Academics explore how manifesto promises would really stack up

A team of academic researchers have carried out a comprehensive assessment of political parties' manifestos to predict economic, environmental, public service and societal outcomes if their pledges were delivered in full.

Their findings have resulted in the following predictions:

• Labour's manifesto claims will result in more favourable outcomes to the public than the Conservative party's across most areas of the political landscape - but they perform worse on the NHS
• Despite large tax cuts and strong pledges on immigration, Reform UK policies would result in the lowest average wages, increased economic inequality. They would also not perform better than Conservative or Labour policies in reducing legal migration or asylum seekers and refugees
• Green and Liberal Democrat policies would have the best outcomes for the environment and for public services
• Despite the highest taxes, Green policies would result in the highest average wage and the second highest level of economic growth of the five UK-wide parties studied
• Liberal Democrat and Green policies would produce the best outcomes for improving water and sewage.

In the study, currently available as a pre-print, researchers from Bournemouth University, Imperial College London and the University of Southampton used an established modelling system to reflect how policies across a range of areas can interact with each other and produce different outcomes than looking at each policy in isolation.

"Manifesto pledges and political promises have dominated the headlines in the election runup, but to get a better picture of how the future might look like under the different parties you need to go further than just looking at individual policies," explained Professor Rick Stafford, a researcher in complex systems and environmental policy at Bournemouth University who led the study.

"For example, a promise to increase the number of police officers can lead to a party being ranked highly for reducing crime, but other factors such as cost of living, benefits and employment levels are also proven to have an impact on crime - so their performance in those areas can change that ranking in either a positive or negative way," he added.

The team used complex models of interconnected economic, environmental, public service and social systems to analyse the overall outcomes of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Reform UK and Green manifestos if they were implemented in full.

They believe this work to be the first of its kind in integrating multiple political policies and performing predictive analysis of what this would mean if these policies were all enacted.

"We ranked outcomes based on what the public typically think is the best outcome - such as high economic growth, or a reduction in carbon emissions - and the results are fascinating,' said Professor Stafford.

While some predictions are perhaps expected, such as Reform UK having the lowest taxes, other results were surprising. The analysis predicted that Reform policies would have the lowest rate of inflation, and that Labour's policies are likely to result in the highest level of private investment into the economy and the highest level of economic growth.

Abigail Croker, a co-author and PhD researcher in the Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet Doctoral Training Partnership at Imperial College London, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, said: "We all have differing priorities so there is no 'best' party, but our research means that voters can now compare their personal priorities to our analysis to help make a more informed decision on how to cast their vote."

The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, although the method itself was published in Environment Science & Policy in 2020, and this latest analysis is now available as a 'pre-print'. More details on the team's predictions for each party's manifestos can be found here.

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