What the Green Party manifesto could mean for UK supply chains

Ahead of the general election on 4 July, political parties in the UK have begun to roll out their manifestos so Logistics Manager is breaking down each party’s policies on a range of factors that could impact supply chains, including the economy, security, skills, employment, transport, infrastructure and trade.

This, the fourth in a series being published on the Logistics Manager website throughout the week, looks into the Green Party’s manifesto for the 2024 general election.

In the foreword to the Green Party’s manifesto, its co-leaders Carla Denyer and Adrian Ramsay said: “The current UK commitment to net zero by 2050 fails to reflect that we can – and must – do so much more. That we can and must make the right political choices in order to transition at speed to a decarbonised economy. One that’s no longer in hock to the fossil fuel giants, but instead runs on clean, green and cheap renewables. An economy in which it’s cheaper to heat our homes, to get out and about and to run a business.”

Key policies relating to supply chain and logistics include:

Economy, security and trade

• Investing an average of £40 billion per year over the course of the next parliament, including £7bn annually on climate adaptation
• Bringing privatised utilities ‘back into public hands’
• Setting up regional mutual banks to ‘drive investment in decarbonisation and local economic sustainability by supporting investment in SMEs and community-owned enterprises and cooperatives’
• Provide local authorities with £2bn per year to ‘provide grants to help businesses decarbonise’
• Bringing the Prompt Payment Code into law and barring late payers from public procurement contracts
• Advocating for a circular economy that reduces the waste of resources
• Requiring manufacturers to offer ten-year warranties on white goods, to ‘encourage repair and reuse’
• Offering ‘sustainable employment, decent livelihoods, career opportunities, good working conditions and ongoing training to those involved in growing food’
• Educating the population about food and health
• Building links between farms, schools and the wider community
• Encouraging a move to mixed farming along with a reduction in meat and dairy production
• Implementing new horticulture support for fruit and vegetable production
• Increasing domestic food production and expanding local horticulture
• Incentivising growing a much greater variety of plant food types to protect sourcing and enhanced nutrition
• Rebalancing the ‘power dynamic between big food manufacturers and local alternatives’
• Revitalising the ‘abandoned’ National Food Strategy
• Developing a new Fairer Farming Charter
• Encouraging that wood and crop waste be recycled into construction materials, paper and fabric
• Ensuring that all new trade agreements respect workers’ and consumers’ rights and meet UK animal protection and environmental standards
• Rejoining the EU, starting with joining the Customs Union

Transport and infrastructure

• Increase investment into research and development by over £30bn in the lifetime of the five-year parliament
• Encouraging government partnerships with universities, other research institutions and businesses to ‘assess the most economically and environmentally significant areas for research and development’
• Investing in a modern, electrified railway
• Re-evaluating Council Tax bands to ‘reflect big changes in value since the 1990s’
• Removing business rate relief on Enterprise Zones, freeports, petrol stations and most empty properties
• Conducting a survey of all landholdings to ‘pave the way for fair taxation of land’
• Bringing the railways back into public ownership
• Investing in more rapid electrification so ‘the rail network can be powered sustainably’
• End sales of new petrol and diesel fuelled vehicles by 2027 and the use of petrol and diesel vehicles on the road by 2035
• Making road tax proportional to vehicle weight
• Introducing a 20mph default speed limit on roads in all built-up areas
• Supporting the transition away from HGVs with internal combustion engines
• Making ‘greater use’ of rail freight
• Banning domestic flights for journeys that would take less than three hours by train
• Making carbon tax apply to all kerosene for aviation sold in the UK

Skills and employment

• Repealing current ‘anti-union legislation’ and replacing this with a positive Charter of Workers’ Rights’
• Introducing maximum 10:1 pay ratios for all private and public sector organisations
• Delivering equal rights for all workers currently excluded from protections, including ‘gig economy’ workers and those on ‘zero hours’ contracts
• Introducing a minimum wage of £15 per hour for all, with the costs to small businesses ‘offset by increasing the Employment Allowance to £10,000’
• Committing to no increases in the basic rate of income tax ‘during this cost-of-living crisis’
• Fully funding every higher education student, restoring maintenance grants and scrapping undergraduate tuition fees

Energy

• Ensuring secure energy and affordable bills by moving over to a range of renewable energy technologies, from wind to solar
• Ensuring wind provides around 70% of the UK’s electricity by 2030
• Preventing new oil and gas licences and ending all subsidies to the oil and gas industries
• Introducing a minimum threshold of community ownership in all sustainable energy infrastructure
• Introducing a carbon tax on all fossil fuels, both domestically produced and imported and raising it ‘progressively over a decade’
• Transitioning to a zero-carbon society ‘as soon as possible, and more than a decade ahead of 2050’
• Investing in innovation to eliminate residual uses of fossil fuels in the economy, such as for HGVs and mobile machinery
• Investing in skills and training, including retrofitting, reaching £4bn per year to allow workers to be ‘prepared for the [green energy] transition’
• Creating a regional strategy ‘building on industrial strengths across the country to maximise the contribution to the transition from existing jobs and businesses’
• Introducing new support and incentives to directly accelerate wind energy development
• Introducing new support for solar and other renewable energies, including marine, hydro-power and geothermal, to ‘provide much of the remainder of the UK’s energy supply by 2030’
• Ending the de-facto ban on onshore wind
• Ceasing development of new nuclear power stations
• Increasing the rate of the windfall tax on oil and gas production and the closing of ‘existing loopholes and tax-relief mechanisms’

Read the other stories in this series on the Logistics Manager website:

• What the Conservative Party manifesto could mean for UK supply chains
• What the Labour Party manifesto could mean for UK supply chains
• What the Liberal Democrat manifesto could mean for UK supply chains