When Conservatives gather in Birmingham tomorrow, the Party will be in a region full of seats the Party held in 2019 and lost in 2024, many of them seats I know well from nine years as the Member of Parliament for Stourbridge. No Conservative government will be formed without winning a good number of them back, and most of the arguments in the fringe rooms next week will be about how this is to be achieved. The harder question is whether the Party is prepared to level with voters about what governing well costs, and why wealth creation should be the overriding purpose of government. 
 
Prosper UK was set up to do things differently. Growth is our overriding purpose, but we also promised to do politics in a particular way. Pragmatic rather than ideological, honest about trade-offs and led by evidence. In June we proposed reforming the triple lock. Next, we made the pro-growth case for high-skilled immigration. Neither position is an easy sell and each has a cost we have been prepared to acknowledge.
 
There is some evidence that voters respond to this approach.  Prosper UK now has approaching 30,000 supporters, and when we surveyed them recently, 41% said they had voted Conservative in 2024, 24% Labour and 23% Liberal Democrat. More than half of the people who have signed up to a centre-right movement run by Conservatives did not vote Conservative at the last election. But they have signed up as supporters of a self declared centre right group that is focussed on economic growth and business.
 
The new Prime Minister is moving the goalposts and those of us on the right need to adapt quickly to a changing environment. Unlike his recent predecessors Andy Burnham is not frightened of his own shadow, trying to second guess the public and govern by focus group. He is prepared to take calculated risks. In Liverpool on Tuesday he reworked the triple lock, removed the ban on public control of water companies, set up a commission on electoral reform and spoke honestly about his assessment that Brexit has done more harm than good. Andy Burnham is widely acknowledged as being a good communicator and knows that voters can tell when they are being levelled with. 
 
The Prime Minister is right that the triple lock must be reformed to remain economically sustainable and fair to working-age people. The public is more receptive than many politicians assume: a YouGov poll published on the day of the speech found that voters supported his plan by 48% to 28%. Prosper UK’s proposal—a smoothed link to earnings—goes further. It removes the 2.5% minimum increase while keeping the state pension aligned with earnings over time and protecting it from inflation in leaner years. We had hoped the Conservative Party would adopt it. Instead, its first response on Tuesday was a pledge to retain the triple lock unchanged; within hours, it had launched a petition claiming that Labour would cut pensioners’ incomes. That is simply untrue. The proposed reform would not reduce anyone’s pension; it would slow the rate at which pensions increase over time.
 
Alarmingly the PM had next to nothing to say about growth, productivity and enterprise, or even defence. How the UK becomes more competitive, more productive and able to defend itself went unanswered, and the Liberal Democrats will not answer it either, having spent their conference on fantasy tax cuts and a vote, backed by their leader, to reject the EHRC's guidance on single-sex spaces. Ed Davey is not cutting through and therein lies yet another opportunity to win back all those home counties seats where Conservative MPs were supplanted by Liberal Democrats.  Too many people who want a government that prioritises the public finances, has a serious plan to restore Britain’s competitiveness and grow the economy feel disenfranchised.
 
With Reform slipping in the polls, the temptation will be to treat the next election as a contest for the right. Many of Reform's voters were Conservatives until recently, some of them must come home, and if the Party  is to be a broad church they should be inside the tent. But the polling shows the shortcomings of a strategy focussed just on this group. Lord Ashcroft found on 15 September that an alliance of the two parties would take just 28% of the vote against the 41% they command separately. At the same time  More in Common found that  45% of Conservative voters would consider voting Reform tactically, fewer than the 50% who would consider the Liberal Democrats, while around half of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters would consider voting Conservative to keep Reform out. The people the Party needs to win back are on both sides of it, and an election winning strategy needs both.
 
The Prosper UK programme at conference is built for them. David Gauke takes the case for reforming the triple lock into a panel with the Resolution Foundation, Andy Street talks about what small firms need to raise investment and scale, and David Lidington looks at the future of defence cooperation with Europe. 
 
Watching the Prime Minister last Tuesday I was reminded of Blackpool in 2005, when David Cameron told a party that had lost three elections in a row that it had to change to win. The seats the Party needs belong to people who stopped trusting it to run the economy, and they are far more likely to come back to a party that is honest with them about what it would do, and that has room for them alongside the voters it is winning back from its right.