I watched Andy Burnham’s first conference speech as prime minister on Tuesday, all sixty-five minutes of it, and one line has stayed with me since: “Hope comes from honesty.” He said it early, about seven minutes in, and then spent the next hour trying to live up to it. He admitted that Britain had been on the wrong path for a long time, that Brexit “has done more harm than good”, and that his own generation of politicians had been “too cowardly” to fix social care.
There was a lot in it I would sign up to, and some I would argue with. Taking back public control of water and the grid is his call to make, and others will judge it. But the parts on young people and on places were thought through. He promised parity between academic and technical education, a 45-day work placement for every young person between 16 and 18, and an apprenticeship at 18. He wants more power in the hands of people and places, with a “Number 10 North” to drive growth into every postcode. He wants Britain to put artificial intelligence at the centre of its G20 presidency next year and to be, in Gordon Brown’s phrase, the world’s innovation nation.
All of that is about the big levers: ownership, budgets, institutions, summits. I think a piece of the puzzle was missing, and it is a piece I see every week in my own work with businesses, lecture rooms and local communities. It is what people actually do with technology on an ordinary Tuesday morning, at work, at home and in their dealings with the council.
| In the speech | Who it reaches | The daily piece to add |
|---|---|---|
| A 45-day work placement at 16 to 18, an apprenticeship at 18 | Young people still in education | Short, regular training at work for the people already employed |
| AI at the centre of the G20 presidency; “innovation nation” | Governments, big firms, researchers | Hands-on help for small firms to try the tools on real work |
| More power for mayors and places; “Number 10 North” | Councils and combined authorities | One place for residents to raise an issue and follow it to a fix |
| (Not covered) | Managers and supervisors | Management training and coaching, listening before instructing |
| “Hope comes from honesty” on the big issues | The country as a whole | The same honesty about daily habits at work, at home and with the council |
Technology is used on a Tuesday morning, not at a summit
The figures are more modest than the hype, and I have put them in the chart below. When the ONS asked firms in June how many were using any AI at all, about a third of those with ten or more staff said yes, and nearly half of the big employers. When it asked what was holding firms back, I recognised the answers straight away from conversations with clients: they could not see where it would help, it looked expensive, or nobody in the building knew enough to try.
That last reason is the one that bothers me, because it is a training problem, and training has been going backwards for twenty years. The Employer Skills Survey, which the Learning and Work Institute analysed at the end of last year, shows employers now spend more than a third less on each employee’s training than they did in 2005, after inflation. Fewer of them offer any training at all than in 2011.
Think about what that means in practice. We want Britain to lead the next industrial revolution, and the people who will be working next to AI in 2030 mostly left school years ago. They are in warehouses, care homes, accountancy practices and council offices right now, and a 45-day placement at 16 will never reach them.
What I would add to the plan is a big shift towards learning at work, from the ground up. I mean short, practical sessions built into the working week. A receptionist gets an hour to learn the booking system properly instead of working round it. A site manager is shown how to check drawings on a tablet. The owner of a ten-person joinery firm spends a morning with someone who shows her what an AI assistant does with a messy quote, and where it gets the prices wrong. You will never see a minister open one of those sessions. I have run enough of them to know that this is where a working week gets shorter.
Working alongside the tools needs managers who can lead
Plenty of people hear “AI” and think of their own job going, and some of them are right to worry. I would still rather our workers used these tools than watched them: the care worker who logs medication on her phone, or the bookkeeper who lets the software match the bank lines and spends the saved afternoon ringing clients who are late paying.
That depends on something the speech did not mention at all, which is management. The figures in the box below come from the Chartered Management Institute and from Lloyds, and they are not flattering. Most people who become managers in this country are simply promoted into it and left to get on with it. They are the ones who decide whether a new system is explained properly or dumped on a team with a login and a deadline.
Better management training would do more for AI adoption than any summit. I would go further and ask for more coaching across society as a whole. By coaching I mean listening first, asking what someone is trying to do, and then helping them do it, which is the opposite of handing down a programme from Whitehall. Nobody closes a digital skills gap with a leaflet. It closes one person, one workplace and one patient conversation at a time.
Councils people can actually reach
The speech said a lot about councils. Burnham blamed the hollowing out of local government for corroding political control, and he promised to hand more power to places. I agree with him. But power in a council is only useful to a resident if they can reach it, and for most people the council is a phone line, a form and a long wait.
Technology can change that, and in places it already has. FixMyStreet, the site built by the charity mySociety, has been sending residents’ reports of potholes, fly-tipping and broken street lights to the right council since 2007. It passed its millionth report in July 2017. Barcelona went further with Decidim, an open-source platform where residents make proposals, argue for and against them, and follow what the city council does with them. Several of the parks and green spaces on its list started as proposals from residents.
Neither of these is glamorous, and both depend on the council inside actually answering. Anyone who has reported a broken bin and heard nothing back knows how quickly you stop bothering. If power moves to places, the plumbing has to move with it. I would want one place where I can raise the issue, see whose desk it is sitting on, read what they decided, and see the date somebody went out and fixed it.
This is what I mean by regenerating communities with technology. It is about a mother in a council flat being able to report the damp in her child’s bedroom on her phone at eleven at night, and then watch the case move. It is about a small charity that can see which streets keep reporting the same problem and take it to the ward councillor with the evidence. Burnham talked about landlords who let homes decay while drawing housing benefit. Residents who can log, date and photograph the problem are part of how councils catch them.
What we want and what we do
There is one more line from the speech I keep coming back to. “Everyone wants less drift and more direction,” Burnham said. I am sure that is true. The trouble is that what everyone wants and what everyone does are two different things, and politics usually talks only about the first.
Psychologists have measured this. In 2006 Thomas Webb and Paschal Sheeran pulled together dozens of experiments in which people were persuaded to change what they intended to do, and then looked at what they actually did. As the two of them put it in a later review, a medium-to-large change in intention produced only a small-to-medium change in behaviour. Most of us have lived that result. We mean to do the course, answer the council survey, try the new system at work, and then Monday arrives.
That is why I keep coming back to the daily part. In the firms I have worked with, the changes that stuck were rarely launched with any fuss. A supervisor kept the training slot in the diary even in a bad week. Somebody used the new tool for a month before making up their mind. A few residents keep reporting the same broken light until fixing it becomes routine. People follow what they watch their neighbours and colleagues do, and they tune out most of what they are told from a stage.
Burnham said hope comes from honesty, and on Brexit, social care and the triple lock he went further than I expected. I would ask for the same candour one level down. Workers get far less training than they did in 2005. Most managers were never taught to manage. In my experience, a council can still take weeks to reply to an email. He was straight with the hall about the big questions on Tuesday, and that was a good start. What I did not hear was the same straightness about what the rest of us do on a Monday morning, at work, at the kitchen table and on the council’s website.
Common questions
What did Andy Burnham's 2026 conference speech leave out?
In my reading, the everyday side. He covered ownership, budgets, devolution and putting AI at the heart of the G20, but said little about training people already in work, about management, or about how a resident actually gets a council to act. That is where I think most of the gains are.
How many UK businesses use AI?
Not as many as the headlines suggest. When the ONS asked in June 2026, about a third of firms with ten or more staff said they used some form of AI, and nearly half of those with 250 or more. The usual reasons for holding back were not seeing a use, the cost, and nobody inside knowing enough to try.
What is the intention-behaviour gap?
It is the distance between what we mean to do and what we then do. Webb and Sheeran’s 2006 analysis of dozens of experiments found that a fairly big shift in people’s intentions led to a much smaller shift in what they actually did. Anyone who has signed up for a course and never started it knows the feeling.
Sources: Andy Burnham, speech to Labour Party Conference, 29 September 2026 (Labour Party video and transcript); Office for National Statistics, “Artificial intelligence in UK businesses: 2023 to 2026”, 20 July 2026; Learning and Work Institute, “Falling short: understanding further falls in employer training”, drawing on the Employer Skills Survey 2024; Chartered Management Institute, “Bad managers and toxic work culture causing one in three staff to walk”, 16 October 2023; Lloyds Banking Group and Ipsos, Essential Digital Skills 2025, 28 October 2025; mySociety, “The big one million: celebrating FixMyStreet”, 21 July 2017; Barcelona City Council, Decidim Barcelona; Thomas L. Webb and Paschal Sheeran, “Does changing behavioral intentions engender behavior change? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence”, Psychological Bulletin 132(2), 2006, 249 to 268; Paschal Sheeran and Thomas L. Webb, “The intention-behavior gap”, Social and Personality Psychology Compass 10(9), 2016, 503 to 518.