Party Conference Round up 2025

Labour:  Big Announcements and Bigger Questions (Liverpool, 28 – 30 September 2025)

Last month, Labour activists left Liverpool with a spring in their step. Keir Starmer delivered his most sure-footed speech, after a difficult few months the bar was low, but the Prime Minister cleared it, and any talk of a leadership challenge has dissipated.

For the property, energy, and regeneration sector the prospect of a change at the top of government is less of an immediate risk. From the conference stage commitment to ‘take on the blockers’ to the function room where activists queued to get Steve Reed’s signature on their ‘Build Baby Build’ caps, the message on Merseyside was all about ‘backing the builders’.

The Housing Secretary’s headline grabber was a commitment to build 12 new towns with Reed planning to get shovels in the ground at three sites before the next election. Each new town will have at least 10,000 homes, and the sites selected include Victoria North in Greater Manchester, alongside Adlington in Cheshire, and locations in Gloucestershire, Yorkshire, and Devon.

The consensus is positive; all are within easy commuting distance of major cities, Britain’s biggest new towns for more than half a century will all be built in areas with high housing demand. If all the sites push ahead then it could mean an extra 300,000 homes over the coming decades. The autumn budget will be an important test of whether the government is willing to back its plans with enough cash to make them a reality.

The Government’s Pride in Place fund was the big announcement for regeneration. The new £5bn scheme will plough investment into 339 ‘overlooked’ communities up and down the country. The money will be spent on revitalising high streets, parks, and public spaces, all part of Labour’s broader mission to halt the rise of Reform in areas where support for Farage’s party is surging.

The most interesting news of all though, took place far from the conference stage. Keir Starmer asked Lord Banner, a Conservative peer and KC to draft a new planning bill to clear away opposition to infrastructure from environmental groups. The mechanism under discussion is a partial withdrawal from the Aarhus Convention – a European treaty that protects judicial review rights and caps the legal costs environmental campaigners have to pay when they lose challenges. At present, Aarhus artificially lowers the barrier to blocking power stations, waste plants, and transport infrastructure.

Scrapping the cost caps would mean challenges to infrastructure would be treated like any other legal case but touching the Convention would be by far the most controversial pro-building policy the Government has proposed since winning power last year. It would make the UK an outlier among European nations and could complicate post-Brexit relations with the EU.

The change would certainly make it easier to deliver infrastructure, but it will be a key test of whether the Government has bitten off more than it can chew. The left of the Labour party will likely oppose the policy, given Keir Starmer’s penchant for U-turns there’s a risk that it toxifies the government’s push for planning reform, turning it into another proxy battle between Number 10 and allies of Andy Burnham.

The big questions as we head into the autumn are how far is the government prepared to push to get Britain building? And how much cash is it prepared to put behind this mission? Important details and clarifications will be required when the Chancellor gets her red box out on November 29th. 

Conservatives: Is Anyone Still Listening?  (Manchester 5-8 October 2025)

After more than a year in opposition, the Conservatives arrived in Manchester needing clarity and confidence. Kemi Badenoch delivered her first leader’s speech, assured, policy-heavy and by common consent her best yet. For activists in the hall, it was a moment of renewed optimism.

For the property, energy and regeneration sectors, the focus was on a slate of economic and housing announcements. The headline grabber was Badenoch’s promise to abolish stamp duty entirely on primary residences, a policy pitched as unlocking home ownership for millions. Conservatives' stats that the £9bn annual cost by the end of the decade would be met through £47bn of savings from welfare reform, civil service cuts and reductions in overseas aid.

Alongside this came a commitment to abolish business rates for most shops and pubs. A striking offer for high streets under pressure.

On energy, Badenoch confirmed what had been trailed going into conference: the party intends to scrap Net Zero targets and repeal the Climate Change Act, arguing that the costs are unsustainable. Saving the average household £165 a year. It’s a dramatic break with the previous Cameron consensus and one that will reverberate through energy investment and planning decisions.

And on regeneration, while less prominent than in Labour’s conference in September, the Conservatives framed themselves as the party of fiscal discipline. Badenoch set out her “golden economic rule”: half of all identified savings for tax cuts, half for deficit reduction. The message was responsibility first, opportunity second. A deliberate contrast with both Labour and Reform’s spending plans and the short-lived Truss experiment.

Two real questions remain. One is trust. The speech electrified the party faithful, but outside the hall voters may ask why these ideas were not delivered during the Conservatives’ 14 years in power. And whether, if returned to government, they could credibly deliver them. The second, is anyone still listening? After a solemn year of no meaningful policy announcements, mounting defections to reform on their right and a powerful Lib Dem ground force on their left, the Conservatives may not have anyone left to talk to.

This was undoubtedly Kemi Badenoch’s best few days as party leader, making it clear that she has a direction and a sense of where she is going - with the party seemingly united behind their leader. However, with next May’s elections looming, history offers a note of caution: the Conservative Party has rarely struggled to find a knife for its own leader when the mood shifts.

For the housing, energy and regeneration sectors, the message is clear: the Conservatives are not backing down from the fight, with eye-catching promises that could reshape markets if enacted. But until the polls move, it remains an open question whether the public is listening or cares.