Lib-Con Coalition agreement: highlights

Here are our 50 highlights from the government programme announced today by David Cameron and Nick Clegg.

We've not included the headline items - you can read about them elsewhere.

These are the little nuggets you might have missed. We've picked them because they made us say one of the following things:

1. Thank goodness! About time too! Freedom and fairness live to fight another day.
2. Wow, a Conservative government is doing that?
3. OK that's just plain weird.

We'll leave it to you to decide which policies elicited which responses. The wording of the policies given here is copied directly from the coalition document. We have resisted the urge to intersperse comments, at least until the very end.

Civil Liberties:

• We will restore rights to non-violent protest.
• We will review libel laws to protect freedom of speech.

Crime and Policing:

• We will ban the sale of alcohol below cost price.
• We will review the operation of the Extradition Act – and the US/UK extradition treaty – to make sure it is even-handed.

Culture, Olympics, Media & Sport

• We will cut red tape to encourage the performance of more live music.

Defence:

• Support for ex-Service personnel to study at university.
• A new programme, ‘Troops for Teachers’, to recruit ex-Service personnel into the teaching profession.
• Extra support for veteran mental health needs.

Energy and Climate Change:

• We will refuse permission for additional runways at Gatwick and Stansted.
• We will reduce central government carbon emissions by 10% within 12 months.
• We will encourage community-owned renewable energy schemes where local people benefit from the power produced. We will also allow communities that host renewable energy projects to keep the additional business rates they generate.

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

• We will launch a national tree planting campaign.
• We will end the testing of household products on animals and work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research.
• We will investigate measures to help with fuel costs in remote rural areas, starting with pilot schemes.

Equalities:

• Internships for underrepresented minorities in every Whitehall department.
• We will stop the deportation of asylum seekers who have had to leave particular countries because their sexual orientation or gender identification puts them at proven risk of imprisonment, torture or execution.

Europe:

• We will amend the 1972 European Communities Act so that the use of any passerelle would require primary legislation.
• We will press for the European Parliament to have only one seat, in Brussels.
• We support the further enlargement of the EU.

Families and Children:

• We will take Sure Start back to its original purpose of early intervention, increase its focus on the neediest families, and better involve organisations with a track record of supporting families. We will investigate ways of ensuring that providers are paid in part by the results they achieve.
• We will investigate a new approach to helping families with multiple problems.
• We will review the criminal records and vetting and barring regime and scale it back to common sense levels.
• We will take steps to tackle the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood.

Foreign Affairs:

• We will work to establish a new ‘special relationship’ with India.
• We support reform of the UN Security Council, including permanent seats for Japan, India, Germany, Brazil and African representation.

Government Transparency:

• We will require public bodies to publish online the job titles of every member of staff and the salaries and expenses of senior officials paid more than the lowest salary permissible in Pay Band 1 of the Senior Civil Service pay scale.
• We will require anyone paid more than the Prime Minister in the centrally funded public sector to have their salary signed off by the Treasury.
• We will require full, online disclosure of all central government spending and contracts over £25,000.
• We will require all councils to publish items of spending above £500, and to publish contracts and tender documents in full.
• We will create a new ‘right to data’ so that government-held datasets can be requested and used by the public, and then published on a regular basis.
• We will ensure that all data published by public bodies is published in an open and standardised format, so that it can be used easily and with minimal cost by third parties.

Jobs and Welfare:

• We will develop local Work Clubs – places where unemployed people can gather to exchange skills, find opportunities, make contacts and provide mutual support.

Justice:

• We will introduce a ‘rehabilitation revolution’ that will pay independent providers to reduce reoffending.
• We will change the law so that historical convictions for consensual gay sex with over16s will be treated as spent and will not show up on criminal records checks.
• We will extend anonymity in rape cases to defendants.

NHS:

• We will give every patient the power to choose any healthcare provider that meets NHS standards, within NHS prices. This includes independent, voluntary and community sector providers.

Political Reform:

• We will establish a commission to consider the ‘West Lothian question’.
• We will fund 200 all-postal primaries over this Parliament, targeted at seats which have not changed hands for many years.
• We will ensure that any petition that secures 100,000 signatures will be eligible for formal debate in Parliament. The petition with the most signatures will enable members of the public to table a bill eligible to be voted on in Parliament.
• We will give residents the power to instigate local referendums on any local issue.

Public Health:

• We will ensure greater access to talking therapies to reduce long-term costs for the NHS.

Schools:

• We will fund a significant premium for disadvantaged pupils from outside the schools budget by reductions in spending elsewhere.
• We will give anonymity to teachers accused by pupils and take other measures to protect against false accusations.
• We will reform league tables so that schools are able to focus on, and demonstrate, the progress of children of all abilities.

Social Action:

• We will give public sector workers a new right to form employee-owned co-operatives and bid to take over the services they deliver. This will empower millions of public sector workers to become their own boss and help them to deliver better services.
• We will take a range of measures to encourage charitable giving and philanthropy.

Social Care and Disability:

• We will reform Access to Work, so disabled people can apply for jobs with funding already secured for any adaptations and equipment they will need.

Taxation:

• We will seek ways of taxing non-business capital gains at rates similar or close to those applied to income, with generous exemptions for entrepreneurial business activities.

Transport:

• We will mandate a national recharging network for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
• Our vision is of a truly national high speed rail network for the whole of Britain. Given financial constraints, we will have to achieve this in phases.

Oh, and just in case all of the above sounds too good to be true - it is too good to be true! The small print is in large print, on the back page. Here it comes:

Postamble:

• The deficit reduction programme takes precedence over any of the other measures in this agreement, and the speed of implementation of any measures that have a cost to the public finances will depend on decisions to be made in the Comprehensive Spending Review.

Oh well. It was nice to dream.