A new dawn has broken, has it not?

Ella Rose, Director, and Alex Evangelou, Senior Client Executive
01/10/2026

Andy Burnham has successfully stewarded his first Labour Party Conference as Prime Minister. By all accounts, until the Tuesday afternoon Leader’s speech, it was a quiet, very boring conference, exceptionally well managed by Number 10 and Labour Party staff. Conference floor, with delegates from across the country being live streamed on TV can be a PR risk, but, unlike Labour’s recent past, was a collegiate, and respectful affair. Motions on housing, reindustrialisation and buses suited the new Prime Minister’s agenda and passed without contention.

Across the Conference, fringes covered the usual wide range but broadly didn’t make the headlines. It felt busy, although admittedly down on the heady years of 2023 and 2024. The Labour movement has a steely determination to back the new Prime Minister, buoyed by the bounce in the polls.

The Prime Minister’s speech broke the quietness of Conference with a bang. A 70 minute, well-rehearsed and tightly held speech, written in large part by the Prime Minister himself. The vulnerability of Burnham up until this point has been the lack of leadership election, and interrogation on his politics and policies. It has enabled media, and business, to project their expectations, filling a void that wasn’t of Burnham’s choosing. His speech closed that void. He set out a clear, left-wing, ideology for the country he wants to see. He did so with humility and humour, recognising that his vision wasn’t for everyone.

In a way, it was a continuity strategy. Starmer had attempted to do the personal story of his parents, the working-class background and the progressive patriotism. Unfortunately for him, it hadn’t landed in the way that Burnham was able to. It was the policies however, that set them poles apart.

Perhaps the most interesting strategic decision, amongst the policies mostly pitched at the left, was the language on progressive patriotism, that politics can have the answers and that the UK has something special. Tonally, it felt the other side of the coin to Nigel Farage – answering the same questions but with a different vision. Number 10 (South and North) will hope that this starts hope, the theme of the conference, can start to win back lost voters.

The speech wasn’t just heavy on rhetoric but offered an ideological thread of policies that were closely crafted together to create a clear vision and narrative.

Triple Lock and Social Care

The most far reaching and consequential announcement made during the Leader’s speech was a promise to review the triple lock. By removing part of the mechanism that uprates the state pension in line every year with growth in average earnings, Burnham hopes to use these savings to help fund the Labour manifesto commitment to establish a universal, free at the point of use, National Care Service.

In some years, the triple lock has meant that the state pension has risen faster than average earnings. With these changes, the state pension is predicted to rise by a lesser degree over time. The Institute for Fiscal Studies argues that this would result in the state pension becoming more sustainable and predictable. The IFS found that if these reforms had been in place since 2010, expenditure on the state pension “would be £9 billion lower than it currently is”.

It has been promised to be as momentous as the founding of the NHS and considering the size of the task ahead, all these major changes will take place in the next parliament. To telegraph stability to the markets, Burnham said that he will stick by current manifesto commitments not to touch the triple lock, and stick to the fiscal rules. But, this is certain to be in any future manifesto and will be further outlined in his 10-year plan published later this year.

Burnham has presented the Labour Party and the country with a destination and is prepared to make the argument to the country about why one should join him on the journey to reach it. Shaped by personal experience and defined by the political capital he is expending, if Andy Burnham is voted in at the next General Election on the platform of universal social care, it will become his legacy.

Constitutional Affairs: Europe and PR

The one split across Labour’s well organised factions is proportional representation. Although not debated on conference floor, it proved to be one of the most consequential take aways, with Burnham promising a commission on the subject. This fits with his consensus building narrative and will help win back Liberal Democrat and Green voters.

The only consequential international announcement was also a cat-out-the-bag – Europe. The Prime Minister announced a full-scale re-think of the UK’s relationship with Europe, with options to be announced in November. Rejoining was not taken off the table; however politically unlikely it feels. Regardless, the Prime Minister was clear that he believes the country is worse off for having left the European Union, with wide-ranging language about a decade of decline since the referendum.

Water

Burnham framed water as a symbolic of “what has gone wrong with Britain”. The 1989 Water Act, passed under the Thatcher government limited government ownership of water companies to between 1% and 3%. Since then, private water monopolies have accrued billions of pounds of debt, have faced mounting financial penalties for environmental damage, and have had borne the brunt of public dissatisfaction in as a result of endless negative headlines.

Burnham announced that he has instructed Angela Eagle to present a strengthened Water Bill to Parliament that repeals the provisions limiting public ownership of water and will devolve new powers to mayors to hold water companies to account. The latter part of this bill builds off a key recommendation of Sir John Cunliffe’s Independent Water Commission, published in June 2025, that called for the establishment of 9 regional bodies given power to oversee parts of water company spending and hold bosses to account over bills and sewage discharges. The full extent of their powers, are, so far, unknown. But the message to water companies is clear, kick up a stink, and public ownership is on the table.

Final reflections

At the end of his speech, Burnham listed the dates when the Labour Party entered government from opposition: 1945, 1964, 1997; missing from that list was 2024. He provided another date: “now”. To many in the room this conference speech felt epochal, and Burnham was acutely aware of this, but with the vaulting ambition must come action. Time will only tell the how consequential this speech will turn out to be; whether this is the “circuit breaker” that was promised or just another motivational speech. We will be paying close attention to the upcoming budget on the 28th of October as well as 10-year plan being published for later in the year; but for now, what we do know, is that the battle lines for the next election have been drawn.