Party Conference Preview: Reform UK

By Emma Cutler, Senior Account Manager, Connect.

Reform UK are this week kicking off the party conference season, returning to Birmingham’s NEC with a conference that they promise will be the ‘most talked-about political event of 2026’.

Members of the Connect team are in Birmingham throughout the Conference and here are the four questions we will be looking to answer?

1. Can Reform convince business they are a credible partner?

Over the past 12 months Reform’s senior MPs and their external affairs team, led by Matthew MacKinnnon, have had their shoulder to the wheel courting business and industry leaders. This effort is culminating this week, as they host their first ever business day.

Reform haw said they are placing business at the heart of the programme ‘built around the issues that matter most to enterprise and industry’. This includes a full day of business focused sessions, fringe events and panel discussions with senior Reform and business figures participating. The day will culminate in a business dinner which the party describes as an opportunity to connect with ‘senior leaders, strengthen relationships and continue the conversation in an informal setting’.

There are a number of well-known names attending, First Bus, BT, Google, Heathrow and TikTok to highlight a few. As well as Vodafone, who are still attending despite Reform’s Shadow Home Secretary accusing them of ‘helping to facilitate the invasion of Britain’ over a charity partnership which gave sim cards to Care4calais.

The key questions for business leaders will be how a year of behind-the-scenes work is feeding into Reform’s key narrative. Are the conversations, roundtables and policy papers feeling into policy positions, and can Reform find a credible balance between its policies designed to appeal to working class voters and an increasingly pro-business message?

2. Are policy announcements detailed and costed

Since last year’s conference, Reform have made a clear effort to broaden its policy offer beyond immigration, asylum and law and order, publishing more detailed proposals across a wider range of domestic issues.

Recent examples include plans to build 50,000 new affordable homes a year, proposals to cut the welfare bill by £50 billion, and an apprenticeship wage credit which the party says could save businesses more than £4,000 a year per apprentice. Proposals have also been directed at business and the city, with proposals to widen tax relief for investors in smaller UK businesses.

Despite the work that has gone into these policy papers, many of the announcements have struggled to generate the cut-through Reform would have liked, during a summer dominated by the arrival of a new Prime Minister and focus on Nigel Farage’s by-election in Clacton.  

Conference gives the party an opportunity to put these policies centre stage and to wrestle back some media attention for new polices.

Does the pace and intensity of conference see the party producing headline-grabbing pledges without the detail that has accompanied some of its recent policy work, or will new announcements come with the substance businesses and the media will need to understand what a Reform government might actually mean in practice?

3. Can the party stay disciplined?

Only a general election campaign can really match the intensity and scrutiny of party conference. With Reform’s senior figures, staff, new Members of the Senedd and hundreds of councillors descending on Birmingham alongside the Westminster lobby, there will be dozens of interviews, speeches, fringe events and late-night receptions. Any deviation from the positions and lines set by Nigel Farage will be quickly spotted and amplified.

So far, Reform’s senior leadership has remained relatively disciplined in public, despite several months of media reports about tensions and internal divisions. Conference will be a significant test of whether that discipline can hold when senior figures are being questioned repeatedly, often on the same issues, and journalists are actively looking for differences in emphasis or policy.

Do any of these divisions begin to emerge in public, or can the party remain united around a consistent set of messages? Nigel Farage will want the story coming out of Birmingham to be about Reform’s policy offer and readiness for government, not contradictory interviews, internal disagreements or rows between senior figures.

4. How can they use conference season to regain momentum

Despite strong performances in local and devolved elections in 2025 and again in May this year, the political landscape has shifted beneath the party.

Andy Burnham’s arrival in Downing Street has changed the dynamic with Labour enjoying an initial polling bounce, with some recent polls reversing the trend of much of the past 18 months and putting Labour narrowly ahead of Reform.

An early challenge for Reform is therefore how it chooses to frame its attack on the new Prime Minister. John Healey has presented the Labour government a ‘continuity of a Labour government with a change of leader’ but clearly the entire terms of the debate have changed. Opposition parties will take the time to understand be clear on which attacks on Burnham resonate and which do not.

At the same time, Reform is increasingly being judged on its own record. Their councils around the country are now having to make difficult decisions, meaning voters are beginning to see what the party looks like when it is in power.

Conference will therefore be an opportunity for Reform to reestablish its key arguments, that despite a change of Prime Minister, the fundamentals of the political system have not changed and that Reform remains the party offering something fundamentally different. Whether that message can cut through and help the party regain the political momentum it enjoyed earlier in the year is to be seen.