Politics. It Does Affect You.

You told us you’re worried about where you’re going to live. And you want politicians to give you some answers in the run up to the General Election. Here are the basics on how your vote can make a difference.Sign up to Swing the Vote to have your say on what happens next.

First thing’s first. You need to register.

The electoral register is a list of names and addresses of everyone eligible to vote. To make sure you get your say, you need to be on it.

To register you must be:

16+ (and due to turn 18 before the next election)

You told us you’re worried about how the UK raises and spends its money. So we’ve rounded up the basics on how this affects you, and what the parties say they’ll do about it. Your vote can influence how we carve up the cash. Sign up to Swing the Vote to have your say on what happens next.

Why does this matter?

Ever been to school? Gone to the doctor? Thrown away some rubbish? Then you’ve used a service that the Government is spending money on.

Though it can seem like these services are free, you do actually pay for them - whenever are taxed on your wages, buy food or clothes or pay to live somewhere, you’re putting some cash in the pot to help fund those services.

So you’ve got a right to have a say on how you want the Government to spend your money.

What’s it got to do with politics?

When you’re broke, do you work more hours, or spend less when you go out? Or a bit of both?

Whoever is elected in May will face a similar decision.

Right now the UK is spending more money than it’s bringing in. For a while we’ve been borrowing money to help plug the gap, but now we need to balance things out so we can starting paying off the debt.

Parliament has voted to make sure that the next government will have to balance the money coming in with the money going out in the next 3 years.

Whoever wins the election will have two main ways it can do this:

1)     Cutting back on some services to run the country more cheaply

2)     Raising taxes to bring in more money.

Higher tax and cuts to services aren’t much fun for anyone, but by voting you can show which party you think has the best ideas about what we should pay more tax for, and which services we can and can’t afford to cut back on.

What will politicians do about it?

The Conservatives want to balance things out without raising taxes - in fact they’ve promised to reduce tax on wages for 25 million people, and even cut tax on petrol and diesel. But lower taxes will mean they need to make more drastic cuts to services.

Labour want to reduce the gap with less drastic cuts to services, but to do this they’ll need to raise taxes, especially for businesses and richer people.

They plan to stop richer pensioners from claiming money from the government to help with heating bills, and put a maximum limit on how much the UK can spend on benefits each year.

They and the Lib Dems both say they’ll ‘share the burden fairly’ between the rich and poor by introducing new taxes on the rich, including a tax on multimillion-pound homes.

The Green Party are against cuts to services. Instead they want to introduce a new wealth tax, new taxes on banks, and close some of the loopholes that currently make it possible for richer people and businesses to cut down their tax bills.

Meanwhile, UKIP say they’ll get rid of environmental taxes we pay as part of our home energy bills, and cut some specific projects to reduce spending – they’d leave the European Union to save £8bn a year in membership fees, and scrap plans to build a high speed railway connecting London and the North.

To bring in more money, they want to invest in the UK’s ability to mine for shale gas. Money made from selling this fuel would then be invested in services.