Re:Think 8 October, 2025

Conservative Party conference: In conversation with Mel Stride

The Conservative Party has spent a year thinking about their policy platform. This week’s party conference provided the platform to launch their initial conclusions – and the public finances were front and centre.

Fresh from his mainstage speech, we hosted an ‘in conversation’ with Shadow Chancellor Rt Hon Mel Stride to dig into his £47 billion proposed savings and how a Conservative government would turbocharge growth.

Here are my three key takeaways from our chat…

1. Sound public finances are non-negotiable. The Shadow Chancellor had already earlier in the year renounced Liz Truss’ ‘mini budget’ – asserting that the Conservative Party would never again “put at risk” economic stability – and Monday’s speech represented the first steps towards a plan for gripping spending. This was the overarching message in our ‘in conversation’, with Stride stressing that a Conservative government would be prioritising tackling the public sector debt by cutting spending. This, he argued, was also key to growth – ensuring credibility and certainty for investors.
2. Gripping the unsustainable long-run spending trends is (selectively) the key. The biggest single contributor to that £47 billion of savings is working-age welfare, and as a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, the Shadow Chancellor has a strong understanding of the challenge posed by ballooning disability and health-related benefit caseloads and costs. Stride talked about the importance of getting to grips with these big drivers of longer term spend – identified by the OBR as the things pushing us towards unthinkable levels of public sector debt – as a vital signal to the markets that Britain is serious about its public finances. That sound thinking does not appear, however, to stretch to pensioner spend, where the Conservatives have recommitted to the – also very much unsustainable – triple lock.
3. Government must set the conditions for growth. Poor infrastructure, poorly designed and too risk averse regulation, an insufficiently skilled workforce, high energy costs – all were cited by the Shadow Chancellor as getting in the way of growth. Announcements on how a future Conservative government would reduce energy costs were made at conference, we can expect further proposals in due course for tackling these other barriers to economic recovery. Stride was also keen to stress the importance of a flexible labour market to business investment and jobs, something he argued the current Employment Rights Bill will threaten.