Conference wrap: Labour Party 2026
Andy Burnham’s first conference as Prime Minister: a National Care Service, the triple lock and who pays
Labour arrived in Liverpool with Andy Burnham as Prime Minister rather than the alternative leader journalists followed around last year’s fringe. The mood had changed: a Survation poll for LabourList found 92% of members thought he had governed well. But with Labour on 27% to 28% and MRPs showing no majority, these are shoots of recovery, not dominance.
Burnham made social care the defining test of his premiership, promising a National Care Service in England, free at the point of use, and changing the pension triple lock from April 2030 to help pay for it. The conference sounded like a manifesto taking shape, but how the full programme will be funded is still far from answered.
Beyond care, Burnham said Brexit had done more harm than good, announced a national commission on alternatives to first-past-the-post and promised greater public control of water and the electricity grid. Around him, Healey’s fiscal rules, Streeting’s defence spending and Mahmood’s migration controls made “moving left” too simple a description.
The full report · 19 pages, with every chart.
Get the full reportWhat we found
1. Burnham’s National Care Service would be funded partly by changing the triple lock
From April 2030 the state pension would rise by at least inflation or 2.5%, with a mechanism keeping pace with earnings over the longer term, rather than by the highest of earnings growth, CPI or 2.5%. The Government estimates this could save around £15bn a year by 2040, but the savings build slowly, and the Nuffield Trust, King’s Fund and Health Foundation all stressed the care offer will need substantial additional public money. Unite’s Sharon Graham warned that weakening pension protection could be “electoral suicide”.
2. Healey’s first speech as Chancellor paired hope with fiscal discipline
“The money New Labour had in the 90s is simply not there now,” he told delegates, promising his October Budget would keep to the fiscal rules. He announced £100m for a Local Apprenticeship Service run through mayoral areas, restored the Union Learning Fund and argued that an ever-expanding benefits bill was not inherently progressive. The CBI’s Rain Newton-Smith welcomed the discipline but said the Budget would have to turn the rhetoric into conditions in which companies could invest and hire.
3. Streeting is recasting defence spending as industrial policy
The Defence Secretary linked the Attlee government’s creation of the NHS with Ernest Bevin’s role in creating NATO, and acknowledged that higher defence spending brings “choices and trade-offs”. The Government is committed to raising core defence spending towards 3.5% of GDP by 2035, and Streeting announced that the £6bn contract for three floating docks for the nuclear-submarine fleet would stay in the UK.
4. Burnham’s “public control” is narrower than his rhetoric suggests
On water, he promised to remove the legislative barrier to bringing failing companies into public ownership; Great British Grid would be a publicly owned participant competing for future transmission projects, with resources small beside the roughly £70bn of transmission investment planned for 2026–31. Angela Rayner’s housing measures, including cutting the qualifying period for Empty Dwelling Management Orders from two years to six months, strengthen intervention without displacing the private market.
What’s in the report
- Lucy Powell: what went wrong, now for the reset p. 4
- Streeting’s defence p. 5
- Foreign policy in the Miliband era p. 7
- New Chancellor, same fiscal challenges p. 8
- Business, work and immigration under the new order p. 9
- Rayner’s comeback p. 10
- The PM’s hope agenda p. 11
- Brexit and electoral reform: reopening questions Labour had tried to close p. 13
- How much “public control” is really being proposed? p. 14
- A speech about more than individual policies p. 15
- Conference summary: a better mood, but what next? p. 16
Thanks. The report has opened in a new tab.
