What I took from Reform conference

I visited my first Reform UK conference last week in Birmingham. NCUB attends party conferences because they are invaluable ways of getting a front row seat to where policy is tested before it gets written, as well as taking the temperature of the party’s elected representatives and members.  

The thing that stood out to me was how much the party is leaning into business. Reform gave over a full day of its conference to it, with guests including Google and Meta, alongside plenty of smaller firms. The message across the rest of the conference was consistent with it. Reform wants to be the party of business and of what it calls a ‘British renaissance of industry’. The economic story they want to tell is that growth comes from lower taxes, cheaper energy and a lighter regulatory load, with Robert Jenrick’s pitch to replace the industrial strategy with a sector-agnostic competitive strategy. You can debate the direction and argue with the detail, but there is no doubt there is a proper argument there to be had over coming months and years.  

One of the most interesting fringe events I attended was a More in Common session on public attitudes to science. It was a thoughtful discussion, with insightful contributions from Dr Victor Currie MSP who still works shifts as an NHS doctor. What I took from it was that there is a real openness in the party to talking about science and research, and that the conversation is at an early stage.  

A lot of the growth Reform wants already runs through universities, but this wasn’t said clearly or loudly at the conference. 

Take the companies on the business day guest list. The big tech firms recruit from a small number of UK computer science departments and fund the labs that train the next cohort. The large energy companies run joint research centres with universities across the country, on materials, on subsurface, on grid technology. Where those companies choose to invest in Britain depends partly on research and people they can’t get anywhere else. It’s the same story for the pharma company deciding whether its next lab goes to the UK or elsewhere, or the engineering firm working out where to build. The research base is part of the reason the answer is often here. 

That’s a case for universities and business collaboration at the heart of UK growth, and it fits the story Reform is telling and the policy plans they want to develop. If you want private investment, high-skilled jobs and a British industrial renaissance, the research base is one of the assets you’d want to use.  

And it’s the case that NCUB is making. Our members are the businesses and universities that actually do the collaborating, and the evidence we hold is about what happens to private investment and skilled jobs when those partnerships work and when they don’t. That is the piece of the growth story we can add, for any political party that wants it. 

The growth Reform is after will come from businesses and universities working together, as it always has. NCUB’s job is to make that easier, and it’s a conversation we look forward to having with Reform and parties across the political spectrum over conference season.