National security, crime and justice

• Urgently review control orders and find a way to allow intercept evidence in court.

• Proscribe groups that have "recently espoused or incited violence or hatred".

• Seek more "no torture" guarantees overseas so that foreign terror suspects can be deported.

• Directly elected "individuals" to oversee police.

• Greater legal protections for people to apprehend criminals and defend themselves.

• Overhaul drinking laws, ban below-cost alcohol sales and "early warning" bans on new legal highs.

• "Rehabilitation revolution" that will pay independent providers to reduce reoffending.

• Full review of sentencing policy and explore alternatives to prison for mentally ill and drug offenders.

• Extend anonymity to defendants in rape cases.

Analysis by Alan Travis

The agreement clears the way for the consideration of wider bans on extreme Islamist groups but with the careful caveat that they must be "subject to the advice of the police and security and intelligence agencies". It may lead to more instances of public funds being denied than outright bans such as that on Hizb-ut-Tahrir demanded in the past by Tory spokesmen.

The position on control orders appears to recognise that despite a Liberal Democrat plan to scrap control orders there is not yet any effective alternative. The strategy of seeking more "no torture" agreements for deporting terror suspects has already been tried by Labour almost to the point of exhaustion but this enables the coalition to sidestep the immediate debate over the Human Rights Act.

The policing package omits the key Lib Dem election promise of employing 3,000 more police officers and pushes ahead with the Conservative proposals for directly-elected police commissioners – although Theresa May prefers to refer to them only as "individuals". The changes in the drinking laws and alcohol prices are likely to provoke a strong reaction from the drinks companies.

On prisons and sentencing, the coalition negotiators have ordered a review of sentencing to square the circle between David Cameron's campaign promise of longer sentences and the Lib Dem commitment to reduce the use of six-month sentences. The use of alternative, secure, treatment-based accommodation for the mentally ill and drug offenders could substantially cut the record prison population but will prove controversial.

Immigration and equality

• Annual limit on number of non-EU economic migrants.

• End detention of children for immigration purposes.

• Create border police force as part of Serious Organised Crime Agency.

• New measures to minimise abuse of student visas.

• Citizens from any new EU member states to be banned from working in UK for a transitional period.

• Halt deportation of asylum seekers who have fled to the UK because their sexual orientation or gender identification put them at risk.

• Extend right to request flexible working to all employees.

• Fair pay review in public sector to implement "20 times" pay multiple.

Analysis by Alan Travis

The Conservatives' promise to cap annual migration to the UK features strongly while the Lib Dems' commitment to an amnesty for illegal migrants who have been in the country for more than 10 years is wholly absent. The document is also silent on what will happen to the estimated 500,000-plus illegal migrants living in the UK with no mention of increased deportations or plans to give them a route to citizenship.

The limit is carefully worded to refer to non-EU economic migrants to reassure minority ethnic groups that it will not cover the much larger numbers coming to Britain for family reunion purposes. The agreement acknowledges that the coalition has yet to work out how the limit will be implemented. Further improvements in the asylum system are promised, and in the equalities section there is a small Lib Dem victory with a ban on deporting asylum seekers who have been persecuted for being gay or lesbian.

Civil liberties

• Introduce a freedom bill.

• Scrap ID card scheme and register, Contact Point database and halt next generation of biometric passports.

• Outlaw fingerprinting of children at school without parents' permission.

• Changes to the DNA database, restore rights of non-violent protest, regulate CCTV and introduce safeguards against misuse of anti-terrorism legislation.

• New mechanism to prevent proliferation of unnecessary new criminal offences.

• Set up commission to "investigate the creation of a British bill of rights that incorporates and builds on all our obligations under the European convention on human rights".

Analysis by Alan Travis

The wide-ranging package on civil liberties is designed to "reverse their substantial erosion and roll back state intrusion". Its proposals to scrap ID cards go further than initially expected with the halting not only of the ID database but also the next generation of biometric passports. This could potentially seriously boost the savings to be made but the Home Office will have serious problems disentangling ID cards from passports.

The terms of reference for the commission looking at replacing the Human Rights Act with its promise to enshrine the European convention rights in British law and protect and extend British liberties sounds reassuring. But the devil is in the details and the Conservatives are looking to reduce the application of Strasbourg case law, rather than the convention rights themselves, in British courts, opening the way for more deportations of terrorism suspects, failed asylum seekers and other controversial areas.

Energy, climate and environment

• Pledge to reform energy markets – that probably means more state intervention as the markets now are very liberalised.

• Ofgem to establish a "security guarantee of energy supplies" – to stop the lights going out as old coal and nuclear stations are retired.

• Annual energy statement to parliament – a school report way of keeping departments on their toes.

• An offshore electricity grid – along with the promised smart grid, that's an expensive but necessary pledge. Who will pay? Consumers in the end.

• Promise of "green financial products" so you can invest in wind farms and other forms of clean energy.

• A free vote on repealing the Hunting Act – a Conservative crowd-pleaser • A national tree-planting campaign – a Liberal Democrat policy that's hard not to like.

• Encouraging councils to pay people to recycle – a Tory "carrot" idea that has been piloted already by Tory councils and is in contrast to Labour's penalising "stick" proposals.

• "Sharing" the responsibility with farmers for dealing with disease outbreaks – ie farmers will pay for next foot and mouth.

• On housing, coalition says it "will require continual improvements to energy efficiency" – but no mention of Labour's commitment to make all new homes zero-carbon by 2016.

Analysis by Damian Carrington

The environment was already one of the most fleshed-out areas of policy in the initial coalition agreement, and today's new "programme for government" doesn't throw up many new surprises. Aside from nuclear power, which retains a Tory green light with Liberal Democrats allowed to abstain, there is much agreement between the two parties – more energy will be generated from renewable sources such as wind and runway expansion remains ruled out at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted.

Some of the newly-announced ideas, such as a national tree-planting campaign – a Lib Dem proposal – are populist as well as good news for the environment. The Tories got their shires-pleaser with a free vote to repeal the act that banned fox-hunting. Another Conservative proposal, councils paying people to recycle, could prove popular compared to Labour's contrasting "pay-as-you-throw" idea.

Some sections of the new agreement are still very woolly. Houses will have to be more energy efficient – but will new homes have to meet the previous government's commitment of being zero carbon by 2016? A green bank will encourage clean energy – yet how much funding it will get is unknown. The government is promising to source food to British Standards – but only where it is cheap.

There is also no mention of the previous government's promise to pay consumers up to £5,000 towards the price of a new electric car. Time will tell whether the coalition lives up to Cameron's promise to be the "greenest government ever".

Defence, security and foreign affairs

• Pledge to "maintain" Britain's nuclear deterrent, but the renewal of Trident should be scrutinised "to ensure value for money", with Lib Dems to "continue to make the case for alternatives".

• Reduce Ministry of Defence running costs by 25%.

• Measures to improve duty of care and military covenant, including doubling allowance for troops serving in Afghanistan.

• Boost defence exports for "legitimate purposes, not internal repression".

• Set up a strategic defence and security review, overseen by the National Security Council "with strong Treasury involvement".

• Establish "a new 'special relationship' with India" and "seek closer engagement with China".

• Maintain "a strong, close and frank relationship with the United States".

• The UK will play a "positive" role in the EU, but amend the 1972 European Communities Act, "examine" the case for a UK "sovereignty bill", and approach legislation in the area of criminal justice "on a case-by-case basis".

Analysis by Richard Norton-Taylor

Though there is little startlingly new in the programme relating to defence, security, and foreign policy, the language and emphasis is significant. All parties agreed before the election on the need to keep nuclear weapons, set up a defence review, and improve the welfare of British troops and their families.

However, there is also plenty of scope for serious disputes over the coming months, notably over when and how to replace the existing Trident nuclear missile fleet and what weapons systems to cut in the defence and security review due to be completed by the end of the year. The emphasis on Treasury involvement and value for money could provoke tensions within the Conservative party – between those who want Britain to procure every available modern weapons system, and those who are more concerned about the cost.

There are signs of balancing acts – for example between hawks who would like to export as much arms as possible, and those, particularly the Lib Dems, concerned about them getting into the wrong hands. The language on the EU is robust – when it comes to what is called the "transfer of sovereignty" but pragmatic and flexible on areas the Conservatives have expressed strong opposition to ie cooperation in the fields of criminal justice and the workplace.

With a significant choice of words, the document refers to a "special relationship" with India, contrasting with "closer engagement" with China. It promises a "frank" relationship with the US, a term reflecting perhaps Nick Clegg's known scepticism about too close a relationship with Washington after the experience of George Bush and Tony Blair's period in power.

Health

• Guarantee year-on-year real-terms increases in health spending and end to top-down reorganisations of the NHS; cut by a third the cost of NHS administration and transfer these savings to frontline services.

• "Significant" cuts in the number of health quangos but strengthened role for Care Quality Commission and Monitor, the foundation trust regulator.

• Reforms to Nice, and create a cancer drugs fund to help patients.

• Stop the "centrally-dictated" closure of A&E and maternity wards.

• Renegotiate the GP contract but give more powers to GPs as patients' expert guides; develop a 24/7 urgent care service in England, including out-of-hours services.

• Ban foreign health professionals from working in the NHS unless they have passed "robust" language and competence tests.

• Introduce directly elected members of primary care trust boards.

Analysis by Denis Campbell

The coalition's health plans pledge to implement most of the ideas the Tories developed in opposition, such as a new independent NHS board, real-terms year-on-year increases in spending, halting the closure of hospital A&E and maternity units, and letting patients rate their quality of hospital care.

But the high-profile and ill-advised Tory pre-election plan to scrap NHS targets introduced by Labour – such as A&E patients being seen within four hours, and every patient receiving treatment within 18 weeks of first seeing their GP – seems to have been dropped. They have been popular with patients and most doctors accept they have brought huge benefits. Abandoning them could see waiting lists rising again, which would be unpopular.

The dozens of clear, detailed promises of reform will bring profound change both in the NHS's structures and the way it operates. Although one promise is to "stop the top-down reorganisations of the NHS", there will be yet another of those. Giving groups of GPs the power to commission health services on behalf of patients and control over budgets will limit the role of England's 152 primary care trusts, and question marks may arise too over the remit and future of the 10 regional strategic health authorities. Mergers of PCTs, like the one ongoing in Birmingham, are likely, with job losses inevitable. NHS managers will face tough times, too, thanks to the pledge to slash NHS bureaucracy.

The coalition will also "significantly cut the number of health quangos". None of those for the chop have been identified yet, but speculation suggests the Food Standards Agency and National Patient Safety Agency – where Sir Liam Donaldson, the outgoing chief medical officer, is about to become the new chairman – may be among those which are vulnerable.

Publishing much more detailed data about which hospitals provide the best care will encourage even more patients to vote with their feet, and that could in time threaten the viability of some district general hospitals.

Social care and disability

• Establish a commission on long-term care.

• Break down barriers between health and social care funding.

• Extend personal budgets for social care.

• Help the elderly live at home for longer through home adaptations and community support programmes.

• Prioritise dementia research.

• Introduce direct payments for carers and improve access to respite care.

• Reform Access to Work programme.

Analysis by Anna Bawden

Despite 13 years of a Labour government and numerous reports and inquiries, the thorny issue of how to pay for social care funding and tackle the burgeoning numbers with dementia has still not been addressed. So the government's announcement of a commission on long-term care, which will report within a year and more resources for dementia research, suggests that it means business.

Crucially, the government seems keen not to simply rehearse old arguments or replicate previous research. The commission has been told to focus on a range of ideas, including the two main proposals on reforming social care funding: a voluntary insurance scheme and the partnership scheme proposed by Derek Wanless in his 2005 root-and-branch review for the King's Fund.

Similarly, the promise to prioritise dementia research is long overdue.

A statement that the government would "break down barriers between health and social care funding to incentivise preventative action" makes all the right noises, but, in an era of cuts, whether councils and the NHS will feel able to pool resources in this way is questionable.

While the extension of personal budgets for carers, older and disabled people and improving access to respite care is a continuation of Labour's policies, the coalition has scrapped plans to implement the Personal Care at Home Act 2010, which promised free care at home.

Education

• Parents, teachers and charities to be encouraged to set up their own schools under a "Swedish-style" system.

• Emphasis on old-fashioned discipline – strict uniform codes, and rules such as pupils standing up when teachers enter the classroom. A pledge to give teachers "the powers they need" to keep order.

• A pupil premium for disadvantaged children – but no mention of what the "significant" premium will be worth and no further detail on what cuts "outside the schools budget" will fund it.

• Inspections to be targeted on failing schools, an effort to get more science and maths graduates to be teachers, and state school pupils to sit "elite" exams like the iGCSE.

• Policy on higher and further education is light on detail, with aspirations such as fostering stronger links between universities, colleges and industry featuring more heavily than actual measures to deliver them.

• No firm policy on student fees. The coalition will wait until Lord Browne's review into university funding has reported; Lib Dems can abstain if the government wants to increase fees.

Analysis by Jessica Shepherd

The coalition government has agreed to push forward the Tories' plans to allow parents, teachers and charities to set up their own schools.

We can expect proposals very soon to change legislation so that these new schools can open. At the moment, rules on planning permission stand in the way of making these new schools – based on Sweden's free schools and US charter schools – a reality in the near future. But while the Conservatives can be seen to have got their way on new schools, where is their big drive to increase the number of academy schools? The only mention of academies is in the penultimate paragraph of the schools section. In the run-up to the election, the Conservatives were loudly proclaiming that they would give primary schools the chance to turn into academies and that any school deemed "outstanding" by Ofsted, the school inspectorate, would be able to transform into an academy within days of a Tory government. The Lib Dems may well have refused to concede an expansion of academy schools. They have stated that they want schools to be held accountable to local authorities. Academies are not, being independent state schools.

Is there a contradiction in telling schools they will have more freedom, but also asserting that they will be "properly accountable"? Many teachers will be delighted that the two parties that make up the coalition agree that government should have less involvement in curriculum matters. We can expect that the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency, a quango in charge of curriculum design, may well have had its day. But teachers and their unions will be worried by the statement that headteachers are going to be given the power to award bonuses to their staff and possibly penalise them too, under a reform of existing "rigid" national pay and condition rules.

Much is still vague in this document. How exactly will Sats be changed? The document says this is "to be reviewed". The Lib Dems have got their way on the pupil premium. This is the financial incentive that would give schools extra cash for taking disproportionately more pupils from poor homes. But how much this pupil premium will be, and where the money will come from, has not been said. On universities, the main question has been evaded: tuition fees. The parties are hiding behind the Browne review, which is currently under way and looking into whether fees should rise. The Lib Dems are well-known for their stance on phasing out the fees. All this document repeats is that Lib Dems will be able to abstain from a vote in parliament on the topic. The Lib Dems have also not got their way on raising the adult learning grant. In their manifesto, they said this should increase from £30 to £45 a week. Just like the pupil premium, the figures are nowhere to be seen.

Sport

• Promise to ensure a "safe and successful" Olympic games, and deliver the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth games and the 2013 rugby league and 2015 rugby union world cups. Will "strongly support" the 2018 football world cup bid.

• Promise to "urgently" form plans to deliver a "genuine and lasting legacy" from the Olympics.

• Reform the lottery to ensure more money goes into sports, the arts and heritage.

• Support an annual "Olympic-style" school sports event to encourage competitive sport.

• Use cash in dormant betting accounts to boost grassroots sport.

• Encourage reform of football governance rules to support the "cooperative ownership of football clubs by supporters".

Analysis by Owen Gibson

The coalition has largely retained all the main sports policies of both parties. In opposition, both had been strongly critical of ill-formed plans to boost sports participation through the Olympics and now have a chance to do something about it. The fact they have flagged the issue as urgent in an otherwise fairly noncommittal list of policy objectives suggests they will move on it soon.

Jeremy Hunt, the new sports secretary, created waves by refusing to ringfence the £9.3bn budget for the Olympics, but it is not understood to be at risk – partly because it would be foolish to cut the contingency budget and risk busting it closer to the games, but mainly because both parties recognise the need not to disrupt a project that appears to be largely on track. However, they will have to continue to make the case for it as spending cuts elsewhere begin to bite.

Hugh Robertson, the new junior sports minister, has identified overhauling the 2012 legacy plan as one of his first priorities, alongside getting the 2018 World Cup bid back on track and reforming the lottery. He is then expected to turn his attention to the thorny issue of reforming English football's dysfunctional governance structure.

Today's promise to support ownership of clubs by supporters will be welcomed by fans' groups but is short of the detail that Labour promised during the election campaign.

Proposals to use cash in dormant betting accounts to fund grassroots sporting facilities – a Lib Dem idea – are sensible but will only raise around £10m a year. That could be a drop in the ocean if an axe is taken to exchequer funding for sport in the wake of the 2012 Olympics.

Coincidentally £10m is also how much the Tories have said it will cost to stage their planned annual "Olympic-style" school sports competition – a plan that critics say replicates too closely existing competitions and would cost money better spent elsewhere.

Communities, local government and social action

• Over 30 commitments ranging across council finance, housing, planning, and volunteering to "shift power from Westminster" and end the "era of top-down government" by devolving decision-making to local councils, communities and individuals, and encouraging social action to help people "come together to improve their communities".

• Abolition of regional housebuilding targets, returning decisions on where and how may homes are built to local councils, who will also have new powers to stop "garden grabbing" – the practice whereby developers build homes in large gardens attached to suburban houses. In rural areas farmers will be able to convert existing buildings into social housing, while communities will be able to form trusts to build homes on public land.

• A freeze on council tax "for at least one year" – two years if local authorities agree. This suggests a coalition compromise – the Tories had previously promised a centrally-imposed two-year freeze. There will be a review of council and housing finance. Town halls will be given more freedom to decide how they run themselves, and will face a less onerous inspection regime. Councillors will be given the power to vote on salary packages for senior council executives.

• Public sector workers will have the right to form co-ops and social enterprises to "become their own boss" and "take over" the services they deliver.

• A cadre of "community organisers" will be trained to support social action in deprived communities. A National Citizen Service will be introduced for 16-year-olds "to give them a chance to develop the skills needed to be active and responsible citizens, mix with people from different backgrounds and start getting involved in their communities".

There are three parts to this policy: allowing councils more autonomy by giving them more opportunities to raise local income; giving councils the power to set local priorities and standards for public services; and allowing local community groups and charities to take direct ownership of buildings and services.

In theory David Cameron and Nick Clegg are on the same page here. "'Liberalism" and "big society" in effect meant "the same thing," Clegg told the big society launch at No 10 on Tuesday.

In practice it may be tricky. The Lib Dems who have around 5,000 local councillors and a strong grassroots activist base, will support greater local autonomy, and will expect rapid and meaningful reform: they will be disappointed if devolution does not materialise, or if the promised review of local government finance (the third in the last six years) is, like its predecessors, shelved and ignored.

The Tory right will be unnerved by the coalition's decision, announced in today's document, to water down their party's current commitment to a two-year council tax freeze. They will be concerned that localism may lead to a proliferation of local taxes and public spending, especially if Labour continues to make gains in local elections.

Housing may be another source of tension. The coalition's decision to scrap regional house-building targets will be welcomed by councils in south-east England, who had opposed them vehemently. But there will be concerns that this, and the promise of greater local control over planning decisions, will fuel nimbyism, make it harder to kickstart the house-building industry, and exacerbate existing housing shortages.

Labour, which flirted with ideas of "community empowerment" in recent years, always feared that localism would undermine the universality of the welfare state and services. The coalition may be less sensitive about this, but if local councils are allowed to shrug off national standards and go their own way Clegg and Cameron can expect to be criticised for presiding over an unfair "postcode lottery" where citizens in neighbouring boroughs end up with widely differing entitlements and levels of service.

Ultimately, localism is always politically difficult, says Andy Sawford, chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit. To do localism successfully means "changing the way we govern, as well as the structure of taxation." That is rarely popular with national politicians, "who feel that they have a mandate to intervene at local level and that they will be held to account anyway for what happens at local level."

Patrick Butler

Families

The Conservatives' core commitment to family values comes through strongly. "Strong and stable families are the bedrock of a strong and stable society," the document states, and measures to encourage couples to stay together include money for relationship counselling, and a commitment to look at addressing the so-called couple penalty in the tax credit system (which arises because two parents living separately can receive a higher level of benefits than those who live together).

Sure Start survives, as promised, but loses its original goal of bringing well-off and poorer children and families together, in order to focus services on the needier, and also shifts its mission to lay greater emphasis on the provision of an extra 4,200 health visitors (as the Conservatives promised last year).

The Conservatives' concern to protect children from "excessive commercialisation and premature sexualisation" is set out here, chiming with recent media outrage over padded bikinis for seven-year-olds. Popular frustration over the growth in demand for Criminal Records Bureau checks for people working with children is also acknowledged, with a commitment to scale the system "back to common-sense levels".

Both Conservatives and Lib Dems promised to adhere to the commitment to end child poverty by 2020 in their manifestos, and that promise is reflected here.

The commitment to promoting shared parenting and flexible parental leave is also an area that both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems have been working on for several years; campaigners welcome this, but stress that all rests on how this is implemented.

Jobs and welfare

One of the final Conservative party campaign posters to go up across the country said: "Let's cut benefits for those who refuse to work." This is translated in today's document into a line that pledges: "We will ensure that receipt of benefits for those able to work is conditional on their willingness to work" and a promise that those who turn down "reasonable offers of work or training" will be sanctioned. There is no further detail on how this will be implemented.

Unsurprisingly, some of the more radical and expensive proposals made by the new work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, in opposition, have not made it into the document.

His scheme to remove benefits more gradually when people move into work (in order to make taking a low-paid job more appealing) is only hinted at here, with a promise that ways to simplify the benefits system in order to improve incentives to work will be "investigated".

Equalities

The government will "promote equal pay and take a range of measures to end discrimination in the workplace". While this will be welcomed widely, everything depends on how actively it promotes this goal, and the pledge is rather vague. Forty years after the Equal Pay Act, women are still paid on average 17% less than men, and even the measures in the outgoing government's equality legislation are not seen as robust enough to tackle the problem; campaigners will be waiting to see details of what these measures consist of.

Ben Summerskill of Stonewall said that the two lines on gay rights were a "happy melange" of Conservative and Lib Dem policy.

Both parties had committed to stopping 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.

The Conservatives had promised to "use our relationships with other countries to push for unequivocal support for gay rights", while the Lib Dems had pledged to work to make sure UK civil partnerships were recognised internationally.

"The acid test will be what politicians do rather than what they say, but with more openly gay MPs in the Conservative party than in Labour and Lib Dems put together, we suspect that there will be more movement here than there might have been historically."

Amelia Gentleman

The arts

• Free entry to national museums and galleries – and greater freedom for national museums and galleries.

• Bigger share of lottery money for arts and heritage – and as with sports, possibility of tax changes to increase lottery profits to the good causes.

• Lottery distributors - ie the Arts Council and Heritage Lottery Fund - to restrict administration costs to 5% of total income.

• Cut red tape to encourage more live music.

When media and sports are stripped out, the culture and arts commitments are the thinnest in the entire coalition document, the least likely to be papering over any Conservative/Lib Dem cracks – and the most likely to disintegrate as spending cuts bite.

On the face of it, this handful of principles, with lottery changes bringing the only promise of new money, is common ground between the coalition partners. However, Jeremy Hunt, the new culture secretary, assured in his first speech that culture will not be a soft target for cuts – but he will be unable to stop the Treasury from seeing it as precisely that, and his ability to defend his new territory has yet to be proven.

The commitment to free admission will be welcomed by most in the sector, after rumblings in opposition from some Tory sources that charging was on the way back. The "greater freedom" phrase may yet prove contentious: it covers Hunt's conviction that private philanthropy, and American-style endowments – a goldmine in the boom years, a millstone which has which has crushed many US museums as the economy crashed – is the way for many arts institutions to guarantee their own long-term stable financial footing.

Cutting administration costs will be a mantra across all government departments: the Arts Council is currently closest to the target at 6.5%, after a wave of painful cuts under Labour.

The red tape and live music promise relates to a bitter and arcane row, raging quite unknown to most of the public for the last seven years, since the new Licensing Act dropped the "two in a bar" provision that small informal live music venues needed no licence. The Lib Dems have been running with the campaign launched by the Musicians Union, to sort out a situation which has been policed in some regions to ludicrous extremes of pub landlords threatened with prosecution or losing their licence over carol singers or Morris dancers.

Maev Kennedy