Conservative Party Conference: What happened?

Kerri Prince, BASW UK’s Public and Political Affairs Lead, updates members on key announcements from the recent UK Conservative party conference.

Commentators, businesses, and civil society had their eyes on Manchester as thousands arrived to attend this year’s Conservative Party conference. 

With the uncertainty about when the next General Election will take place, this conference was viewed as one of the last chances for the Conservative Party to speak to their members and stakeholders and rally them ahead of what is expected to be one of the toughest elections for the Conservatives in a generation. 

Party leaders spend many months building up their offer ahead of a General Election, and this party conference season gives us a good indication of what battlegrounds the parties will be fighting on when voters eventually go to the polls. 

Key announcements

The key focus of a party conference is the speech by the Leader. Rishi Sunak gave his speech on Wednesday and a few headlines emerged from this, including:

  • Steadily increasing the age to buy cigarettes, with current 14-year-olds never being old enough to buy tobacco products
  • Phase 2 of HS2 (Birmingham to Manchester) has been cancelled – with the funding redirected to transport around the country
  • Replacement of A-Levels (but not until 2033)
  • A new law meaning full-life terms for sexual and sadistic murders 

Confirming the cancellation of a major part of HS2 will have lasting effects that the next UK Government will struggle to reverse if they wanted to, but other announcements such as replacement of A-Levels and phasing out of tobacco products could easily be reneged on by the next Government. It could also be that Rishi Sunak does not have the parliamentary time to push through these changes before the next election has to take place.

What about social work?

There was nothing in Rishi Sunak’s speech about social work. There were also no announcements about public services or tackling poverty. This tells us that these will not be issues that the Conservatives will focus on in their election campaign, nor will they feature in the King’s Speech next month. The Government is supposed to be publishing a Mental Health Bill, but there are doubts that this will happen in this Parliament. 

The Health and Social Care Secretary gave a speech at Conservative Party conference too, but the majority of the content was focused on what the Labour Party would or wouldn’t do in Government, and failed to lay out any plans to tackle the crisis in social care.

Instead, what we are likely to see are more statements from Government ministers about small boats, and what they view as ‘woke’ issues, including the rights of trans people and equal opportunities. 

The next 12 months will be busy for the main political parties as they seek to win public favour, but it is the voters that will ultimately have their say whenever the General Election is called.