The Green New Deal is a practical plan for tackling the interlinked crises of the climate and ecological emergencies driven by an economy that isn’t working for the majority and is causing corrosive inequality, and a finance system that serves only an elite few. It will deliver an environmental transformation of our economy and society catalysed by public investment that solves these connected challenges at the same time, and makes life better for all of us.

Good work

The Green New Deal will create good quality, well-paid and secure jobs in every corner of the country, focusing on the areas and communities where they are needed most. It will also support the skills and training to create and sustain them, now and in the future. The Green New Deal will promote and deliver greater democratic participation, accountability and shared ownership in the workplace. It will draw on the skills and potential of people around the country to transform the way we travel; the way we produce and consume energy; the way we manage the land; the way we grow the food we eat, and the way we work.

Home comfort and protection from price shocks

The Green New Deal will improve the heating and insulation of every home in the UK, making sure all our homes are warm in winter and cool in summer. This will protect us from high and volatile energy prices and end fuel poverty. Work on our homes, business and public buildings will create quality jobs in every part of the UK as we shift to a zero carbon economy.

Better investment

The Green New Deal will deliver the investment needed to decarbonise the economy at the scale and speed that science tells us is necessary. The Green New Deal will make use of the full range of financing possibilities available to government. Public investment in a Green New Deal reaps social, economic and environmental benefits and can help us reverse corrosive inequality. It will create a fairer world as well as greener world.

Investment in the Green New Deal must be catalysed by the government, which is uniquely placed to invest in the necessary ten-year transformation of our economy and society. Encouraged by this lead, investment will also come from private investors as well as from pension funds and savers.

We can also spend ‘better’ by reforming taxes, so that we tax more on what we want less of (like pollution and reckless speculation) and less on what we want more of (like green goods and services).

Banks and a finance system fit for purpose

The Green New Deal will create new checks, balances, regulations and directions for a banking system that isn’t working for most people or the planet. Banks have been allowed to profit at our expense for too long. We must regulate them better to make sure that they invest and lend at low, affordable interest rates to support the economy’s environmental transformation. We must also create the new public banking infrastructure to help deliver the investment necessary to deliver the Green New Deal.

Safer savings

The Green New Deal will mean greater security for our pensions and savings. Many people have already started to take savings and pensions out of the fossil fuels that we can’t afford to burn and which will soon become worthless as the world wakes up to the need to leave them in the ground. This creates the need for new, low risk, steady return mechanisms for saving. New bonds, nationally and locally, and new pension arrangements targeted at the green renewal of our infrastructure could help bring long-term benefits to everyday savers and the country as a whole.

Space for nature

Human health and well being are inextricably linked to nature, but we are living through a mass extinction event because of the pressure from economies on ecosystems. The Green New Deal will deliver space for nature with policies to restore habitats in urban, suburban and countryside settings. Not only will this benefit other plants and animals, but through more contact with nature bring greater well being and quality of life for people. The Green New Deal embraces a vision for food and farming that will improve human and environmental health, maximise the landscape’s ability to store carbon, promote innovations in land management and ownership, and ease the transition by protecting jobs and creating new green employment opportunities

Real leadership

The Green New Deal will mean the UK showing real world leadership, setting an example by transforming our economy and working with others around the world to make sure that the Green New Deal is both global and just. The Green New Deal will end the policy contradictions which can see a government declare a climate emergency, and yet still go ahead with expanding airports and issue new licences to dig for fossil fuels.

National fairness

The Green New Deal will target investment at those that need it most including communities that have suffered from decades of deindustrialisation, communities who have been excluded from full participation in the economy and in areas where there are high levels of underemployment and unemployment, and people working in today’s high emission sectors.

International fairness

The Green New Deal is about setting the economy, nationally and globally, on a path to living within its environmental means. It must also be about fairness in a warming world. The Green New Deal calls for the new financial mechanisms and technology transfers to help the majority world adapt to climate change and support human well-being, breaking the carbon chains of fossil fuel dependence and the end of the economic culture of that has viewed people and places primarily for the extraction of profit.