsumes the personal allowance, the blind person’s allowance, and the £1,000 trading and property allowances — a single, generous, universal sum instead of a means-tested patchwork. Gift Aid is retained, because it funds charities rather than individuals; the £500 dividend allowance is retained, CPI-indexed, purely as a no-filing rule for small shareholders

• A new £10,000 tax-free savings allowance, CPI-indexed and outside any wrapper, replaces the old £1,000 personal savings allowance — protecting the interest on a meaningful cash buffer for every saver, with no account to open and no provider to choose. This sits alongside the £20,000 income threshold; ordinary savers pay no tax on their interest, and only those with very large cash holdings pay the flat rate on the excess

• VAT thresholds index-linked to CPI — so small businesses are not gradually drawn back into the VAT net by inflation

• The £20,000 CGT annual exempt amount index-linked to CPI — the same anti-fiscal-drag protection applied to capital as to income

• The £10 million National Wealth Credit threshold index-linked to CPI — the floor is for the extraordinarily wealthy, and stays that way

• The £10,000 ISA allowance index-linked to CPI — held stable in real terms, never eroded by stealth, and never quietly cut without a vote

• The £10,000 tax-free savings allowance index-linked to CPI — savers protected from fiscal drag exactly as earners are

• A fully transferable income tax-free allowance between spouses and civil partners — one partner may transfer their entire unused £20,000 to the other, sheltering up to £40,000 of income from the national flat rate in a single-earner household. This applies where the couple has a dependent child under 18, or a dependent child of any age with a disability, and is available from the tax year in which a child is born — so it covers the parental-leave period from the start, when a household first drops to one-and-a-bit incomes, rather than making the family wait for the next April. Single parents keep their own full £20,000 and the family-support provision in Chapter 6

• The transfer is of the income-tax allowance only. The 4% Local Income Tax keeps its own £20,000 threshold per person and is unaffected: the earning spouse remains liable for local income tax on income above their own £20,000, exactly as every other taxpayer is. A transferred allowance lowers the household's national income-tax bill; it never exempts anyone from funding their local services

• Road Charge tiers index-linked to CPI — the flat rate stays flat in real terms

• The Pension Credit Winter Heating Element linked to the average domestic gas price rather than CPI — uniquely among our thresholds, because it exists to cover a specific volatile cost and should track that cost up and down, with no floor and an annually-reviewed cap

• All principal tax thresholds reviewed and uprated annually by the Office for Fiscal Honesty

Index-linking these thresholds removes a persistent tool of stealth taxation — governments have repeatedly frozen thresholds to raise revenue without a visible tax rise. Under F³, that practice ends.

Supporting Families

We will replace Child Benefit — a cash payment that does not guarantee children are better fed, clothed or supported — with direct provision:

• Free breakfasts for all school-age children — universal, with no means test. A fed child learns; the stigma of a means-tested queue is itself a harm, and testing a daily meal costs more to administer than it saves

• Free lunches for all school-age children — universal, on the same principle

• Uniform vouchers — means-tested at a household income of £80,000 (CPI-indexed). Periodic and higher-value, these are easy to target at the families who need them

• Holiday support payments — means-tested at the same £80,000 household threshold, replacing the patchwork of holiday-hunger schemes with one clear entitlement

• Enhanced support for children under five

This ensures support reaches children directly, reduces stigma, and delivers better nutritional and educational outcomes than cash transfers.

Chapter 7: Special Educational Needs Reform

The Problem

Britain’s SEND system is broken — not from lack of spending, but from lack of capacity and a system built around bureaucracy rather than provision:

• SEND spending has risen sharply year after year

• EHCP numbers continue to grow, overwhelming the system

• Tribunal cases have exploded as families fight for basic support

• Parents spend years navigating legal battles that should never be necessary

• Councils face enormous SEND deficits and potential bankruptcy

• Too many children are sent to expensive private special schools because local places simply do not exist

The crisis is not a lack of money. It is a lack of places, a lack of specialist staff, and a bureaucratic process that forces families to fight the system rather than helping their children. Parents should not need lawyers to secure support, and councils should not be forced into financial crisis because specialist provision does not exist.

Reform 1: Diagnosis-Led Funding

For lower and moderate needs — ADHD, dyslexia, mild autism, anxiety, speech and language difficulties — funding will follow diagnosis automatically. No lengthy EHCP battle. No appeals. No waiting years for a decision that should take weeks.

• Schools receive dedicated funding directly upon diagnosis

• Trained SENCOs in every school with genuine authority and accountability

• Earlier intervention, at the point children actually need it

Reform 2: Reserve EHCPs for Complex Cases

Education, Health and Care Plans will be reserved for the children who genuinely need the full weight of multi-agency co-ordination:

• Severe autism, Down syndrome, profound learning disabilities

• Significant physical disabilities requiring specialist environments

• Complex cases requiring co-ordinated health, education and social care

This reduces administrative burden, allows specialists to focus on the highest-need children, and ends the situation where families with moderate-need children spend years in a system designed for something else entirely.

Reform 3: Specialist Units in Mainstream Schools

Every large secondary school will be encouraged and funded to develop dedicated specialist provision on site:

• Autism resource bases

• SEND resource centres

• Speech and language hubs

• Sensory support spaces

This keeps children close to home, close to their peers, and within mainstream education wherever possible — while providing the specialist support they need. It is better for children, better for families, and far cheaper than out-of-area independent placements.

Reform 4: National SEND Capital Fund

We will establish a £5 billion capital programme over five years — £1 billion per year — to build:

• New special schools in areas of acute shortage

• Dedicated autism schools

• SEND units attached to mainstream schools

• Therapy and assessment facilities

This will be funded through government capital borrowing — not day-to-day spending. Borrowing to build schools is investment, not consumption. Just as governments borrow to build roads, hospitals and railways, investing in specialist educational capacity generates long-term fiscal returns.

The arithmetic is compelling. An independent special school placement currently costs councils £60,000–£150,000+ per pupil annually. A maintained special school place costs approximately £35,000. A new 200-place school saves around £13 million per year once full. The capital programme pays for itself within a decade through reduced placement costs alone.

Reform 5: Parent-Directed SEN Budget

Families will receive greater direct control over their child’s support spending, usable for:

• Specialist tutoring and teaching support

• Therapy — occupational, speech and language, psychological

• Specialist software and assistive technology

• Equipment and sensory tools

With proper safeguards against misuse and clear accountability for outcomes.

The Fiscal Position

This is one of the few areas in this paper where modest investment demonstrably reduces long-term public spending:

The net annual revenue cost of approximately £600m is more than offset over time by the returns from the capital programme. As new state special school places replace expensive independent placements, the savings grow year on year.

Chapter 8: Housing and Planning

Planning Reform

• Presumption in favour of development — the default answer to planning applications is yes, not no

• Faster planning decisions with statutory time limits

• Simplified planning system with fewer grounds for obstruction

• Planning objections must include a constructive alternative — not simply opposition

Policy Interaction: Immigration and Housing Supply

The interaction is manageable but requires honest monitoring. F3 sets an explicit housing supply target: 300,000 new homes per year by year 3, rising to 350,000 by year 5. If housing starts fall materially below this trajectory in years 1-2, the immigration openness will be reviewed — not reversed, but the pace of new route expansion moderated until supply catches up. The Land Banking Tax is the primary supply accelerant: by making land banking economically painful from day one, it creates immediate financial incentive to build. The planning presumption in favour of development removes the bureaucratic barrier. Together these should deliver supply within 12-18 months — ahead of immigration volumes building to their full level.

Land Banking Tax

Land banking — holding developable land with planning permission without building on it — is costing Britain tens of thousands of homes every year. Britain’s eight biggest housebuilders alone sit on nearly 500,000 unbuilt plots with a combined estimated value of £200bn. The total national picture, including smaller developers and strategic land holders, represents £300–400bn of developable land lying idle.

We will introduce an annual Land Banking Tax of 2% on the value of land that holds planning permission but remains unbuilt after two years:

• Applied to all landowners — housebuilders, developers, investment funds, and private holders

• Calculated on the assessed development value of the land, not agricultural value

• Exemptions for sites with active construction underway or where development is genuinely blocked by infrastructure constraints

• Revenue ring-fenced in the first parliament for affordable housing and planning capacity

At 2% on an estimated £300bn taxable base, the levy raises approximately £6bn annually before behavioural change. As developers accelerate building to avoid the charge, revenue falls — but housing supply rises, house prices moderate, and economic growth follows. By year three the tax may raise only £2–3bn, but Britain will have gained tens of thousands of additional homes.

Ending Social Engineering in Housing

The current planning system imposes mandatory affordable housing quotas — typically 30-40% of all new developments, rising to 50% under recent Labour reforms — as a condition of planning permission. The intention is admirable. The outcome is counterproductive.

Developers respond to unviable affordable housing requirements in two ways: they either abandon the scheme entirely — currently 8,500 planned affordable homes are at risk because housing associations have withdrawn from Section 106 agreements — or they submit viability assessments arguing the site cannot bear the cost, triggering years of negotiation, legal challenge and delay. Meanwhile, nothing gets built.

The fundamental economic truth is simple: housing becomes affordable when there is enough of it. Cities with high supply — Tokyo, Minneapolis, Auckland since its planning reforms — have moderate and falling house prices. Cities that restrict supply while mandating affordable percentages have expensive housing and less of it.

F³ will remove mandatory affordable housing quotas as a condition of planning permission:

• No central government-imposed affordable housing percentage requirement on private developments

• Developers build what the market needs — more supply of all types moderates prices across the board

• Local authorities retain the ability to use their own land and resources to build social housing directly — this is the appropriate mechanism for delivering genuinely affordable homes

• The Land Banking Tax and planning reform together will unlock far more homes than any quota system has delivered

This is not an argument against social housing — it is an argument that social housing should be built by the public sector on public land, not extracted as a levy from private developers in a way that makes development unviable. The proceeds of the Land Banking Tax, ring-fenced in the first parliament for affordable housing, provide the public sector funding to do exactly that.

Property Tax Reform

Replacing Stamp Duty with Capital Gains Tax (see Chapter 1) directly improves housing market mobility — allowing people to move for work, family or downsizing without punitive transaction costs.

Chapter 9: Immigration

Britain’s immigration policy has been pulled in contradictory directions for a generation — too restrictive for the talent and skills the economy needs, too permissive in the areas where public confidence has been lost. F³ will reverse both failures simultaneously: make it significantly easier for high-value immigration, and significantly firmer on illegal entry and asylum abuse.

Why Britain Needs People — The Honest Starting Point

Begin with the demographics, because everything else follows from them. Britain’s birth rate has fallen to around 1.4 children per woman — well below the 2.1 needed to hold the population steady. The working-age population that pays the tax which funds pensions, the NHS and social care is shrinking relative to the number of retired people who draw on them. A country in that position has only three options: accept managed decline, raise the birth rate overnight (no government has ever managed it), or bring in people who work and contribute. There is no fourth door.

So the honest question is not whether Britain needs immigration — it does, and the maths is not close — but which immigration. The country needs the doctor, the engineer, the care worker, the founder, the graduate who stays and builds: people who pay in more than they take out and who fill the gaps an ageing workforce leaves. It does not need, and the public will not accept, uncontrolled illegal entry or an asylum system gamed by people with no claim. The failure of the last decade was to muddle the two — to wave at a single net-migration number while losing control of its composition. F³ separates them cleanly: more of the migration that builds the country, far less of the migration that strains it.

Free Movement: An Honest Position

Free movement of EU citizens is a fundamental rule of the Single Market. Norway has it. Iceland has it. Liechtenstein has it. There is no credible path to Single Market membership that does not include it. Any politician who claims otherwise is not being straight with the public.

F³ makes this case openly. Free movement from the EU — of workers, students, professionals and families — has been broadly economically beneficial to Britain. The problems attributed to immigration are largely problems of public service capacity, housing supply and wage pressure in specific sectors — all of which our platform addresses directly. The solution is to build more houses, fund public services properly, and raise wages through productivity growth — not to restrict the movement of European citizens who contribute significantly to Britain’s economy and culture.

With free movement restored, seasonal worker schemes for EU nationals become unnecessary. The Single Market itself provides the flexible labour access that British agriculture, hospitality and other sectors need without bureaucratic visa processes.

Attracting Global Talent: An Ambitious Open Door

Beyond EU free movement, Britain should be the most attractive destination in the world for high-performing individuals. Labour has spent its time in office trying to reduce immigration routes despite the obvious economic benefits. This is economically illiterate and nationally self-defeating.

F³ will actively recruit the world’s best minds, most ambitious entrepreneurs and most productive professionals. We will make the visa system for high-value migrants faster, simpler and more generous than any comparable country:

• High Earner Fast Track — any individual with a confirmed salary or contract above £120,000 receives an expedited visa within 14 days, no caps, minimal bureaucracy

• Global Talent Visa — dramatically expanded and simplified for scientists, researchers, engineers, artists, musicians, architects and other exceptional talent

• Entrepreneur Visa — any individual bringing verifiable capital of £250,000+ or founding a company with credible backing receives immediate residency

• Student visas — actively promoted, graduate routes maintained and extended, international students treated as the economic and soft power asset they are

The Trump Opportunity: Recruiting America’s Intellectual Refugees

The United States is conducting a remarkable experiment: systematically alienating the global talent on which its innovation economy depends. Federal research funding has been frozen or cut. Universities are under political attack. Scientists, academics, technologists, artists and financiers are actively looking to leave.

Americans now make up the fastest-growing group of foreign applicants for UK jobs — up 2.4 percentage points in a single year. A Nature survey found 75% of US scientists were considering leaving for Europe or Canada. Nobel laureates are relocating. Dozens of researchers are moving to France following high-profile recruitment campaigns.

Britain is watching this opportunity with one hand tied behind its back — bureaucratic visa processes, hostile rhetoric about immigration, and a government that has cut rather than expanded talent routes. F³ will change this decisively.

• A dedicated US Talent Welcome Programme — streamlined visa processing for American scientists, researchers, technologists, life scientists, financiers and artists seeking to relocate

• Research asylum — formal fast-track routes for researchers whose work is being defunded or suppressed in the US, modelled on France’s Safe Place for Science initiative

• University partnerships — UK universities actively funded and encouraged to recruit displaced US faculty

• Tax incentives for the first three years — non-domiciled status maintained for new arrivals, making Britain financially competitive with the US for relocated talent

Non-EU Skills Migration

Outside the EU free movement framework, Britain maintains a points-based assessment for non-EU immigration:

• Skills-based system — genuine shortage occupations prioritised, with regular independent review of the shortage occupation list

• No salary floor that prices out genuinely needed roles in care, education and public services — shortage occupation designation takes precedence

• Dependant rights maintained — isolating workers from their families is not an immigration policy, it is cruelty that drives talent elsewhere

Asylum: A System That Has Lost Public Confidence

The 1951 Refugee Convention was designed for post-war Europe — to protect people fleeing persecution across land borders in a continent recovering from conflict. It was not designed for a world of mass, organised people smuggling networks, nor for people who cross multiple safe countries to reach a preferred destination.

The result is a system that has lost public confidence and is genuinely being exploited — while genuine refugees in the most desperate circumstances wait longer for protection. That is good for nobody.

The Dublin Opportunity

One of the least-discussed consequences of Brexit is that Britain lost its ability to return asylum seekers to the EU country they arrived from. Before 2021, the Dublin III Regulation allowed returns to France and other EU states. Brexit ended that.

Rejoining the Single Market creates a direct opportunity to fix this. We will negotiate re-entry into a Dublin-equivalent returns framework with the EU as part of Single Market accession — restoring our legal ability to return people who cross from France, and removing the primary incentive for small boat crossings.

Renegotiating Our Asylum Obligations

We will seek to renegotiate Britain’s obligations under the 1951 Convention to enshrine in international law what should always have been its founding principle: that asylum claims must be made in the first safe country reached.

• Pursue renegotiation through diplomatic channels as a priority in our first parliament

• Work with like-minded European partners who share our concerns about the Convention’s current interpretation

• Maintain safe and legal routes for genuine refugees — expanded, well-funded, and properly administered

• Failed asylum applicants removed promptly to home countries or designated safe third countries

The Conditional Commitment

More legal routes in. Firm borders against illegal entry. A treaty that reflects modern reality. A system the public can trust.

Chapter 10: Energy Security and Net Zero

The Honest Transition

Britain is committed to net zero — but honesty requires acknowledging that the transition takes time, and that intermittent renewables alone cannot power a modern economy. The path to a clean energy future runs through a pragmatic bridge, not ideological purity.

Natural gas will remain part of Britain’s energy mix during the transition. Expanding domestic gas production is not a retreat from net zero — it is a rational response to energy security, reducing dependence on imports, keeping bills lower during the transition, and ensuring continuity of supply as we build the clean infrastructure of the future. We will expand domestic natural gas production as a transitional measure, with a clear sunset horizon tied to nuclear and storage capacity coming online.

Ending the Hydrogen Distraction

Significant public money has been directed toward green hydrogen as a heating and transport solution. The evidence does not support this. Green hydrogen is enormously energy-inefficient to produce, expensive to store, and requires entirely new distribution infrastructure. Heat pumps and direct electrification are demonstrably more efficient pathways. We will end government investment in hydrogen as a domestic heating solution and redirect that funding to proven technologies that will actually deliver lower bills and lower emissions.

Nuclear: The Backbone of Clean Baseload

Britain has already taken the right first steps. Rolls-Royce has signed a contract to build the UK’s first three Small Modular Reactors at Wylfa in North Wales, backed by £2.5bn government funding and £599m from the National Wealth Fund. Rolls-Royce estimates the programme will contribute up to $73bn to the UK economy over its lifetime, with 90% of manufacturing in UK factories. We will back this programme fully and accelerate it.

• Full backing for the Rolls-Royce SMR programme at Wylfa — first units targeting grid connection in the mid-2030s

• Fast-track identification of further SMR sites beyond Wylfa — the programme should not stop at three units

• Support for Sizewell C and new large-scale nuclear sites as identified by Great British Energy-Nuclear

• Long-term procurement frameworks giving the British nuclear supply chain the certainty to invest in capacity

Thorium Molten Salt Reactors: The Next Generation

Beyond conventional nuclear lies a technology that could transform Britain’s long-term energy position. Thorium-based Molten Salt Reactors offer significant potential advantages over conventional uranium reactors — and Britain should be at the forefront of their development.

• Thorium is 3-4 times more abundant than uranium and Britain has domestic deposits

• MSRs operate at atmospheric pressure — eliminating the meltdown risk inherent in pressurised water reactors

• Produces dramatically less long-lived radioactive waste — hazardous for hundreds rather than tens of thousands of years

• Cannot easily be weaponised — a significant non-proliferation advantage

Copenhagen Atomics, a Danish company in active conversation with the UK’s National Nuclear Laboratory, has developed a working prototype and claims 300 units delivering 12GW of capacity could be deployed by 2035 under an as-a-service model — at no upfront capital cost to British taxpayers, saving an estimated £8bn annually versus current energy baseline costs.

We will establish a dedicated Thorium MSR development programme — inviting international developers to partner with UK institutions, fast-tracking regulatory assessment, and positioning Britain as the leading Western nation in next-generation nuclear technology. China is already ahead in this race. Britain should not cede that ground.

Geothermal: Britain’s Untapped Strategic Asset

Britain is sitting on an energy and critical minerals asset it has barely begun to exploit. The UK’s first deep geothermal power plant went live at United Downs in Cornwall in February 2026 — and what it revealed should fundamentally reshape our energy strategy.

• The British Geological Survey estimates over 200GW of thermal resource at temperatures suitable for electricity generation lies beneath Britain’s surface

• Geothermal provides 24/7 baseload power — entirely weather-independent, unlike wind and solar

• The Cornwall site simultaneously produces battery-grade lithium carbonate at among the highest concentrations found anywhere in the world

• Scaling lithium production to 18,000 tonnes annually would supply 65% of Britain’s EV battery needs from domestic sources

Geothermal is not just an energy story — it is a critical minerals story. Domestic lithium production reduces supply chain dependence, supports British EV manufacturing, and strengthens national economic security. We will establish a national deep geothermal development programme with fast-track planning consent and long-term revenue certainty for developers.

Fixing the Wind Power Scandal

The problem has two parts. First, location. The majority of UK wind capacity sits in Scotland — far from the major demand centres of England. The transmission network cannot move all that power south when the wind blows strongly. The result: Scottish wind farms are paid to turn off, and gas plants in England are paid to fire up to replace them. Total curtailment payments exceeded £2.5bn in 2025 alone. As Octopus Energy’s Greg Jackson has observed, some energy companies own both a constrained Scottish wind farm and a flexible gas plant in England — allowing them to be paid twice during the same constraint event. Consumers pay both times.

Second, the Contract for Difference structure itself. CfDs guarantee revenue regardless of where power is generated or whether the grid can use it. There is no financial incentive for developers to site projects near demand, near storage, or in ways that reduce grid pressure. The subsidy system is location-blind in a country where location is the entire problem.

We will reform CfDs for all new contracts:

• Locational pricing — strike prices reflect proximity to demand centres and available grid capacity

• Storage co-location incentives — developers pairing generation with battery or pumped hydro storage receive premium contract terms

• Local energy pricing — communities near generation assets pay lower bills, creating genuine social licence for new development and reducing long-distance transmission costs

• End structural curtailment payments — new CfDs include grid risk sharing so developers have a direct financial interest in siting projects where power can actually reach consumers

Energy Storage: The Missing Link

Intermittent renewables become reliable when paired with adequate storage. Britain has massively underinvested here. We will accelerate:

• Grid-scale battery storage co-located with generation and at key grid nodes

• Pumped hydro — Britain’s geography is well suited and planning barriers will be removed

• Vehicle-to-grid technology — turning the growing EV fleet into a distributed national storage asset

The Economic Dividend

Lower energy costs feed directly into business competitiveness, household spending power, and industrial viability. Energy-intensive industries — steel, chemicals, ceramics, glass — can survive and grow in Britain rather than relocating to countries with cheaper power. Domestic lithium production supports the EV and battery industries. Nuclear and geothermal provide the long-term price stability that serious industrial investment requires.

Chapter 11: Transport

Drivers are not the enemy. Commuters are not a problem to be solved. Transport policy should serve the people who use it — not punish them for needing to get somewhere.

Roads

• Motorway speed limit increased to 80mph — recognising that modern vehicles are categorically safer than those of 1965 when the current limit was set

• 20mph limits restricted to residential streets and school zones — not imposed blanket across entire towns and arterial routes

The Road Charge

We will abolish Vehicle Excise Duty and the planned pay-per-mile scheme, and replace both with a single flat Road Charge — one published rate per vehicle class, CPI-indexed, with every pound of revenue allocated in public:

• Cars and vans: £450 a year — petrol, diesel, hybrid or electric, identical

• Motorcycles: £100 a year

• E-bikes: £25 a year, with registration — a number plate, not a revenue line

• Pedal cycles: nothing, ever — no registration, no charge. The line is the motor

• HGVs: the existing weight-based schedule stays — a 44-tonne lorry does exponentially more road damage than a hatchback, and flat-rating it would be a subsidy

• Exemptions preserved: disabled drivers and vehicles over 40 years old

No CO2 bands, no first-year supercar rates, no list-price supplements, no mileage reporting. A Range Rover already pays more VAT at purchase and more fuel duty at the pump than a Fiesta — the state collects on price and on use elsewhere. The access charge has one job, and it does it in one line.

Where Every Pound Goes

The Road Charge raises roughly £17bn a year. The allocation is published and audited annually:

• £2bn — free parking in every town centre, hospital and railway station, replacing the parking income councils, NHS trusts and stations lose

• £4.5bn a year — the Local Roads Renewal programme: the entire £16.8bn pothole backlog cleared within four years, then kept clear

• £1.3bn — local transport infrastructure

• £9bn — the general revenue VED already provides, plus cover for the fuel duty freeze below

The honest household arithmetic: the standard rate rises from £195 to £450 — £255 a year more. Against it: £300–600 of parking charges gone for regular users, and the average £460 pothole repair bill engineered away. For most driving households this is a net gain in year one. For multi-car rural households, who gain least from the Rail Pass, the free parking and renewed roads are precisely the compensation — and we name them rather than hoping nobody adds it up.

Fuel Duty: Frozen, Withering, Never Per-Mile

Fuel duty is frozen in cash terms permanently — no escalator, no staged returns. As the fleet electrifies it withers on schedule: a deliberate, published, fifteen-year tax cut for motorists, part-funded inside the Road Charge allocation above. And we make the commitment Labour would not: there will be no pay-per-mile charging in Britain — not by tracker, not by odometer return, not by stealth. They reach £450 a year by making electric drivers report their mileage; we reach it with one flat line and no forms.

E-Bikes: Registered, Charged, Off the Pavement

Riding on the pavement has been illegal since 1835 — for every cycle, electric or not. The law is not the gap; enforcement is, because an unregistered machine with no plate faces no consequence. The £25 Road Charge tier closes that gap:

• Every e-bike registered, with a visible identifier — making theft recoverable, hit-and-runs traceable and enforcement possible

• Pavement riding on a motorised cycle: a £100 fixed penalty, actually enforced — resourced within our police restoration programme

• Derestricted and throttle-only machines are already motorcycles in law: unregistered ones are seized, full stop

• Delivery platforms made liable for their riders' machines being legal and registered — the illegal e-moto epidemic is a business model, and the businesses will answer for it

• Battery safety standards for imports — ending the fire risk in flats and hallways

• Speed pedelecs (28mph assist) sit in the motorcycle tier, as the law already classifies them

Ordinary pedal cycling stays exactly as it is: free, unregistered, encouraged. The line is the motor — and the principle is the one running through this whole chapter: use the road, share the cost, follow the rules everyone else follows.

Rail: A Transformation, Not a Tweak

The problem with UK rail is not simply that fares are high. It is that the pricing system is incomprehensibly complex, peak fares are punishing, and walk-up tickets bear no relationship to the cost of provision. We will reform all three.

The F³ National Rail Pass

Inspired by Germany’s transformative Deutschlandticket — which attracted 11 million subscribers within months of launch — we will introduce a British equivalent:

• £75 per month or £800 per year for a national pass covering all standard class rail travel

• £45 per month or £480 per year for a regional pass covering travel within a defined zone

• Concessionary rates for under-25s and lower-income over-65s

• Available to individuals and as an employer benefit

The pass model works because a significant proportion of purchasers buy it for flexibility and occasional use — paying in months they travel less, cross-subsidising heavy users. This is not a giveaway; it is intelligent pricing that grows the market.

A London commuter currently spending £4,000 a year on season tickets would save over £3,000. A family making occasional trips to visit relatives would gain flexibility without the lottery of dynamic pricing. A business offering the pass as a staff benefit would see measurable improvements in recruitment, retention and punctuality.

Peak Fare Cap

Walk-up and peak fares will be capped at a fixed multiple of the equivalent off-peak fare — ending the practice of charging commuters who have no choice but to travel at peak times whatever the market will bear.

Ticketing Simplification

The complexity of UK rail ticketing is itself a hidden tax. We will mandate a simplified national fare structure — no more than five fare types on any route — and require all operators to sell the cheapest available fare for any given journey proactively, without passengers needing to know which obscure ticket type to request.

The Commuter Mobility Levy

Large employers are the primary beneficiaries of an efficient commuter network. A business with hundreds of employees in a city centre depends on public transport to function. Yet the cost of that infrastructure falls entirely on passengers and the public purse.

We will introduce a Commuter Mobility Levy on companies with 250 or more employees or a payroll above a specified threshold:

• A modest levy of approximately 0.3% of payroll above the threshold

• Revenue ring-fenced exclusively for: reduced commuter rail fares, peak fare caps, station improvements, park-and-ride expansion, and local transport links to employment hubs

• Applied regionally — revenue raised in the North funds Northern rail, revenue raised in London funds London commuter routes

• Far smaller than the Business Rates we are abolishing — net effect on large employers remains strongly positive

At 0.3% of eligible payroll, the levy raises approximately £1.2bn annually — precisely the funding gap created by capping peak fares and subsidising the national pass. Large employers gain a more reliable, punctual workforce. Workers gain affordable travel. The levy pays for itself in productivity.

Rail Reliability

• Stronger performance contracts with operators — with meaningful financial penalties for persistent delay

• Long-term investment in capacity, electrification and station infrastructure

• Open-access competition on suitable routes — the single biggest driver of lower fares where it has been tried

Chapter 12: Defence and National Security

The Commitment

The UK currently spends 2.4% of GDP on defence — £60bn annually, rising to £73.5bn by 2028-29. NATO’s emerging expectation is 3.5% of GDP. The gap between commitment and requirement is real, growing, and cannot be filled by tinkering at the margins of existing budgets.

We will increase defence spending to 3% of GDP within this parliament and set a clear path to 3.5% — matching the seriousness of the threat environment with the seriousness of our response.

Honest accounting: 3% of GDP is roughly £15bn a year above current plans by the end of the parliament. Most of that is resource spending — pay, training, munitions, operations — and it appears in our fiscal scorecard as a ramped cost of £3bn in Year 1 rising to £8bn by Year 5. The capital share — ships, aircraft, infrastructure — is financed through the Defence Bond. We do not pretend salaries can be paid with bonds, and we will not park the largest spending commitment in this paper outside its own fiscal framework.

The F³ Defence Bond

We will fund a significant portion of the defence spending increase through a public Defence Bond programme — modelled on the success of Green Savings Bonds and the wartime bond model that has served democracies in every major conflict:

• Retail Defence Bonds available to every British citizen and institution

• Competitive fixed-rate returns over 3, 5 and 10 year terms

• Revenue ring-fenced exclusively for capital defence investment — ships, aircraft, vehicles, cyber infrastructure

• Not counted against day-to-day borrowing rules — defence capital investment is treated as national infrastructure, not consumption

Defence bonds do three things simultaneously: they fund the capability Britain needs, they give British savers a patriotic and financially sound investment, and they build public engagement with and support for defence investment. At a time when the transatlantic security guarantee is less certain than at any point since 1945, that public buy-in matters.

Buy British: A Defence Industrial Strategy

Britain has world-class defence industries in aerospace, shipbuilding, cyber, electronics and AI. Too often, procurement decisions default to overseas suppliers when British alternatives exist or could be developed. We will end this.

Article 346 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union explicitly allows member states to exempt defence procurement from Single Market rules where essential security interests are at stake. France routinely uses this to buy French nuclear submarines. Belgium awarded a 20-year strategic partnership for light weapons to FN Herstal without competitive tendering. Germany buys German armoured vehicles. Britain will use the same legal tools every major European defence nation already deploys.

• A strong preference for British design and systems integration on all security-sensitive defence contracts — invoked through Article 346 exemptions where legally appropriate

• British content requirements for non-sensitive components where this can be justified on industrial policy grounds

• Long-term procurement frameworks that give British defence industry the certainty to invest in capacity and skills

• Defence as an industrial policy — every pound spent on British defence capability circulates in the British economy, supports British jobs, and builds sovereign technological capability

We will not apply a blanket Buy British rule that would be legally unsustainable — but we will apply the Article 346 security exemption as broadly and assertively as the treaty allows, and more assertively than any recent British government has done. The legal tools exist. The political will has been absent. F³ will supply it.

Cyber and Technology

• Significant increase in investment in cyber defence and offensive capability

• Britain’s AI and technology sector enlisted as a national security asset — with appropriate frameworks for responsible use

• Sovereign satellite and communications capability

• Electronic warfare and counter-drone systems — the warfare of the near future, not the last war

European Defence Cooperation

Rejoining the Single Market creates an opportunity to rebuild Britain’s defence industrial relationships with European partners — particularly in the context of reduced US engagement with NATO. We will pursue deeper bilateral defence cooperation with France, Germany, Poland and the Nordic nations, and seek to participate in EU defence industrial programmes where British interests are served.

Chapter 13: Pensions and Retirement

Britain’s pension system has two distinct problems: a state pension that is becoming unaffordable in its current form, and a private pension system that leaves too many workers — particularly the self-employed, part-time and lower-paid — with inadequate retirement savings. We will address both.

State Pension Reform

First, How the State Pension Is Funded — Because Abolishing NI Raises the Question

If employee National Insurance is abolished, what funds the state pension? The question is natural and the answer is reassuring, because it rests on a fact most people have never been told: National Insurance has not funded pensions in any real sense for decades. The UK state pension is pay-as-you-go — today's contributions pay today's pensioners, immediately, with nothing invested and no personal pot. The so-called National Insurance Fund is an accounting device that holds only a small working balance and is topped up from general taxation whenever it falls short. In substance, National Insurance was already a tax with a different name; the link between what you paid and what you receive was severed long before F³.

So folding employee National Insurance into the single income tax changes the label on the money, not the money itself. Pensions continue to be paid from general revenue, pay-as-you-go, without a day's interruption — exactly as they are now, and exactly as they are in the many developed countries that fund state pensions from general taxation rather than a separate contribution. Nothing about abolishing NI defunds the pension, because NI was never a fund.

What must be preserved is not the tax but the entitlement record — the qualifying-years count that determines who receives the full pension. That record continues unbroken on the same HMRC and PAYE systems that already track everyone's earnings: a year worked is a year credited, precisely as today, and the credits for those who cannot work — carers, the disabled, the unemployed — are retained in full (Chapter 20). You will build, keep and prove your state-pension rights exactly as before. The only thing that disappears is a separate, regressive payroll tax that stopped functioning as insurance generations ago.

• End the Triple Lock — linking pensions to CPI inflation instead, maintaining real-terms value without the ratchet effect

• Pensioners retain the full value of their pension; it simply grows in line with prices rather than whichever of three metrics is highest each year

• A five-yearly earnings review — an independent report to Parliament on where the pension stands against average earnings. Any correction is a decision for the government of the day, taken openly against the fiscal position: a review, not a ratchet. We abolished one automatic lock; we will not legislate another

The Triple Lock costs £12–15bn per year more than inflation-linked uprating. Over a generation it will cost hundreds of billions. That money is better spent on health, housing and opportunity for working-age Britain.

Pensioner Benefits

The universal Winter Fuel Payment is abolished — not means-tested, abolished. Means-testing it would only swap one unfairness for another, creating exactly the kind of cliff edge this paper rejects, where the pensioner a pound over the threshold loses everything. Instead we do two cleaner things at once. For every pensioner, the universal benefit becomes the abolition of VAT on domestic energy (Chapter 1) — a permanent cut to the heating bill of every household in the country, pensioner or not. And for the poorest pensioners, a Winter Heating Element is built into Pension Credit, paid automatically each winter and linked to the average domestic gas price. This is the honest design: the help tracks the thing it exists to cover. In an expensive winter it rises automatically; in a cheap-gas year it falls, and if gas is cheap enough it falls to nothing — because at that point the heating bill is low, the energy-VAT abolition is already doing the work, and a payment that kept flowing regardless would be the very with-no-regard-to-need spending this paper abolished at the universal level. We deliberately set no floor: help should scale with the problem, not exist for its own sake. We do set a cap, reviewed annually against the same gas-price data Ofgem uses for the price cap — not to abandon pensioners in a crisis but to keep the commitment budgetable, because an uncapped payment indexed to a volatile global commodity is exactly the open-ended liability the fiscal glide path exists to prevent. The asymmetry is intentional: no floor, because cheap gas needs no subsidy; a cap, because a price spike must not blow a hole in the public finances. It rides on Pension Credit's existing taper, so it adds no new cliff. Free bus passes are similarly retargeted at pensioners on Pension Credit. As one in four pensioners is now a millionaire, a universal payment funded by working households was always a transfer from the struggling young to the comfortable old. We end the universal version and protect the pensioners who actually need it — by name, without a cliff.

And the other side of the ledger — what pensioners gain under F³: the £86,000 Dilnot cap on lifetime care costs, reinstated (Chapter 20) — the largest pro-pensioner commitment on offer from any quarter; a CGT downsizing relief so moving to a smaller home is never taxed (Chapter 1); and a state pension guaranteed in law never to fall in real terms. We ask wealthier pensioners to give up universal perks. We give every pensioner protection from the catastrophic care costs no government has ever actually delivered.

Private Pensions: A System That Works — With Reforms

The existing private pension framework — tax relief on contributions, tax-free growth, and auto-enrolment — is broadly sound. We will keep what works and fix what does not.

Abolish Salary Sacrifice — For All Benefits

Salary sacrifice schemes — for pensions, cars, bikes and other benefits — were designed as a minor flexibility tool. They have grown into a major and incoherent tax avoidance mechanism. In 2024, £32bn of pension contributions alone used salary sacrifice arrangements, costing the exchequer billions in lost revenue that falls disproportionately on those who cannot access such schemes.

Under F³, employee National Insurance is abolished and employer NIC is halved. Salary sacrifice exists primarily to avoid NICs — so most of its rationale disappears with the reform itself. We will abolish all salary sacrifice arrangements cleanly and completely, replacing them with a simpler, fairer system where pension contributions receive straightforward tax relief at the contributor’s marginal rate.

Honest scoring: because the NIC saving that made salary sacrifice valuable is largely extinguished by our own reform, abolition yields roughly £0.5bn a year from boundary effects — not the £5bn a static reading against today’s system would claim, which would double-count revenue already moved by the NIC changes. The case for abolition now rests where it always should have: simplicity, and equal treatment between the employee of a sophisticated employer and everyone else.

Mandatory Employer Contributions

Auto-enrolment has been transformative but employer contributions remain too low and too discretionary. We will move to a mandatory employer contribution model — drawing on international best practice:

Australia’s Superannuation Guarantee requires employers to contribute 12% of ordinary earnings — a rate that has been legislatively increased year on year and is now settled at that level. Denmark and the Netherlands have similarly strong mandatory employer contribution frameworks that deliver retirement incomes their citizens can actually live on.

• Mandatory employer contributions set at 10% of salary — 8% to the pension and 2% to the Personal Care Account (Chapter 20) — phased in over three years, with a five-year schedule for employers with fewer than 50 staff

• Auto-enrolment maintained and strengthened — with opt-out rather than opt-in as the default for all workers including part-time

• Extended to the self-employed through a simplified flat-rate contribution mechanism

We state the split plainly: the pension element is 8%, and the Care Account is the other 2%. At 8% employer pension contributions plus the 2% Care Account and typical employee contributions of around 5%, total retirement-and-care saving reaches roughly 13% of pay — above Australia’s 12% Superannuation Guarantee — while pre-funding the care costs Australia’s system leaves unsolved.

Simplified Annual Allowance

The current pension tax relief system — with its annual allowance, tapering for high earners, money purchase annual allowance, and lifetime allowance legacy rules — is needlessly complex and creates perverse incentives:

• Annual contribution limit set at £60,000 — sufficient for serious retirement saving without being a tax shelter for the very wealthy

• Abolish the tapered annual allowance entirely — it is complicated, creates cliff edges, and discourages senior professionals from working

• No lifetime cap — the previous lifetime allowance was administratively burdensome and discouraged pension saving among those who most need long-term certainty

Simple rules. Generous limits. No taper. Consistent treatment regardless of income level.

Chapter 14: Inheritance and Wealth

Ordinary family homes and working estates should not face large inheritance tax bills built over a lifetime of work. The state should not be a primary beneficiary of a family’s life savings.

Inheritance Tax Reform

• No inheritance tax on estates below £3 million — protecting the overwhelming majority of families including most working farms

• Estates taxed at the flat income-tax rate — 37%, falling to 35% when the income rate does at Step 4 — levied only on the excess above £3 million

The £3 million threshold is deliberately set to protect genuine family wealth without requiring complex carve-outs. The average working farm in England — 203 acres at £11,000 per acre plus farmhouse and buildings — sits at approximately £2.5–3 million. The threshold already protects most genuine working farms without needing Agricultural Property Relief or specific exemptions. Larger landholdings above £3 million, often held as investment assets rather than working farms, contribute proportionately at the flat rate — 37%, then 35%. One rate for income, the same rate for estates: when the OBR gate cuts it for the living at Step 4, it cuts it for legacies too. Both start and finish below today’s 40%.

Business Relief: Deferral, Not Exemption

Business Relief — the open-ended exemption for business assets — is abolished and replaced by the principle the National Wealth Credit uses: no exemption, no forced sale. Inheritance tax attributable to genuinely illiquid business assets is payable over ten years, interest-bearing at the gilt rate plus 2%, secured against the asset — so no family firm is ever broken up to pay a death bill, and no portfolio is ever assembled purely to dodge one. The £3m threshold already shields small firms entirely. The industry that marketed AIM portfolios as inheritance-tax products loses its product; the Growth Exchange gains a market held for growth instead of wrappers. And this base-broadening is what lets our +£4bn scoring stay conservative.

This is simpler, fairer and more honest than a system of complex reliefs that in practice benefit wealthy landowners and are lobbied for by those with the resources to exploit them.

Non-Domiciled Residents and Overseas Assets

The previous government’s decision to apply inheritance tax to the worldwide assets of long-term UK residents — regardless of where those assets are held — was a significant deterrent to wealthy individuals choosing to live, invest and spend in Britain.

Britain’s status as a global financial centre depends on attracting internationally mobile talent, entrepreneurs and investors. A policy that effectively taxes their entire global estate on death — including assets in countries where they also pay tax — is duplicative, punitive and self-defeating.

• Reverse the extension of IHT to overseas assets of non-domiciled long-term residents

• Restore the previous regime under which UK assets of non-doms are subject to IHT but overseas assets are not

• Maintain the £3 million threshold for UK-sited assets regardless of domicile status

This sends a clear signal that Britain welcomes internationally mobile wealth and talent — consistent with our broader platform of openness, growth and global ambition.

The National Wealth Credit

Everything else in this paper builds the environment in which wealth is created: courts that work, the Single Market restored, a free STEM pipeline, fast-track visas for talent, falling energy costs, CGT tapering to 10% for long-term holders, no stamp duty on shares, no taper traps. Wealth creation and accumulation are good — this platform exists to produce more of both. But when individuals hold more than entire nations while structuring their personal tax toward zero, the compact between wealth and the society that enables it has failed. The Credit repairs it: not a punishment for success, but a floor under contribution.

How It Works

• A minimum annual contribution on net wealth above £10 million — a threshold index-linked to CPI, so fiscal drag never pulls the merely successful into a system built for the extraordinarily wealthy

• Rates on the slice: 1% between £10m and £100m; 1.5% between £100m and £1bn; 2% above £1bn

• Every pound of UK income tax, capital gains tax and dividend tax paid in the year is a credit against the floor. Only the shortfall is collected. A £30m founder paying £400,000 in tax already owes nothing

• Roughly 22,000 people are above the line. Below £10 million the Credit can never apply — by statute

Wealth, Exactly Defined

A floor only works if the base is complete. Net wealth for Credit purposes means worldwide net assets at 5 April each year, self-assessed with full HMRC audit rights:

• Cash, deposits and money-market holdings

• Listed securities and funds, at market value

• Unlisted and private company shares — at a provisional value (the most recent arm’s-length transaction, or a published assets-and-earnings formula), with a true-up at eventual sale so any under- or over-payment is corrected with interest. Valuation disputes are settled by reality, not by tribunal

• All real property, UK and overseas, including the main residence — at £10 million there is no sympathy case

• Pension wealth: defined-contribution pots at value, defined-benefit rights at transfer value

• Trust interests, looked through to settlors and beneficiaries; assets held in personal investment companies attributed pro-rata — the two classic escape routes, closed at the design stage

• Loans owed to the individual, crypto-assets at market value, and intellectual-property and royalty rights

• Art, collectibles, vehicles, vessels and aircraft — individual items under £10,000 ignored, collections valued as collections

• Less all debts and liabilities: this is a net measure. Gifts to minor children are attributed to the parent; spouses are assessed individually, with anti-fragmentation rules

There are no exemptions — not for business assets, not for pensions, not for homes. France exempted ‘business assets’ and watched everything become a business asset; the exemption is the avoidance superhighway, and we are not building one. Illiquidity is real — but it is a payment problem, not an exemption problem, and it is solved below.

Liquidity, Not Carve-Outs

• Contributions attributable to illiquid assets may be deferred until a liquidity event, accruing interest at the gilt rate plus 2%, secured by a charge over the asset. No founder is ever forced to sell their company to pay

• Payment in kind: contributors may settle in shares, transferred at market value to the British Future Fund — the state that built the environment takes its stake in the success it enabled

• In-kind receipts are revenue, not borrowing — the Future Fund’s surplus-only capitalisation rule is unaffected

The Exit Lock

Norway learned in 2022 that a wealth contribution without an exit charge is a relocation incentive — and fixed it only after the departure lounge had emptied. We adopt the fix before launch, not after:

• Leaving the UK triggers a deemed disposal: CGT on unrealised gains at departure, with a deferral election for moves within the EEA — the design settled European case law requires, keeping the Credit fully Single Market-compatible

• The floor itself trails after departure, on wealth accumulated while UK-resident — at a taper, not a cliff. A departing contributor who was fully within the Credit pays the full floor in their first year away, then four-fifths, three-fifths, two-fifths and one-fifth across the following four years, reaching nil after five. Leaving is a gradual exit from the obligation, not an overnight escape from it

• Outside the EEA, the exit charge is drafted to survive Britain’s double-tax treaties — because several of them would otherwise override a domestic exit charge on emigration. Most UK treaties follow the OECD model, which leaves gains on emigration to the departing state in defined cases, but some allocate taxing rights in ways that would blunt the charge. We will legislate the exit charge as a tax on gains accrued during UK residence, crystallised at departure — the form treaty practice already recognises (Canada, Australia and the United States all operate departure or expatriation charges alongside their treaty networks) — and, where a specific treaty would still frustrate it, that treaty will be renegotiated or notified for the limited change required, on the same timetable as accession. We name this rather than discover it in court: an exit charge that any competent adviser could treaty-shop around would not be worth legislating

• You are free to leave. Your dues are not

The Ten-Year Runway

The Credit applies from the tenth year of UK residence. Someone arriving under our talent programmes gets a decade before the floor reaches them — consistent with the restored non-dom architecture, and a materially better offer to arriving wealth than the regime Britain operates today. We are not ambivalent: we want the world’s wealth creators here. The Credit is designed so that coming remains rational and staying remains fair.

Three clarifications, because clever advisers will ask. First, the ten years are cumulative across a lifetime, not consecutive — leaving in year nine and returning later does not restart the clock. Second, the exit charge — deemed-disposal CGT on gains accrued while resident — applies to every leaver from day one, runway or not: everyone settles their capital gains on the way out. Third, and this closes the obvious gambit, the runway itself tapers rather than ending in a cliff. We considered letting the year-nine leaver walk owing no Credit at all — the simplest design — but it hands the wealthiest a clean exit precisely one year before the obligation begins, and rewards the adviser who books a departure in month one hundred and seven. So entry into the Credit phases in across the final years of the runway: someone who leaves in year nine pays a proportionate share reflecting how close they came to full residence, not zero. The honest principle is symmetry — the Credit fades in as residence lengthens and fades out as departure recedes, with no single date on which a fortune can step across the line untouched. Britain charges for the harvest, even where it never charged for the field — and it does not leave a one-day gate open in the fence.

Honest Revenue

Mechanical gross: £12–14bn a year on roughly £1.2 trillion of above-threshold wealth. Minus the credits this group already earns through tax actually paid — £6–8bn. Minus a residual behavioural response, kept small because exit no longer escapes the charge. We score the National Wealth Credit at £5bn a year from Year 2 (£3bn in our LOW scenario, £8bn in HIGH) — deliberately a third of what campaign groups claim for similar designs, because this manifesto’s credibility rests on being the document that does not do fantasy yields. Year 1 is registration and valuation infrastructure; revenue begins at Step 2.

And the name is the mechanism: it is called a Credit because it works as one. Those who pay, pay nothing more. Those who structure to zero meet, for the first time in British history, a floor.

Chapter 15: Financial Reform and Capital Markets

The Scale of the Problem

The numbers tell an unambiguous story of decline. In 2024, 88 companies delisted or transferred their primary listing from London — the largest exodus since the financial crisis. Proceeds raised from London IPOs fell 64% in the first half of 2025. AstraZeneca and Wise are among the companies exploring US listings. Deal numbers fell roughly 80% between 2022 and 2025.

The causes are structural and largely self-inflicted: stamp duty on share trading that no other major financial centre imposes, pension fund domestic equity allocations that have collapsed from over 50% in the 1990s to below 5% today, listing rules that have been too rigid for founder-led technology companies, and a decade of political and economic uncertainty that has depressed valuations relative to the US.

Abolish Stamp Duty on Share Trading

Stamp duty on shares is, as City leaders have called it, a self-inflicted wound. No other major financial centre taxes equity investment this way. It suppresses trading volumes, depresses share valuations, drives institutional investors into derivatives to avoid the charge — reducing transparency and compounding the impression of poor liquidity — and actively discourages companies from listing in London.

The economic case for abolition is overwhelming. Independent modelling shows abolition would:

• Permanently increase UK GDP by 0.2–0.7%

• Trigger a one-off 4% uplift in UK equity valuations — worth approximately £100bn in additional wealth

• Leave the average defined contribution pension pot more than £6,000 larger over a career

• Be revenue-positive in the medium term — the growth effects generate more tax than the £3.3bn annual stamp duty take

We will abolish stamp duty on all UK share transactions. This is the single most impactful measure available to revive the London market and it costs the exchequer nothing in the medium term.

Reviving the IPO Market

London’s listing rules have been reformed — but not enough and not fast enough. Companies, particularly in technology, have consistently chosen New York over London because of valuation gaps, investor depth and structural flexibility. We will go further:

• Dual class share structures — formally embrace and simplify the rules allowing founder-led companies to maintain control post-IPO, as New York has done for decades

• Retail investor participation — make it structurally easier for retail investors to participate in IPOs at the same terms as institutions, deepening the domestic investor base

• A British Growth Exchange — a dedicated market for high-growth companies, designed around the four things AIM never had. Full design below

• Secondary listings — actively market London as the premier venue for international companies seeking a secondary listing, with streamlined dual-listing rules

• FTSE index reform — review the criteria that determine FTSE inclusion to ensure the index better reflects the growth companies of the future, not just the incumbents of the past

Pension Funds and UK Equity

The collapse of pension fund allocation to UK equities is perhaps the single biggest structural driver of London’s decline. When domestic institutions owned 50% of UK shares, London had deep, liquid markets and strong valuations. At below 5%, the market is structurally disadvantaged.

Mandating pension fund allocations to UK equity is too blunt and potentially harmful to savers' returns. The primary lever is stamp duty abolition — which immediately reduces the cost disadvantage of UK equity and triggers the £100bn valuation uplift that makes UK equities structurally more attractive without regulatory compulsion. Beyond that:

• Stamp duty abolition on shares is the primary lever — the single most impactful measure for UK equity markets, revenue-positive in the medium term, and creating the structural demand that a dedicated savings account was intended to achieve

• The ISA becomes a single investment wrapper for shares and funds only. The cash ISA is abolished — but savers lose nothing, because the new £10,000 tax-free savings allowance (Chapter 1) shelters cash interest directly, with no account to open. The wrapper does what it was always meant to do — channel long-term capital into productive assets — while everyday cash saving is simply tax-free up to a generous limit

• Solvency and investment rules — review the regulatory framework that has pushed pension funds into bonds and away from equities, removing the regulatory bias against long-term UK equity investment

• Sovereign wealth participation — the British Future Fund (below): surplus-funded, never gilt-funded, a patient cornerstone for UK equities

• Pension fund reporting — funds above a certain size required to explain publicly why they hold less than 10% in UK equities, creating accountability without mandating allocation

Single Market note: F³ originally proposed a British ISA restricted to UK-listed equities. This has been removed as incompatible with EEA free movement of capital rules. Stamp duty abolition, a shares-only ISA, and the separate cash savings allowance together achieve the same structural goal — more capital into equities — more powerfully and without legal conflict. The contrast with the current approach is deliberate: where today’s reform cuts the cash ISA limit and threatens a punitive charge on cash held in share accounts, F³ uses the carrot — a generous tax-free savings allowance — not the stick.

The British Growth Exchange: A Stock Exchange, Not a Tax Wrapper

AIM’s decline — from 1,700 companies to under 700 — is not a branding problem. Institutions will not hold small-caps locked out of the index series; abundant private capital lets companies stay unlisted longer; and much of what remained was held for inheritance-tax relief rather than growth: an estate-planning product with a ticker attached. The Growth Exchange is built on the four things AIM never had:

• Index inclusion from day one — BGX constituents enter a FTSE Growth index family with automatic graduation to the FTSE 250 and FTSE 100 as they scale. Tracker demand follows the index; AIM’s exclusion was its liquidity death sentence

• An anchor investor — the British Future Fund may cornerstone BGX floats and warehouses the shares the state receives through National Wealth Credit payment-in-kind: a patient demand floor no junior market has ever had

• The pension channel — BGX holdings count toward the 10% UK-equity explain-or-comply reporting rule for large schemes

• One rulebook — a single proportionate FCA regime replaces the Nomad system and its £400,000-a-year quote-maintenance overhead

How It Fits the Tax System

• EIS, SEIS and VCT continue — and a BGX listing counts as 'unquoted' for their purposes, exactly as AIM does today, so floating never triggers a relief clawback. The ladder runs SEIS, to EIS, to BGX, to the main market — with no tax cliff at any rung

• CGT holding periods carry through the IPO — a founder’s or early backer’s taper clock does not reset at listing. Ten patient years means 10%, uncapped: Business Asset Disposal Relief without the £1m ceiling, available to every long-term shareholder

• No stamp duty — like every share in Britain under F³

• And no inheritance-tax wrapper: Business Relief becomes a ten-year deferral, not an exemption (Chapter 14). The Growth Exchange will be held for growth, because growth is all it offers

The British Future Fund: An Investment Trust the Nation Owns

In structure, the Fund is an investment trust with a single shareholder — the Treasury: closed-end, permanent capital, an independent board on staggered statutory terms, professional managers on published mandates, quarterly NAV, audited by the National Audit Office, holdings register public. The governance models are Temasek and Norway’s oil fund — not a quango, and not a minister’s chequebook.

• Capital from three sources only: realised fiscal surpluses under the glide path, shares received through National Wealth Credit payment-in-kind, and its own reinvested returns. Never gilt issuance — the state does not borrow to buy equities

• Mandate: long-term total return for the nation, with authority to cornerstone British Growth Exchange floats — capped at 10% of any company, votes cast on a published passive policy. A patient shareholder, never a controlling one

• Anti-raid protection: the mandate sits in primary legislation; no distributions for the first decade, and thereafter only under a published spending rule once debt is on its statutory path

• Honest scale: an acorn by design — perhaps £3–8bn by Year 5 from in-kind receipts and early surpluses. The point is to build the institution now, so the surpluses of the 2030s have somewhere to compound

What it is not: leveraged, redeemable, or available for bailouts. An investment trust cannot be run on — and this one cannot be raided.

Capital Gains Tax: A Fair and Coherent Framework

Britain’s CGT system is a patchwork of rates, reliefs, exemptions and cliff edges that has been repeatedly tinkered with for political rather than economic reasons. The current system is neither fair nor growth-promoting. We will replace it with a coherent framework built around three principles: alignment with income tax, protection from inflation, and reward for long-term patient capital.

Rate Alignment

CGT is aligned with the prevailing flat income tax rate — 37%, falling to 35% at Step 4 — so the top of the holding-period taper always equals the income rate of the day. The distortion between income and capital gains rates creates perverse incentives — to disguise income as capital, to structure remuneration artificially, and to defer sales for tax rather than economic reasons. Alignment ends them: the shortest-held gains are taxed exactly as income, and only genuine long-term holding earns the taper below.

Dividends follow the same principle, with one deliberate adjustment. Dividend income is taxed at the flat rate — 37%, then 35% — but with a fixed credit for the corporation tax already paid at 30%, so the same profit is not fully taxed twice. The combined burden on distributed company profit therefore lands close to the rate on labour income, removing the incentive to dress salary as dividend that a naked rate gap would create. The £500 dividend allowance is retained and CPI-indexed, sparing small shareholders from filing over trivial sums.

Indexation Relief

Gains attributable to inflation will not be taxed — only real gains. If an asset bought for £100,000 is sold for £120,000 after inflation has risen 15%, the taxable gain is £5,000 not £20,000. This is the crucial protection for genuine risk-takers and long-term investors — you pay tax only on wealth genuinely created, not on monetary illusion. Indexation will be calculated using CPI from the date of acquisition.

Holding Period Taper

Patient capital — investment held for years or decades — creates more genuine economic value than short-term trading. The tax system should reflect this. We will introduce a holding period taper on the effective CGT rate after indexation:

An entrepreneur who builds a business over 15 years and sells it pays 10% CGT on real gains — after inflation is stripped out. A short-term trader pays the full income rate of the day. This is the right incentive structure: it rewards genuine wealth creation and long-term risk-taking while ensuring the state benefits proportionately from shorter-term gains.

Annual Exempt Amount

The annual CGT exempt amount has been salami-sliced from £12,300 to £3,000 — a stealth tax increase that has swept ordinary investors and small savers into CGT liability. We will restore and increase it to £20,000 — sending a clear signal that saving and investing is encouraged, not penalised — and index-link it to CPI.

The Holding-Period Taper — Bands Defined

• Under 2 years: the full income rate — 37%, then 35% at Step 4. Speculation pays exactly what earned income pays

• 2 to 5 years: 25%

• 5 to 10 years: 17.5%

• 10 years and beyond: 10% — uncapped, for every shareholder, with no employment condition attached

• Clocks follow the shares: holding periods carry through IPOs, reconstructions and share-for-share exchanges — and through being fired. The taper rewards patient ownership, not job titles

Worked Example: The Founder Forced Out

Seven years in, two funding rounds, a £70m company — and a 20% founder forced out and forced to sell. Proceeds of £14m against a near-nil base cost. Seven years puts the gain in the 17.5% band: tax of roughly £2.45m, against about £3.3m under today’s BADR-plus-24% system — and £1.4m had they reached year ten. Two design choices matter here. First, the taper attaches to the shares, not the job: today’s reliefs carry employment conditions that a boardroom coup can poison; ours cannot be weaponised by the people removing you. Second, the National Wealth Credit charges nothing extra — £2.45m of CGT paid is credit far beyond a £40k floor, and any provisional Credit deferred against the private shares in earlier years simply trues up at the sale.

Business Asset Disposal Relief

The existing Business Asset Disposal Relief — which charges 18% on the first £1m of qualifying business gains — will be replaced by the holding period taper, which is more generous for long-term entrepreneurs and simpler to administer. The artificial £1m lifetime cap disappears; what matters is how long you built the business, not an arbitrary ceiling.

Financial Regulation

London’s regulatory framework — the FCA, the PRA, the Bank of England — is broadly sound. The instinct to regulate proportionately and principles-based rather than rules-based has served Britain well. We will maintain this approach and resist the temptation to follow the EU into ever-more-prescriptive financial regulation.

• FCA mandate explicitly includes competitiveness and growth as primary objectives alongside consumer protection — as recently legislated but insufficiently operationalised

• Fintech and digital assets — maintain Britain’s position as the leading global centre for responsible fintech innovation with a clear, predictable regulatory sandbox approach

• Green finance — support London’s position as the world’s leading green finance centre without mandating disclosures that add cost without adding information value

Chapter 16: Arts, Culture and Tourism

Film and Television

The UK’s film and television tax relief framework — now the Audio Visual Expenditure Credit at 34% for film and high-end TV — has made Britain one of the world’s leading production destinations. Pinewood, Shepperton, Crown Works: the infrastructure is world-class. We will maintain and strengthen this framework.

• Maintain the AVEC at current rates — providing long-term certainty for inward investment decisions

• Extend enhanced relief for independent British films — supporting domestic storytelling, not just international productions using British facilities

• Fast-track planning for studio expansion — removing barriers to new studio development outside London and the South East

• Restore VAT-free shopping for international visitors — reversing a post-Brexit own goal that has cost London and major cities billions in lost high-value tourist spending

Music

Britain produces world-class music — from classical to grime, from the Beatles to Adele. Yet the music industry receives far less fiscal support than film and television, despite comparable cultural and economic impact. We will address this imbalance.

• Introduce a Music Production Tax Credit — equivalent to the AVEC for recorded music production, incentivising artists to record in Britain

• Music venue relief — extending business rate abolition with enhanced support for grassroots music venues, the pipeline through which all major artists develop

• Export support for British music — targeted support for breaking British artists in international markets

• Protect and strengthen music education in schools — the pipeline from which British musical talent flows

Channel 4 Privatisation

Channel 4 was created as a publisher-broadcaster — commissioning content from independent producers rather than making it in-house. That model remains valuable. But public ownership is no longer necessary to achieve it. The independent production sector it was designed to support is now mature and robust.

We will privatise Channel 4, with conditions that preserve its public service broadcasting remit, its commissioning model, and its commitment to British independent production. The proceeds will be reinvested in the creative industries infrastructure fund.

BBC World Service and Soft Power

The BBC World Service is one of Britain’s most powerful soft power assets — trusted by hundreds of millions of people in countries where free media does not exist. At a time of growing global information warfare, cutting it is a strategic own goal.

• Restore and expand BBC World Service foreign language broadcasting — with particular focus on Russia, China, the Middle East and Africa

• Fund the expansion through the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office budget — treating it as the strategic communications asset it is, not a cultural nicety

• Invest in digital distribution — ensuring World Service content reaches audiences through platforms that work in restricted media environments

Tourism

• Restore VAT-free shopping for international tourists — already noted above but worth emphasising: this costs little and generates significant high-value visitor spending

• Support hospitality and cultural industries — removing regulatory burdens that price out small venues and independent operators

• Revitalise town centres through free parking, business rate abolition and planning reform — the same policies that support housing and growth also support culture

Chapter 17: Technology and Artificial Intelligence

The Opportunity

AI could add £550bn to UK GDP by 2035. British AI firms raised £4.7bn in investment in 2025 alone. We have DeepMind, Arm, a world-class university research base, the English language, the deepest financial markets in Europe, and a fintech and life sciences ecosystem that is genuinely world-leading.

What Britain lacks is not talent, not ideas, and not capital. It lacks the scale-up infrastructure to turn world-class research into world-class companies — and the regulatory confidence to move at the speed the technology demands.

The F³ AI and Tech Platform

• Back and accelerate the existing AI Opportunities Action Plan — but with more ambition on compute infrastructure, data access and planning for data centres

• Fast-track planning for data centre development — treating AI compute infrastructure as national strategic infrastructure, equivalent to power stations and transport

• Expand the AI Growth Zones programme — extending beyond Wales to create AI and tech clusters in every major British city

• Sovereign AI capability — ensuring Britain maintains independent AI development capacity rather than becoming wholly dependent on US or Chinese models

Regulation: An Honest Position

The EU AI Act is the world’s first comprehensive AI regulatory framework — binding from August 2026, with fines up to €35m or 7% of global turnover. It is important to be honest about what this means for Britain.

The EU AI Act already applies to British companies. Any UK business that develops, deploys or sells AI systems affecting users in the EU must comply — regardless of whether Britain is in the Single Market. This is not a future concern. It is current reality, and Single Market membership changes the practical position only at the margins.

What Single Market membership does change is this: currently Britain is subject to EU AI regulation extraterritorially, with zero input into how those rules are written. EEA membership provides informal consultation rights during drafting and expert participation in the process — not a vote, but not nothing. For a country of Britain’s size and technological weight, that informal influence is meaningful.

F³ will maintain a principles-based domestic AI framework for purely domestic applications — lighter-touch than the EU AI Act where British law permits it. But we will not pretend that British AI companies can ignore EU rules while selling into European markets. The honest position is:

• Domestic applications — principles-based, outcomes-focused regulation with clear red lines but no unnecessary burden on low-risk innovation

• EU-facing applications — compliance with the AI Act is unavoidable and already required; Single Market membership gives Britain informal input into future revisions

• Sector-specific high-stakes frameworks — healthcare, criminal justice, financial services — developed with industry, not imposed upon it

• International standards leadership — Britain actively shaping global AI governance norms through the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, which the UK has already signed

The strongest argument for our position is not that Britain escapes EU AI regulation — it does not. It is that Single Market membership, combined with a lighter domestic framework and active engagement in international standard-setting, gives Britain more influence over the global direction of AI governance than the current arrangement of rule-taking from outside with no voice whatsoever.

AI in Public Services

The productivity gains from AI in public services are potentially enormous — and largely unrealised. We will drive adoption across:

• NHS — AI-assisted diagnosis, administrative automation, drug discovery and clinical trial acceleration

• HMRC — AI-driven tax compliance and fraud detection, reducing the tax gap and cutting administrative burden on honest taxpayers

• Planning — AI-assisted planning decisions, reducing the months-long delays that currently block development

• Criminal justice — AI tools for case management, reducing the backlog that is denying justice to victims and defendants alike

Skills and Talent

Britain cannot lead in AI without the people to build it. We will:

• Expand computer science teaching from primary level — coding and data literacy as core curriculum alongside reading and maths

• Create an AI skills visa — a fast-track route for the world’s top AI talent to work in Britain, with no cap on numbers

• Fund postgraduate AI research places at British universities — keeping our best graduates here rather than watching them leave for the US

• Target 10 million workers upskilled in AI by 2030 — delivering the existing government commitment with proper resourcing

Life Sciences and Fintech

Britain’s life sciences and fintech sectors are already world-class. AI supercharges both. We will maintain the regulatory frameworks — the MHRA, the FCA sandbox model — that have made Britain the destination of choice for innovative companies in both sectors, while actively backing British champions to scale rather than sell.

Social Media, Cohesion and Democracy

Social media is the most significant driver of social division in Britain today. The evidence is now substantial and largely beyond dispute: algorithmic amplification of outrage is documented and deliberate, the mental health impact on young people is beyond reasonable doubt, and foreign state actors — as the opening of this paper illustrates — routinely use social media infrastructure to amplify division for geopolitical ends.

The policy challenge is framing. Any government intervention risks being characterised as censorship. F³ rejects both the authoritarian instinct to regulate speech and the libertarian instinct to regulate nothing. We target the mechanism of harm — the algorithm — not the content.

We are not regulating what people say. We are regulating the commercial exploitation of human psychology for profit, and the deliberate amplification of content designed to divide us. The algorithm is not neutral — it is a product, and like every product it must meet basic standards.

• Algorithm transparency — platforms above £500m UK revenue must publish how their recommendation systems work and what content they amplify. Not censorship. Sunlight.

• Opt-in algorithmic curation — the default for all users is chronological feed. If you want the algorithm, you opt in. This one change would fundamentally transform the information environment.

• Under-18 protections — no algorithmic recommendation, age-verified accounts, default safe settings, no targeted advertising. The evidence on harm to young people is strong enough to justify firm action.

• Foreign state interference liability — platforms that knowingly host coordinated inauthentic behaviour by state actors face significant fines. Makes it commercially rational to police this seriously.

• Digital literacy curriculum — mandatory critical media literacy from secondary school. Understanding how algorithms work, how to identify disinformation, how to evaluate sources.

Platform Liability: Money and Amplification Carry Responsibility

Platforms have hidden for thirty years behind a single claim: we are just the pipes. The claim was always selective — pipes do not sell advertising against the sewage — and under F³ it ends where it was always false. Liability follows the platform’s own conduct, in three tiers:

Tier 1 — Paid and Promoted: Full Joint Liability

Where a platform is paid to distribute content — advertising, sponsored posts, boosted reach — it is jointly liable for that content as a publisher: defamation, fraud, scams, incitement, all of it. A platform that takes a scammer’s money and delivers the scammer’s victims is not an intermediary; it is a partner. Victims of fraud originating in paid placement are entitled to restitution from the platform, recoverable in turn from the advertiser — and platforms contribute to authorised-push-payment fraud reimbursement where first contact came through their paid or promoted surfaces.

Tier 2 — Amplified: Amplification Is Publication

Where a platform’s recommender system pushes content beyond its organic reach — chooses it, ranks it, injects it into the feeds of people who never asked for it — the platform is jointly liable for what it amplified. This is the editorial act: a front page assembled by machine is still a front page. The synergy with this chapter’s algorithm rules is deliberate: a platform operating chronological, neutral, opt-in feeds makes no editorial choice and keeps full hosting protection. Amplify and you own it; merely carry it and you don’t. The liability rule enforces the algorithm policy through incentives, not inspectors.

Tier 3 — Hosted: Immunity With Teeth

For organic, unamplified content, conditional immunity remains — because the alternative is collateral censorship. No moderator can adjudicate truth or honest opinion at scale, so blanket liability would mean every contested review, every allegation and every criticism deleted on receipt of a lawyer’s letter — and only the giants could carry the risk, entrenching exactly the companies this chapter exists to discipline. But the conditions acquire teeth:

• 48-hour takedown on a valid notice of unlawful content — defamation with particulars, fraud, incitement — with daily penalties for default

• Identity disclosure: on a court order, platforms must produce verified account information so victims can sue the actual author. Monetised accounts are identity-verified at onboarding — anonymity for speech, not for income

• Senior-manager liability for systemic failure — a named executive answers for the system, not for each post

• Repeat-offender duties: accounts and advertisers with adjudicated violations lose monetisation and amplification before they lose the account

Single Market note: under EEA membership Britain adopts the Digital Services Act, which grants hosting immunity to neutral intermediaries. Tier 2 is therefore drafted inside the DSA’s own 'active role' doctrine — a recommender that selects and promotes is not a neutral host, and paid placement never was. We expect the argument; we have written it down in advance.

F³ explicitly does not: regulate what individuals say (within existing law), remove content on political grounds, create government content moderation bodies, or give ministers power over platform decisions. Liability in this chapter attaches to platform conduct — money and amplification — never to the lawful speech of individuals.

Chapter 18: Criminal Justice

A System in Crisis

The scale of the criminal justice backlog is extraordinary and largely invisible to public debate. There are currently 379,000 outstanding cases in magistrates' courts and 80,000 in the Crown Court — with 21,000 cases open for over a year. Some defendants wait until 2027 or 2028 for trial. Victims live for years in limbo before seeing justice.

This is not an accident. Criminal legal aid rates were effectively cut by 42% in real terms between the early 2000s and recent years. Court buildings are deteriorating. Technology fails routinely. Essential staff have left and not been replaced. The profession of criminal defence solicitor — the bedrock of access to justice — is in rapid decline, leaving entire regions of England and Wales as legal aid deserts where affordable legal representation simply does not exist.

F³ will fund a comprehensive criminal justice recovery programme — treating it as the public safety infrastructure it is.

Funding the Recovery

• Immediate 20% real-terms increase in criminal legal aid rates — stopping the haemorrhage of solicitors leaving the profession

• £2bn capital investment in court buildings and technology over five years — ending the scandal of cases collapsing because of crumbling infrastructure

• Significant increase in the number of sitting days — courts that could run five days a week should not run three

• Expand the magistracy and judicial appointments — addressing the shortage of judges and magistrates that is a primary driver of delay

• AI-assisted case management — technology to reduce the administrative burden on judges, clerks and legal professionals

Sentencing: Punishment and Purpose

Public anger at sentencing is real and legitimate. When violent offenders receive sentences that bear no relationship to the harm they have caused, confidence in the justice system collapses — and with it, the deterrent effect that sentencing is meant to provide.

• Tougher sentencing for violent crime — mandatory minimum sentences for serious violence, knife crime with intent to harm, and repeat offenders

• Remote prisons for dangerous and violent offenders — purpose-built facilities in remote locations where the environment itself reflects the seriousness of the crime and proximity to criminal networks is eliminated

• White collar crime — heavy financial penalties rather than custodial sentences as the primary response; fines set as a multiple of the financial gain, not a fixed sum that becomes a cost of doing business

• Confiscation of assets — proceeds of crime pursued aggressively and comprehensively, with no statute of limitations on financial investigation

Rehabilitation: Investing in Second Chances

The evidence on what reduces reoffending is clear and has been ignored for decades. Prison without rehabilitation produces more crime. The majority of those in the criminal justice system come from a narrow band of disadvantaged backgrounds — care leavers, victims of abuse, those who grew up in poverty without stable family structures.

The devil finds work for idle hands. Young people without purpose, without activity, without hope are the recruiting pool for gangs and violence. Preventing crime is cheaper than prosecuting it, imprisoning it, and living with its consequences.

• Mandatory education and skills programmes in all prisons — every sentence is an opportunity to equip someone for a life without crime

• Mental health and addiction treatment as sentence requirements — addressing the underlying conditions that drive a significant proportion of offending

• Dedicated rehabilitation programmes for care leavers and those from abusive backgrounds — recognising that these individuals are often victims before they are offenders

• Expand the network of sports facilities, youth clubs and community activities — free or heavily subsidised, run through schools and sports centres, available evenings and weekends

• Fund youth workers and mentors in high-crime communities — not as a soft alternative to policing but as a complement to it

Policing

• Restore police numbers to 2010 levels as a minimum — neighbourhood policing that knows its community is the most effective crime prevention tool that exists

• Cut police bureaucracy — officers should police, not fill in forms; administrative burden reduction to free up frontline time

• Knife crime — serious enforcement combined with serious prevention; stop and search used intelligently and lawfully, not as a substitute for community engagement

Drugs Policy

The UK’s drugs policy debate is often presented as a binary choice between full legalisation and zero tolerance. F³ rejects both extremes in favour of a coherent evidence-based position.

Medical cannabis was legalised in Britain in 2018 but remains largely inaccessible through the NHS due to complex regulation and cautious guidance. This is indefensible. The evidence for medical cannabis in treating chronic pain, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, chemotherapy-induced nausea and a range of other conditions is robust. Independent analysis shows wider NHS access could add £13.3bn to the UK economy over a decade, reduce hospital admissions by 28% for eligible patients, and help thousands of people with long-term conditions return to work. The Alfie Dingley case — a child whose NHS care costs fell by £130,000 annually after starting cannabis treatment, now seizure-free — illustrates the human case as powerfully as any economic model.

• Expand NHS access to medical cannabis for all conditions with robust clinical evidence — not just the three currently approved

• Streamline the regulatory framework for prescription — removing the barriers that force patients into expensive private clinics

• Support domestic production of medical cannabis — reducing import dependence and building a British industry

On broader decriminalisation: F³ does not support it. The county lines drug gangs destroying communities, the knife crime epidemic driven by drug territory disputes, and the devastation of addiction in families across Britain are not arguments for making drug acquisition easier. They are arguments for better treatment, better enforcement of serious drug supply offences, and the rehabilitation programmes described elsewhere in this chapter.

Chapter 19: Water — Back in Public Hands

The Privatisation Failure

Since privatisation in 1989, water companies in England and Wales have paid out £85 billion in dividends to shareholders while loading £65 billion of debt onto their balance sheets. They were sold with no debt. They now carry more than £60 billion of it — and consumers pay the interest through their bills. Thames Water alone has paid £7.2 billion to shareholders while dumping raw sewage into rivers, losing 630 million litres of water daily through leaking pipes, and bringing itself to the brink of collapse.

This is not a market failure. It is the entirely predictable consequence of allowing private equity and infrastructure funds to treat a natural monopoly — an essential service with no competition and captive customers — as a vehicle for financial engineering.

The Case for Public Ownership

Water is different from other industries in four fundamental ways that make private ownership structurally inappropriate:

• Natural monopoly — customers cannot switch supplier; there is no market discipline on quality or price

• Essential service — no household or business can function without it; demand is entirely inelastic

• Long-term infrastructure — the investment horizon for water infrastructure is decades, incompatible with private equity’s typical 5-10 year ownership model

• Environmental stewardship — water companies manage rivers, aquifers and ecosystems that belong to everyone, not shareholders

Scotland’s water is publicly owned and consistently outperforms England’s privatised sector on leakage, investment and customer satisfaction. Northern Ireland’s water is publicly owned. France — which pioneered water privatisation — has been returning systems to public ownership since the 1990s. Paris renationalised its water in 2010 and immediately cut bills by 8%.

Policy Interaction: Renationalisation and Bond Markets

The risk is real: a disorderly haircut on water company bonds could raise the risk premium on all UK infrastructure debt — partially offsetting the fiscal emergency brake credibility built elsewhere in this programme. F3 mitigates this through three commitments: (1) Special Administration process is court-supervised and transparent — no ministerial discretion on compensation; (2) fair value is determined by independent valuation, not government fiat; (3) the sequencing is explicit — companies approaching insolvency voluntarily first, profitable companies only after the insolvency route is exhausted. Infrastructure investors will distinguish between an orderly, legally supervised acquisition of an insolvent utility and political expropriation of profitable assets. We are doing the former, not the latter.

The Renationalisation Plan

The government’s own estimate of £100bn for full renationalisation is based on Regulatory Capital Value — a methodology that includes 35 years of inflation-adjusted investment, regardless of the quality of that investment or the debt loaded onto customers in the process. The true cost is likely significantly lower.

Several companies — Thames Water foremost among them — are already functionally insolvent. Their bondholders and shareholders have already been told to expect a significant haircut. Special Administration, the formal insolvency process for regulated utilities, is the mechanism through which the government can acquire these companies at or near their actual worth — which in Thames Water’s case may be close to zero after accounting for their debt and environmental liabilities.

• Bring water companies into public ownership through a phased programme — starting with companies already in or approaching Special Administration

• Compensation paid at fair value — not at the inflated RCV figure that rewards decades of underinvestment and excessive debt loading

• Debt taken on only where backed by genuine asset value — bondholders who financed dividend extraction rather than infrastructure investment cannot expect full recovery

• A new National Water Authority to manage the public estate — not a return to the pre-1989 monolithic structure but a regionally organised public body with genuine accountability

• Ring-fenced investment programme — every penny of profit reinvested in infrastructure, leakage reduction and environmental standards

The annual saving from removing shareholder dividends — currently running at approximately £2bn per year across the sector — goes directly into reducing bills and funding investment. Public ownership does not cost money. It redirects money that currently goes to shareholders toward the infrastructure and the customers it should have been serving all along.

Chapter 20: Social Care — A Pre-Funded Future

The Scale of the Crisis

Total spending on adult social care in England reached 34.5bn in 2024-25 — and the Health Foundation estimates an additional 8.3bn will be needed by 2032 just to keep pace with demographic demand. The sector employs 1.6 million people with 152,000 vacancies. Local authorities are overwhelmed, care homes are closing, and hundreds of thousands of elderly people are not receiving the care they need.

The fundamental problem is structural: social care is funded year-to-year from local authority budgets, creating chronic underfunding and a system that cannot plan beyond the next spending review. Eighty percent of people aged 65 will need some social care before they die — but the amount is unknowable in advance. It is an insurance problem that is currently funded as a consumption problem.

The Singapore Model

Singapore solved this problem through a mandatory pre-funded long-term care insurance system. CareShield Life provides every citizen with lifetime long-term care coverage. Premiums are paid during working years, risk-pooled across cohorts, and fully payable from MediSave — Singapore’s mandatory healthcare savings account. Payouts start at S62 per month in 2025 and increase annually. The scheme is self-funding and sustainable.

The principle is elegant: you fund your future care during your working years, when the cost is small and spread over time, rather than facing catastrophic bills in old age. Those who die without needing care contribute to a pool that covers those who need extensive care. The risk is pooled across a whole generation.

The F3 Personal Care Account

F3 will create a Personal Care Account for every working person — funded from within the mandatory employer pension contribution. Of the 10% mandatory employer contribution:

• 8% goes to the pension fund as currently — funding retirement income

• 2% goes to a dedicated Personal Care Account — invested and growing throughout working life

The Personal Care Account operates on these principles:

• Tax-free growth throughout working life — invested in a diversified, low-cost fund

• Accessible only for qualifying care needs — home care, residential care, assistive technology, adaptations

• Cannot be accessed for general spending or retirement income

• At death, any residual balance passes to the National Social Care Fund — pooling the savings of those who died without needing care to subsidise those whose costs exceed their account balance

• The National Social Care Fund tops up shortfalls where care costs exceed an individual account balance

Those Who Cannot Build an Account

An employer-funded account only works for people with an employer. The long-term unemployed, the low-paid with broken contribution records, and disabled people who cannot work would build little or nothing — and a care system that protected only the steadily employed would be no system at all. The Account is the funding mechanism, not the entitlement. Care need is met on need; the Account determines who pre-pays, never who qualifies:

• Carer’s National Insurance credits already build state pension entitlement for those out of work through caring, disability or unemployment. The Personal Care Account is credited on the same basis: periods on Universal Credit, carer’s benefits, or disability benefits earn Care Account credits, Treasury-funded, so a contribution record is never zero through no fault of the person

• Disabled people who have never been able to work are guaranteed the full care floor regardless of account balance — funded by the National Social Care Fund. Working-age care needs are met directly, never out of a lifetime account they had no means to fill

• The Dilnot cap is universal — it limits lifetime care costs for everyone, whatever their account holds, so no one faces catastrophic costs because their working life was interrupted

• At the bottom, the means-tested care floor that exists today is retained and strengthened: those with little or no account and few assets receive state-funded care, with the account topping up rather than replacing it

So the answer to who pays for the care of those who could never contribute is the same answer this paper gives throughout: contribution is credited where work was impossible, need is met regardless, and the pooled Fund — residual balances of those who died without needing care — is what makes universal coverage affordable. The Account rewards a full working life; it never punishes the absence of one.

The Numbers

A worker on average earnings of 39,000 paying 2% of salary for a full 40-year career:

• Annual contribution: approximately 780

• At 5% real investment return over 40 years: approximately 97,000 accumulated

• Average residential care cost: approximately 50,000 per year; average stay 2.5 years = 125,000 total

• The Personal Care Account covers approximately 75-80% of average care costs

• The National Social Care Fund covers the shortfall from residual balances of those who died without needing care

The Dilnot Integration

The Personal Care Account works alongside a reinstated Dilnot-style care cost cap — the 86,000 lifetime cap legislated in 2014 and abandoned. The Personal Care Account covers the first tranche of costs. The Dilnot cap covers catastrophic costs above the threshold. Together they provide complete coverage without the open-ended liability that has made the problem intractable.

Workforce

• Free movement from the EU restores the labour supply that Brexit removed — care workers from across Europe can return

• Care worker pay raised through the Social Care Fair Pay Agreement and mandatory pension contributions

• A Social Care Apprenticeship pathway from entry level to specialist and management roles

The Fiscal Position

The Personal Care Account is funded from within the existing pension mandate — it redirects 2% of the 10% employer contribution. It does not require new government spending. The National Social Care Fund is initially seeded by government (estimated 5bn over the first parliament) and becomes self-funding as the first generation of account holders reaches care age. Within 20-30 years the system is entirely self-financing.

Chapter 21: Agriculture, Food Security and Rural Britain

Leaving CAP Was Right. What Replaced It Is Not.

The Common Agricultural Policy was poor policy — paying farmers based on how much land they farmed regardless of productivity or environmental outcomes. Britain was right to leave it. The problem is what replaced it.

ELMS has been implemented as a cliff edge. Farms receiving 160,000 in CAP payments in 2020 received 62,000 in 2024 and will receive just 7,200 in 2025. Beef and sheep farmers — the custodians of Britain’s most iconic landscapes — have been the hardest hit, with many facing insolvency.

The F3 Agricultural Framework

• Public goods payment — farmers paid for environmental stewardship, flood prevention, biodiversity enhancement and landscape management. Simple, predictable, not a labyrinthine application process

• Food security baseline — minimum domestic production capacity maintained as a strategic asset. Britain should produce at least 70% of its temperate food

• Productivity investment — grants and low-interest loans for technology adoption, precision agriculture and energy efficiency

Single Market and Food Costs

Rejoining the Single Market is the single most impactful measure for reducing food costs. Trade friction since Brexit has added approximately 6% to UK food import costs. Restoring frictionless food trade reduces those costs immediately. Britain produces 17% of its fruit and 55% of its vegetables domestically — highly import-dependent. Frictionless EU trade restores competitive pricing for these staples.

Food Standards Are Non-Negotiable

Trade deals with the United States and other countries must not come at the cost of British food standards. Chlorinated chicken, hormone-treated beef and products from intensive farming systems that would be illegal in Britain will not be permitted to undercut British producers. This is not protectionism — it is the application of consistent standards regardless of where food is produced.

Rural Communities

• Rural broadband and mobile coverage as statutory infrastructure obligations

• Rural transport — community transport funding and flexible bus routes

• Planning flexibility for rural dwellings and farm diversification

Chapter 22: Welfare Reform

The Scale of the Problem

Total working-age and children’s welfare spending is £145bn annually. The full breakdown reveals the scale of the challenge:

Of these, State Pension is addressed through triple lock abolition. Child Benefit is replaced by school-based provision. The F³ welfare reform programme focuses on the three areas where spending has risen most sharply and where the case for structural reform is strongest: disability and incapacity benefits, Universal Credit conditionality, and housing benefit.

Disability and incapacity benefit spending has risen from £36bn in 2019-20 to £77bn today and is projected to approach £100bn by the end of the decade without reform. The number of working-age people receiving disability benefits has risen from 2.1 million to 3.4 million in five years — an increase that cannot be explained by a sudden deterioration in national health.

The causes are complex and demand honest acknowledgment:

• Mental health claims — particularly anxiety and depression — have risen dramatically, especially among young people post-pandemic. More people now receive maximum PIP for generalised anxiety than were born deaf. This reflects a genuine mental health crisis that needs treatment, not simply payment

• Assessment failures — the current system simultaneously denies support to people who desperately need it while paying others who do not

• Perverse incentives — a system designed around inactivity rather than supported employment traps people in dependency

• No regular reassessment — only 6% of PIP assessments are currently face-to-face; many awards run indefinitely without review

The result serves nobody well. Genuinely disabled people wait years for support while fighting bureaucratic battles. People who could work with the right support are written off. Taxpayers fund a system that is neither compassionate nor effective. F³ rejects the false choice between cruelty and complacency.

The F³ Principles

Our welfare reform is built on three principles that are simultaneously non-negotiable:

• Genuine need receives genuine support — no person with a serious disability or health condition should be worse off

• The system exists to enable people, not trap them — supported employment should always be the goal where it is achievable

• Public money must be spent honestly — a system that cannot distinguish between genuine need and exploited entitlement fails everyone, including those it is meant to help

PIP Reform — Personal Independence Payment

PIP is the largest single working-age disability benefit at £25bn annually, rising to a projected £37bn by 2029-30 without reform. It was designed to help with the extra costs of disability — mobility aids, adapted equipment, care support. It has drifted far beyond that original purpose.

F³ will reform PIP assessment comprehensively:

• Face-to-face assessments increased to 50% of all PIP assessments — the current 6% face-to-face rate is indefensible for a benefit of this scale

• This is funded, not assumed: returning to majority face-to-face assessment costs roughly £0.4–0.5bn a year in assessor capacity, and the two-yearly work-capability reassessments add to that. The net savings in the scorecard are stated after these delivery costs — the cost of doing the assessing is inside the line, not hidden beside it

• Assessors must hold relevant clinical qualifications — a generalist nurse should not be assessing complex neurological or psychiatric conditions

• Awards time-limited by default — 2-3 year reviews for most conditions, with indefinite awards reserved for genuinely permanent and severe conditions

• Ad-hoc reviews triggered by credible lifestyle evidence — activities demonstrably inconsistent with claimed limitations trigger reassessment

• Fraud treated as serious criminality — deliberate misrepresentation prosecuted, not just administratively corrected

• Conditions primarily treatable through the NHS — anxiety, depression, mild ADHD — addressed through NHS provision and employment support, not permanent PIP awards

Universal Credit Reform

Universal Credit at £60bn is the backbone of the working-age welfare system. Its structure — combining housing, childcare, disability and income support in one payment tapering at 55p per pound earned — creates significant work disincentives for many recipients. F³ will reform the conditionality and taper:

• Reduce the UC taper rate from 55% to 45% — allowing people to keep more of what they earn as they move back into work

• Strengthen work search requirements — those capable of work who decline reasonable offers face meaningful sanctions, applied consistently and fairly

• Mandatory work capability reassessments every two years for all claimants on health-related elements — regular review rather than indefinite award

• Assessors trained and resourced for fluctuating and mental-health conditions, with the NHS mental-health expansion (a stated precondition of this reform) carrying the clinical load a benefits assessment cannot. The point of more face-to-face contact is accuracy in both directions — awards refused that should never have been made, and awards granted that the broken remote process wrongly denied

• In-work progression requirements — those in part-time work actively supported and expected to increase hours where possible

Carer's Allowance — Ending the Cliff Edge

Unpaid carers save the state an estimated £160bn a year by caring for relatives the NHS and social care would otherwise have to. In return, Carer's Allowance pays around £86 a week — and traps them with one of the cruellest rules in the entire benefits system. Earn a single pound over the weekly limit and the whole payment vanishes for that week: a cliff edge, not a taper. The result was a national scandal — between 2015 and 2025, thousands of carers drifted over the limit after small pay rises they did not realise breached it, and were pursued for debts running into thousands of pounds, with penalties on top. A benefit meant to support the most selfless people in the country became a trap that punished them for working an extra hour. F³ ends it:

• Replace the cliff edge with a taper. Above the earnings limit, Carer's Allowance withdraws gradually — so an extra hour of work always leaves a carer better off, and no one is ever pursued for thousands because a pay rise tipped them a pound over a line

• Carers of school-age children can work school hours without penalty. The earnings limit for carers of children is set so that part-time work during school hours never costs them their allowance — recognising that caring and a modest job are not mutually exclusive, and that work during the hours a child is in school is exactly the flexibility a carer can offer

• A more generous limit for carers of non-school dependents — modestly higher than today's, in recognition that round-the-clock caring for an adult or a child out of education leaves less room for paid work, but that some work should still always pay

• Recognise caring intensity. Following the direction Scotland has already taken, payments reflect the hours of care provided — 20, 35 and 50-plus hours — rather than a single flat rate that treats light and round-the-clock caring identically

• Allow caring hours for more than one person to be combined toward the qualifying threshold — so someone caring for two relatives part-time is no longer locked out for failing to reach 35 hours for either alone

• Write off the historic overpayment debts caused by the DWP's own admittedly unclear guidance, and end the practice of pursuing carers for the department's failure to design a workable rule

The cost is modest — Carer's Allowance is a ~£4bn line, and a taper plus higher limits adds a fraction of that — and it is among the most defensible spending in this paper. A country that leans on £160bn of unpaid care has no business punishing the people who provide it for daring to also hold down a job. We score the change conservatively and treat it, openly, as money well spent.

Housing Benefit Reform

Housing benefit at £37bn is significantly driven by high private rents and the failure to build enough homes. The most effective housing benefit reform is a planning reform that increases supply and moderates rents — which our platform delivers through land banking tax, presumption in favour of development, and removal of viability-killing affordable housing quotas.

In parallel:

• Local Housing Allowance rates reviewed and uprated to reflect actual local rents — the current freeze has pushed claimants into housing poverty while doing nothing to reduce rents

• Benefit cap maintained but uprated with inflation — protecting the principle while preventing real-terms erosion

• Stronger incentives for local authorities to build social housing directly — using Land Banking Tax proceeds as the funding mechanism

Assessment Reform

The current assessment system is broken in both directions — too harsh on some, too permissive on others. F³ will reform it comprehensively:

• Face-to-face assessments increased to 50% of all PIP and Work Capability Assessments

• Assessors must be qualified healthcare professionals with relevant expertise

• Awards time-limited by default — most awards set for 2-3 years with mandatory review

• Ad-hoc reviews triggered by lifestyle evidence — social media posts, reported activities or third-party information that contradicts claimed limitations should trigger reassessment

• Fraud penalties significantly strengthened — deliberate misrepresentation treated as a serious criminal matter

NEETs and Young People

The rise of young people who are Not in Education, Employment or Training is one of the most serious long-term challenges facing Britain. It is not a simple story of laziness or entitlement — it reflects failures of the education system, the mental health crisis among young people, the lack of affordable housing near jobs, and the absence of routes into work that do not require a university degree.

F³ addresses the root causes through our education, housing, mental health and criminal justice reforms — but also directly:

• A national youth employment guarantee — every person under 25 who has been out of education and employment for more than 6 months receives a guaranteed offer: employment, apprenticeship, training or community service

• Benefit conditionality for under-25s — those who decline all reasonable offers without good cause face a graduated reduction in benefits. This is not punitive; it is the same expectation we have of any adult in a functioning society

• Apprenticeship expansion — make it as easy for an employer to take on an apprentice as to hire a graduate, with comparable status and career prospects

• Mental health support as a condition of benefit receipt — those whose NEET status is driven by mental health conditions receive treatment as a priority, with benefits maintained during engagement with treatment

Policy Interaction: Welfare Reform and NHS Capacity

The NHS mental health backlog is already severe. Removing PIP from conditions treatable through NHS without expanding NHS capacity first would trap people between two failing systems — no benefit, no treatment. F3 will therefore: (1) expand NHS talking therapies and IAPT capacity in year 1 as a condition of welfare reform proceeding; (2) set minimum NHS mental health waiting time standards before PIP eligibility tightening takes effect; (3) guarantee a supported employment offer to every person whose PIP is reduced. Welfare reform delivers its fiscal savings only if the NHS can absorb the demand — and that requires explicit investment sequencing, not a simultaneous cut.

The Fiscal Position

We score this the way the OBR would score it — costs first, savings only where precedent supports them:

• PIP reassessment and eligibility reform: +£4–6bn a year by Year 5 (gross) — in line with, not beyond, what the OBR scored for far milder packages

• UC taper cut from 55% to 45%: −£3bn a year, scored as a cost. We believe employment effects will claw much of it back; we do not book that belief as money

• Year-1 NHS mental-health expansion — the precondition for this chapter: −£2bn a year, scored

• Housing benefit reduction through increased supply: +£2–3bn by end of parliament

• NEET youth employment guarantee: +£1–2bn net of programme costs

Net position: £4–6bn a year by Year 5 — roughly half the headline other parties would claim from the same reforms, because we have scored the cost of doing it properly. The fiscal framework uses these numbers, not the press-release version.

What F³ Means For You: Real Income Examples

Tax policy is abstract until it lands in your pay packet. Here is what F³ means for five salary levels — against the current system, with nothing excluded.

These tables are levy-inclusive. The F³ deduction is the full combined rate on income above £20,000 — 37% income tax + 4% Local Income Tax + 2% Health Levy = 43% in Years 1–3, falling to 41% when Step 4 cuts the headline rate to 35%. Employee National Insurance is abolished. The first £20,000 carries no tax, no levy and no local charge. This is the whole bill: if you can find a deduction we have left out, write to us.

Full-Time Minimum Wage Worker (£26,437)

Gain: +£1,114 a year from day one — a 4.9% rise in take-home pay — rising to +£1,243 at Step 4. Employee NIC abolition and the £20,000 threshold do the work.

£40,000 — Typical Skilled Worker

Cost: −£920 a year (−£18 a week) in Years 1–3, narrowing to −£520 (−£10 a week) at Step 4. The gap is, almost exactly, the 2% Health Levy — a tax we name rather than hide. See the offsets table below before judging the net position.

£80,000 — Senior Professional

Cost: −£2,757 a year (−£53 a week) in Years 1–3, narrowing to −£1,557 (−£30 a week) at Step 4. This is the most exposed point on the income scale and we say so plainly. A commuting two-child household recovers most or all of it through the offsets below.

£120,000 — Higher Earner (Currently Caught by the Taper Trap)

Gain: +£1,465 in Years 1–3, +£3,465 from Step 4. The 60% marginal-rate trap between £100,000 and £125,140 is abolished entirely.

£300,000 — Very High Earner

Gain: +£5,798 in Years 1–3, +£11,398 from Step 4. We print this number because our opponents will. The defence is the ladder below — every rung still rises — and the abolition of the allowance-withdrawal games that made today’s published 45% a fiction.

The Effective-Rate Ladder

Progressivity is measured by effective rates — the share of total income actually paid. Here is the ladder, levy-inclusive:

The ladder rises at every rung — the definition of a progressive system — with the largest fall at the bottom and the smallest at the top, and without the 60% marginal-rate spike that today makes an extra pound earned at £110,000 worth less than an extra pound earned at £300,000.

What the Middle Gets Back

The transitional cost between £40,000 and £100,000 is real and named. So are the offsets — line items with prices, not vague promises of better services:

A two-child household at £80,000 with one rail commuter recovers more than the full £2,757 transitional cost from the first two lines alone. We are honest about the limit of this: a household that neither commutes by rail nor has school-age children — the childless driver on £80,000 — draws less from the offset list, and for them the Health Levy is felt more directly. They still gain from the abolished employee National Insurance, the energy VAT cut, and free parking, but the offset is smaller. We do not claim every household is made whole by the offsets; we claim most are, we name the ones who are not, and we point to the reason the cost exists at all — a National Health Service funded honestly, by a levy that everyone above the threshold pays and can see. The transitional cost narrows at Step 4 for them as for everyone else.

The honest distribution: everyone below roughly £32,000 gains from day one. Between £40,000 and £100,000 there is a named transitional cost — the visible price of the Health Levy — narrowing at Step 4 and offset for most households by the items above. Above £110,000, abolishing the taper produces gains we publish rather than bury. If the country judges the middle’s share too high, the honest lever is a Health Levy threshold — a choice we cost at roughly £8bn, openly, rather than pretending it is free.

Net effect by income decile in Year 1, before any growth dividend. Lower deciles gain; the middle carries the named, temporary cost; the very top pays most through the Wealth Credit, CGT and inheritance reform.

Winners and Those Who Pay More

Most manifestos only talk about winners. We believe honest politics requires acknowledging who pays more under our proposals — because honest government begins before election day. Here is our assessment across all 22 chapters of this paper:

We make no apology for this redistribution. Those who gain most are working families, growing businesses and people who use public services. Those who pay more are the wealthy, the land-banking, and those who benefit from universal entitlements they do not need.

Winners and Losers: Business

The same honesty applies to business. F³ pulls three levers at once — it abolishes transaction taxes (Business Rates, Stamp Duty), it cuts the cost of employing people (employee NIC gone, employer NIC roughly halved), and it raises the headline Corporation Tax rate to 30% while enforcing it through the global minimum-tax floor. The effect is deliberate and uneven: it rewards businesses that are physical, domestic and employment-heavy, and it falls hardest on those whose UK profit is large, mobile, and currently booked elsewhere. Here is the picture by size.

Small Businesses

The clearest winners in the entire programme. A high-street firm pays no Business Rates, half the old employer NIC, no Stamp Duty when it moves premises, and trades into a high street with free parking and returning footfall — while its modest profits sit far below the level at which the 30% rate bites hard.

Medium-Sized Businesses

Net winners, but the balance is finer. The rates and hiring savings are large for an employment-heavy scale-up, and a domestic profit base means the 30% rate is paid in full rather than dodged — which is the point. The losers here are those who leaned on reliefs the programme withdraws.

Large Domestic Businesses

A mixed picture that tilts on one question: where is your profit booked? A large employer with genuinely UK operations gains enormously from rates abolition and the hiring-cost cut, and pays the 30% rate it was largely paying anyway. A large firm that has engineered its UK tax bill down toward zero is a clear loser — by design.

Multinationals

The band where F³ asks the most. The trade is explicit: a far more competitive operating environment — frictionless EU access, no rates, cheaper hiring, stable rules — in exchange for paying tax on profit genuinely earned in Britain rather than routing it through lower-tax jurisdictions. For multinationals with real UK substance this is a good deal; for those whose UK presence is largely a tax address, it is not.

It bears stating plainly, because it is the heart of the business case: for the great majority of firms, the savings outweigh the rise. The worked examples make it concrete — the manufacturer pays roughly £9m more in Corporation Tax but saves some £40m in Business Rates and £15m in employer NIC. Only a business with very large UK profit and a very light UK footprint — the offshore-booking multinational — ends up paying materially more overall. Everyone who actually builds, hires and occupies premises in Britain comes out ahead, even with a higher headline rate, because we cut the two taxes that fell on them regardless of whether they made a penny of profit.

The pattern is consistent with everything else in this paper: F³ taxes what is booked and rewards what is built. A business that employs people, occupies premises and makes its profit in Britain is a winner several times over. A business whose UK profit is large but whose UK tax is small is asked, at last, to pay it. We think that is the right trade — and we say so to their faces, before the election, not after.

Four Worked Examples

Illustrative figures, rounded, to show the direction and rough scale in each band. Real outcomes vary with property values, payroll and profit, but the pattern is robust.

The Corner Shop — a small independent retailer

A high-street shop: £400,000 turnover, eight part-time staff on a £140,000 payroll, £35,000 profit, premises with a £28,000 rateable value paying roughly £14,000 a year in Business Rates.

• Business Rates: £14,000 → £0. A direct saving of £14,000

• Employer NIC on the payroll: cut from roughly £21,000 to a 7.5% core of about £10,500 — saving roughly £10,500, with the Training Point recoverable through a group scheme

• Corporation Tax on £35,000 profit rises modestly with the 30% rate, costing a few hundred pounds more

Net effect: better off by roughly £24,000 a year — almost as much again as its entire previous profit, and almost entirely from killing two taxes that ignored whether it made any profit at all. Verdict: a decisive winner.

The Regional Chain — a medium-sized employer

A 12-site hospitality group: £18m turnover, 320 staff on a £9m payroll, £1.2m profit, paying about £900,000 a year in Business Rates across its sites.

• Business Rates: £900,000 → £0

• Employer NIC: cut from roughly £1.24m to a 7.5% core near £675,000 — saving around £560,000, the Training Point recovered by running real apprenticeships

• Corporation Tax: £1.2m profit at 30% rather than 25% costs about £60,000 more

• Stamp Duty: nothing now payable when it acquires or relocates a site

Net effect: better off by well over £1.4m a year before counting Single Market supply-chain savings — money the group can put into wages, new sites and hiring. The 30% rate is paid in full on profit genuinely earned here, which is the trade. Verdict: a clear winner, paying its fair share.

The Manufacturer — a large domestic business

A FTSE 250 manufacturer with UK operations: £1.4bn turnover, 6,000 UK staff on a £240m payroll, £180m UK profit, large plants and warehouses paying around £40m a year in Business Rates. Its profit is genuinely booked in Britain.

• Business Rates: roughly £40m → £0 — a very large saving on a heavy physical estate

• Employer NIC: cut from about £33m to a 7.5% core near £18m — saving roughly £15m across the payroll

• Corporation Tax: £180m at 30% rather than 25% costs about £9m more — paid, because the profit is real and UK-based

Net effect: better off by tens of millions a year, because a genuinely domestic large employer was always going to pay close to the headline rate and gains enormously from abolishing the taxes that fell on its premises and its workforce. Verdict: a substantial winner — provided its profit is really here.

The Tech Multinational — UK profit booked offshore

A global technology group: roughly £2bn of UK sales, a modest UK headcount, and a UK tax bill engineered down toward a few tens of millions through royalty and licensing payments to a low-tax jurisdiction. The contrast with the manufacturer is the whole point.

• Business Rates and employer NIC savings are real but small relative to its UK sales, because its UK physical and human footprint is deliberately light

• Single Market access is a genuine, large gain — frictionless sales across 450 million customers

• Corporation Tax at 30% enforced through Pillar Two, plus tighter rules on profit-shifting, mean the UK profit it has long routed offshore is increasingly taxed where the sales actually happen — potentially a nine-figure swing

• Its globally-mobile principals resident in Britain meet the National Wealth Credit floor; its platform arms meet the new content-liability tiers

Net effect: the operating environment improves markedly, but the tax bill rises sharply — by design. For a multinational with real UK substance this is a trade worth making; for one whose UK presence is largely a tax address, F³ is the end of a long free ride. Verdict: the band that pays for the others — and the one we are least apologetic about.

Closing Statement

Future Forward Foundation

Building Prosperity. Securing the Future.

Future Forward Foundation · A Policy Paper