Skip to content
Accessibility Sitemap Search

The UK's national charity for working parents and carers

Donate
Members log in

General Election – Manifesto pledges for working parents and carers

Published: 14 Jun 2024

This week has been a busy one in politics, with each party racing to publish their manifesto for the upcoming General Election. 

Our policy team has been busy scouring through each party’s pledges and picking out the points that matter for working parents and carers. 

Here’s our round-up of the key policies. 

Conservatives 

 
Childcare 

  • Give working parents 30 hours of free childcare a week from when their child is nine months old to when they start school. 
  • All parents will be able to access wraparound childcare before and after school by September 2026. 

Carers 

  • Attract and retain a high-quality care workforce, make reforms to shape the market for older people’s housing and support unpaid carers. 
  • Implement the planned reforms to cap social care costs from October 2025. 

Flexible working 

  • Ensure the UK retains the flexible and dynamic labour market that gives businesses the confidence to create jobs and invest in their workforce. 

Social Security 

  • Maintain the National Living Wage in each year of the next Parliament at two-thirds of median earnings. On current forecasts, that would mean it rising to around £13 per hour. 
  • Move all of those remaining on legacy benefits onto Universal Credit. 

Child Benefit 

  • Move to calculating Child Benefit based on household income rather than individual income. 
  • The combined household income at which a family will start losing Child Benefit will be £120,000 until household income reaches £160,000. 

Labour 

 
Day One rights 

  • The New Deal for Working People will introduce basic employment rights from ‘day one’, including to parental leave. 

Employment Rights 

  • The New Deal will ban exploitative zero hours contracts and end fire and rehire. 
  • A Single Enforcement Body will be created to ensure employment rights are upheld. 
  • Labour will strengthen rights to equal pay and protections from maternity and menopause discrimination and sexual harassment. 

Parental Leave 

  • Labour will review the parental leave system, so it best supports working families, within the first year in government. 

Childcare 

  • Labour will expand the childcare and early-years system, opening an additional 3,000 nurseries. 
  • Labour will take initial steps to confront poverty by introducing free breakfast clubs in every primary school. 

Social Security 

  • Labour will change the remit of the independent Low Pay Commission so it accounts for the cost of living. 
  • Universal Credit will be reviewed so that it makes work pay and tackles poverty. 

Liberal Democrats 

New Parent Leave 

  • Make all parental pay and leave day-one rights, and extend them to self-employed parents. 
  • Double Statutory Maternity and Shared Parental Pay to £350 a week. 
  • Introduce an extra use-it-or-lose-it month for fathers and partners with paternity pay increasing to 90% of earnings, with a cap for high earners 

Childcare 

  • Review the rates paid to providers for free hours to ensure they cover the actual costs of delivering high-quality childcare and early years education. 

Carers 

  • Increase Carer’s Allowance 
  • Expand eligibility for it by reducing the number of hours’ care per week required, raise the amount carers can earn, and introduce an earnings taper to end the unfair cliff-edge. 
  • Introduce paid carer’s leave 

Flexible Working 

  • Boost productivity and empower more people to enter the job market – such as parents, carers and disabled people – by making the most of technology and new ways of working. 
  • Give everyone a new right to flexible working and every disabled person the right to work from home if they want to, unless there are significant business reasons why it is not possible. 

Social Security 

  • Tackle child poverty by removing the two-child limit and the benefit cap and reducing the wait for the first payment of Universal Credit from five weeks to five days. 

Legal Protections for people with caring responsibilities 

  • Make caring a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010 and require employers to make reasonable adjustments to enable employees with caring responsibilities to provide that care.