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

In the foreword to the Labour Party’s manifesto, its leader Kier Starmer said: “The world has become increasingly volatile, with a major war in Europe for the first time in a generation and ever greater threats to the living standards of working people. This ‘age of insecurity’ requires the government to step up, not stand aside.”

He continued: “This means a return to the foundations of good government: national security, secure borders and economic stability. But it also requires an enduring partnership with business to deliver the economic growth we need. It needs more focus on long-term strategy, not the short-term distractions that can animate Westminster. And it demands a final and total rejection of the toxic idea that economic growth is gifted from the few to the many.”

Key policies relating to supply chain and logistics include:

Economy, security and trade

• Improving the UK’s trade and investment relationship with the EU by ‘tearing down unnecessary barriers to trade’
• Negotiating a veterinary agreement to prevent unnecessary border checks and help tackle the cost of food
• Ensuring a strong defence sector and resilient supply chains across the whole of the UK by ‘establishing long-term partnerships between business and government’
• Investing £2.5 billion to ‘rebuild’ the nation’s steel industry
• Ensuring AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership with Australia and the US, delivers its full economic and security potential
• Bringing a ‘long-term and strategic approach’ to managing the UK’s relations with China
• Striking ‘targeted trade agreements aligned with the UK’s industrial strategy and economic strengths’
• Leading international discussions to modernise trade rules and agreements so they ‘work for Britain’, promoting deeper trade and co-operation including through the World Trade Organisation and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership
• Seeking a new strategic partnership with India, including a free trade agreement, and ‘deepening the UK’s co-operation with partners across the Gulf on regional security, energy and trade and investment’
• Delivering a ‘new approach’ to trade with African countries
• Improve resilience and preparation across central government, local authorities, local communities and emergency services

Transport and infrastructure

• Developing a ten-year infrastructure strategy, ‘guiding investment plans and giving the private sector certainty about the project pipeline’
• Investing £1.8bn to upgrade ports and build supply chains across the UK
• Investing £1.5bn to build new gigafactories to support the automotive industry
• Creating new new roads, railways, reservoirs and ‘other nationally significant infrastructure’
• Setting out new national policy statements to ‘make major projects faster and cheaper by slashing red tape and building support for developments by ensuring communities directly benefit’
• Updating national planning policy to ‘ensure the planning system meets the needs of a modern economy, making it easier to build laboratories, digital infrastructure and gigafactories’
• Ensuring economic regulation ‘supports growth and investment, promotes competition, works for consumers and enables innovation’
• Ensuring that any proposed takeover of Royal Mail is ‘robustly scrutinised’
• Exploring new business and governance models for Royal Mail so that ‘workers and customers who rely on Royal Mail services can have a stronger voice in the governance and strategic direction of the company’
• Fixing an additional 1 million potholes across England in each year of the next parliament, funded by deferring the A27 bypass
• Accelerating the roll-out of EV charge points
• Restoring the phase-out date of 2030 for new cars with internal combustion engines
• Standardising the information supplied on the condition of EV batteries
• Ensuring industrial strategy supports the development of the AI sector and removing planning barriers to new data centres
• Creating a National Data Library to ‘bring together existing research programmes and help deliver data-driven public services, whilst maintaining strong safeguards and ensuring all of the public benefit’
• Scrapping short funding cycles for key research and development institutions in favour of ten-year budgets that ‘allow meaningful partnerships with industry to keep the UK at the forefront of global innovation’
• Creating a new Regulatory Innovation Office to ‘help regulators update regulation, speed up approval timelines and co-ordinate issues that span existing boundaries’
• Introducing binding regulation on the companies developing the most powerful AI models
• Deepening devolution settlements for existing Combined Authorities and widening devolution to more areas
• Reducing waste by moving to a circular economy

Skills and employment

• Establishing a youth guarantee of access to training, an apprenticeship or support to find work for all 18 to 21-year-olds
• Ensuring the minimum wage is a ‘genuine living wage’
• Changing the remit of the independent Low Pay Commission so it accounts for the cost of living
• Removing ‘discriminatory age bands’, so ‘all adults are entitled to the same minimum wage’
• Establishing Skills England to ‘bring together business, training providers and unions with national and local government’ to ensure a highly trained workforce
• Ensuring Skills England formally works with the Migration Advisory Committee to make sure training in England accounts for the overall needs of the labour market
• Devolving adult skills funding to Combined Authorities
• Transforming Further Education colleges into specialist Technical Excellence Colleges. which will ‘work with businesses, trade unions and local government to provide young people with better job opportunities’
• Reforming the Apprenticeships Levy and creating a flexible Growth and Skills Levy, with Skills England consulting on eligible courses to ‘ensure qualifications offer value for money’

Energy

• Investing £1bn to accelerate the deployment of carbon capture
• Investing £500 million to support the manufacturing of green hydrogen
• Creating a new Clean Power Alliance, ‘bringing together a coalition of countries at the cutting edge of climate action’
• Working with the private sector to double onshore wind, triple solar power and quadruple offshore wind by 2030, ‘creating 650,000 jobs across the country ‘
• Create a new publicly-owned company, Great British Energy, which will partner with energy companies, local authorities and co-operatives to install thousands of clean power projects through a combination of onshore wind, solar and hydropower projects
• Working with industry to ‘upgrade national transmission infrastructure and rewire Britain’
• Introducing a carbon border adjustment to ‘prevent countries from dumping lower-quality goods into British markets’ and support the UK in meeting its climate objectives

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