New hope?: Andy Burnham’s task at his first Labour Conference as leader is to start t turn ‘hope’ into real change
A year ago, Andy Burnham was seen scurrying away from the Labour Party Conference, scorned by loyal Starmerites. Today, he makes a speech to the 2026 conference as Prime Minister.
ANDREW FISHER reports from Liverpool exclusively for Inside Croydon on other changes from 12 months ago
“Hope Again” is the slogan bedaubing almost everywhere you look at the Labour Party Annual Conference in Liverpool this year. It reflects the greater optimism ushered in by the defenestration of Keir Starmer and the coronation of Andy Burnham.
The Labour Conference was a miserable affair in 2024, as cuts to winter fuel payments divided the party so soon after the landslide General Election victory, and again in 2025 as Starmer’s poll ratings continued to fall.
This year, little more than two months since the former Manchester Mayor moved in to Downing Street, Labour are ahead in the polls and instead of the most unpopular Prime Minister in British history, Andy Burnham is the only political leader in Westminster with a positive rating.
Despite the many problems – which are no doubt causing Chancellor John Healey sleepless nights ahead of his first Budget next month – the mood among party delegates in Liverpool is buoyant.
Even Steve Reed, the MP for Streatham and Croydon North, and a loyal Starmerite to the end, conceded in an interview with the Ofcom rule-breakers GB News: “He’s got off to a good start, we’re doing better in the polls, we need that stability. We will all get behind Andy.”
Mersey beat: Labour’s Annual Conference is in Liverpool for a fourth successive year
Often, when Reed’s faction is behind you, it is wielding a metaphorical knife.
Peter Kyle, one of Reed’s Cabinet colleagues under Starmer, spent the opening day of Labour Conference attacking Burnham’s leadership and calling for it “to act with more urgency when it comes to economic growth”.
Kyle’s solution amounted to delaying improvements to workers’ rights, something he argued for when he was in Cabinet. He was ignored then, too. Growth at the expense of workers is not growth that you would expect any Labour government to support.
While Burnham was swept into office with goodwill, questions are now being asked about his policy programme.
As Conference opened over the weekend, policies were being announced on housing and for a National Care Service, “on NHS principles”, free at the point of use and universal.
On housing, a scheme called “Your First Home” was announced. It is similar to George Osborne’s Help to Buy scheme, with an offer of only a 2.5% deposit and a time-limited interest-free loan, for first-time buyers purchasing new-builds. Property developers have already welcomed the effective public subsidy of their homes. “This is very good news” as “a demand stimulus”, according to Steve “Build Baby Build” Reed.
Delivery dilemma: Andy Burnham and Chancellor John Healey (left) know that Trussonomics and Trump’s war on Iran has left them little fiscal room for manoeuvre
The government also announced plans to reduce the period of time a house must be left vacant before it can be taken over by a local authority, from two years down to six months. Further reforms to Empty Dwelling Management Orders will also aim to protect councils from absorbing the costs of legal wrangling.
Angela Rayner, back in the role of housing secretary, had this to say at Conference: “Labour in power is putting the tools in local leaders’ hands to take over desperately needed derelict homes and put them back into use. We’re reversing the Tories’ damaging changes by supporting councils to intervene and use untapped powers to meet local housing need.
“These changes will ensure councils can intervene earlier to prevent properties from falling into serious disrepair by accelerating their return to use and simplify the process to empower local authorities to act more decisively and with greater speed.”
Rayner’s predecessor as housing secretary had, of course, been Steve Reed. Talking on GB News to the Daily Telegraph’s Camilla Tominey, Reed was less enthused about the empty homes policy. “We can’t sequester [empty homes] … it would be a bit Soviet, and we can’t have that,” Reed said.
Across London, there are 47,000 long-term empty homes.
There’s more than 2,000 empty homes in Lambeth, some of which have been empty for more than 10 years. According to its own figures, Lambeth Council, where Reed was leader before becoming an MP, has 43,000 households on its housing waiting list.
There are 1,432 vacant homes in the other borough that Reed represents in Parliament, Croydon. I’d hazard a guess many of the around 8,000 families on Croydon’s housing waiting list would quite like any empty home sequestered for them.
But while policy announcements from the top table have been permitted, delegates were barred from debating council housing as the Conference Arrangements Committee ruled out numerous motions from local Labour parties that called on the government to accelerate council housebuilding.
The top-down culture of the Starmer era still lingers, with all motions on Palestine and all of those calling for the public ownership of water also blocked from debate.
Yesterday, Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband branded the suffering in Gaza as “a stain on the conscience of the world”.
Starmer suppression: around 150 arrests were made at a Gaza genocide demonstration outside the Labour Conference venue on Sunday
In a plea to voters who abandoned the party under Starmer, Miliband said from the conference stage: “I want to say to the millions of people in this country, and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people, we hear you.
“You were right. And under Andy’s leadership, we have reset our approach…
“We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank. We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine. And we match words with actions.”
The day before, just outside the Conference “secure zone”, 150 people, mostly pensioners and including some from Croydon, were arrested under anti-terror legislation for peacefully holding signs reading, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action.”
When the government is warning of terrorist attacks by foreign state-funded proxies, it really is silly, and a colossal waste of police time, still to be arresting these peaceful activists as “terrorists”.
Andrew Fisher’s recent columns:
- Perry’s ‘comedy’ video claims are leaving the joke on Croydon
- As Brandt Report warned, we can’t afford to be small-minded
- It’s a red card for those who use crime as a political football
- Burnham’s challenge is to rebalance Britain yet cherish London
- From 2015 to 2019, Andrew Fisher was the Labour Party’s Director of Policy under Jeremy Corbyn
- Fisher is also the author of The Failed Experiment – and how to build an economy that works, and now writes columns for InsideCroydon, the i newspaper and is a regular pundit on BBC and Sky News programmes
PAID ADS: To advertise your services or products to our 10,000 weekday visitors to the site, as featured on Google News Showcase, email us inside.croydon@btinternet.com for our unbeatable ad rates
- If you have a news story about life in or around Croydon, or want to publicise your residents’ association or business, or if you have a local event to promote, please email us with full details at inside.croydon@btinternet.com
As featured on Google News Showcase
- Our comments section on every report provides all readers with an immediate “right of reply” on all our content. Our comments policy can be read by clicking here
Inside Croydon is a member of the Independent Community News Network
“Your First Home” must be a bad idea, if Steve Reed supports it.
“The Fold” block of flats in Queen’s Gardens being closed in 2026 for repairs of faults by the now-bankrupt slapdash original builders only four years after opening, plus the well-documented problems of the Brich by Brick fiasco, means Croydon should not rely on ANY decent new build homes being built, but what about getting Croydon’s stock of empty homes used again? I keep seeing flats with security grilles on the windows in the Stockbury Road estate (Woodside). In a housing crisis, they should be refurbishing these properties and getting new residents…..
Another Commission on electoral reform? The cynic in me asks is this another delaying tactic? we’ve had a large number of commissions going back over a century — from memory — shouldn’t we simply get on with it?
Get on with what version though?
There are literally dozens of possible ways for electing MPs (and Councillors too) and they all have their own pros and cons.
And many PR systems mean losing the constituency link between voters and the elected.
People want to know who their own MP is so they can contact them directly.
You can have a system like in the Netherlands where the entire country is a single constituency and you cast one vote. The parties control who gets elected via the way they put candidates on the list. Is it proportional then yes it is but you don’t have a local MP
Or Germany where they do have large constituencies but also list members allocated to make the result proportional – people get two ballot papers.
Or do you have something like ranked choice voting?
Or on election night if a candidate in a constituency gets 50% they elected otherwise the top two (or 3) go into a run off a couple of weeks later. This is what they do in France.
So get on with what?
Calm down Chris. We can do what some other UK citizens do, which is use the Single Transferable Vote system, “STV”.
For the person you most want to win, you write 1 in the box on the ballot paper next to their name. You can leave it at that or put 2 for your second most preferred candidate, and if you want, carry on right down to your least preferred person, whether they are 6th or 16th.
STV was first used in the UK in Northern Ireland, from 1921 to 1929, and has been used again since 1973. Northern Ireland’s Assembly Members represent constituencies’ constituents while, in the case of councillors, its wards and locals.
In Scotland, STV has been used for local council elections since 2007.
In Wales, citizens now have the right to choose to move to STV for their councils.
STV’s use leads to higher voter participation than under our unfair “first past the post” (and sod everyone else) system, which in Croydon has meant we have a Mayor with dictatorial powers elected by just one voter in eight
I don’t need to calm down.
I was a responding to a comment to ‘just get in with it” and suggesting that there isn’t a single method of “fairer votes” and suggested some others.
And like all the other options STV has its pros and cons.
Just because it’s used for some elections in the UK doesn’t mean it’s the best method for different types of election in other parts of the nation.
You mention Wales which has a proportional system for the Senned based on one vote per person but in large multi-member constituencies. But it isn’t proportional across the whole of Wales.
Scotland has a totally different system for the Scottish Parliament.
And yes PPP was elected on a very low vote share but that was a result of it being a FPTP election. The result might have been different if the supplementary vote system. Either way people complained about the result.
I think there should be a vote on that, though under PR I guess only a fraction of getting on with it would result
Regarding proportional representation, they could try the following:
Assume the winner as having received 40% of the votes, with the second placed person having received 30%, the third 20%, and the fourth, 10%, then the winner becomes a MP/councillor for 40% of the time, then the second placed person takes over for 30% of the time, etc etc. That would give everyone representation.