In Government, on your side

Plenty of residents ask whether going into government with the Tories the right thing to do and does Coalition Government work?

In due course you, the electors, will have to judge.

No party in a coalition will ever be totally happy with everything that happens but this period of coalition has given the Lib Dems the chance to implement many of our policies, things which would otherwise not happen, as well as prevent the Tories from bringing some of their more extreme ideas to bear.

In coalition the Lib Dems have managed to...

• Take 800,000 people out of tax altogether through increases in the Income Tax threshold. Another £23 million working people have had their tax cut by £200 per year. And each year, starting this month, ordinary working people will have tax cuts until the first £10,000 earned will be free of tax.
• Made sure that pensioners never again suffer Labour's 75p per week increase by tying pensions to the cost of living, the increase in earning, or 2.5%, whichever is the highest. This will result in the highest ever increase this Spring.
• Introduced a pupil premium which results in schools receiving an extra £480 for each disadvantaged child, and this figure is set to double by 2015.
• Created 440,000 new apprenticeships in 2010/11, a 50% increase on the previous year.
• This year introducing a £1 billion scheme which will guarantee every unemployed young person aged 18-24, a job or training place.
• Create a £3 billion green investment bank and introducing the "green deal" to provide free insulation to be paid for later from savings in Energy bills. As well as cutting costs and reducing carbon emmisions this will great thousands of green jobs.

Meantime we continue to put a brake on Tory policies which favour the richest in our society to make sure that the pain of paying back Labour's deficit is shared. This includes no cut in Inheritance taxes, an increase in capital Gains Tax to 28% and a £2.5 billion levy on banks each year.