TOWARDS THE MANIFESTOS: WHAT’S THE AGENDA FOR FIXING POVERTY AND TACKLING INEQUALITIES?

The APPG on Inclusive Growth wants to stimulate the debate within our political parties around fixing poverty and tackling inequalities and to galvanise this conversation, the APPG has teamed up with the Policy Institute at King’s College London and the Fairness Foundation to convene academics, experts, think tanks and campaigners in a new programme designed to provide a catalyst for the critical thinking required in the months ahead.

At the core of our ‘provocation’ to the political parties, the aim of our conference is to share:    

1. A core set of ideas for tackling inequalities, drawn from eighty of the UK’s inequality policy experts across tax, health, education, housing/ levelling up, employment, social security, equalities policy - designed to provoke the debate: ‘are the best ideas on the table? What are the ideas we are missing?’
2. Comprehensive new polling about UK attitudes to addressing poverty and inequalities, designed to explore which of the identified ideas the public thinks are popular, credible and impactful - to provoke the debate: ‘how do we build a sustainable consensus for action, between left and right, between the generations, and between all parts of the UK?’  

As our political parties limber up to begin drafting manifestos, the conference will provide a critical staging post to assess what we know about what works, where new policy research is required, and which policies and narratives are persuasive enough to command broad-based support at the ballot box.