Shadow Transport Secretary Richard Holden MP addresses Conservative Party Conference 2026

Richard Holden MP, Shadow Transport Secretary, delivered his speech at Conservative Party Conference 2026.

Please see the full text of the speech below:

Checked against delivery

Can I just ask, who today, or yesterday, or the day before arrived at conference by car or shared a car?

Some hands up please.

So, I think that is about half of the audience.

Well then, you would have noticed quite how high our fuel prices are at the moment.

Sky high.

Fuel prices are impacting how most people get to work,

How every business in our country moves goods around,

And how hauliers keep every supermarket's shelves stocked.

But if you rely on road transport, you would have thought that you were in a parallel universe this last weekend at the Labour party conference,

Because our Transport Secretary did not mention fuel, petrol, diesel or fuel duty once in a 20-minute speech.

Not once.

In fairness to her, she did mention drivers once,

But only in that railway drivers have changed,

Whatever that meaningless statement really means.

Make no mistake, Labour do not care about Britain's motorists,

Labour in local government, as Greg said, and in national government, are at war with motorists.

And faced with record levels of fuel prices, Labour are still planning to put up fuel costs by six pence a litre in the new year.

That's right, five pence a litre on fuel duty,

And do not forget, on top of fuel duty, they add VAT.

 So it's six pence a litre in the new year.

Now ladies and gentlemen, Conservatives opposed this before, we kept fuel duty down in government and we will oppose it again.

So please ensure that when you are out there campaigning over the next few weeks and months, that you are really ramming this message home.

Because the impact that those fuel duty has on costs for businesses up and down the country is appalling.

And as Andrew said in the speech before, we should also be producing more of our own oil and protecting Britain's refining and petrochemical industries too. 

In an increasingly uncertain world, it is vital that for our energy sector, for our national security and for our country that we reduce our reliance on foreign suppliers too.

Now I don't know if any of you have had a chance to get to the Birmingham tapestry yet,

Well, you must go along if you haven't.

There's a lovely little image of me there with Kemi at our pothole patrol, I have got a little pickaxe there.

Personally, though I thought the depiction of Robert Jenrick was quite apt,

You can see he had been on the jabs,

He is very, very small indeed.

It's a very much post Ozempic Jenrick.

However, it really did make me think that it's a shame they don't make a jab for egos quite at this stage.

But back to the serious business in hand,

I don't want to alarm anyone, but something struck me yesterday,

 Aside from the Battle of Hastings and the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the battle, does anyone remember anything else that happened in the early Norman period?

The Doom's Day book strike anyone?

It basically was a massive assessment of property for taxation purposes.

And after the Birmingham Tapestry, I do fear that Burnham's Dooms Day Budget may be just around the corner.

And whether it floats, flies, runs on roads or rails, if it moves or even if it doesn't, it's pretty clear to me that Andy Burnham is going to tax it.

And that should worry us all.

Andy Burnham and Labour like to talk about the cost of living, but when it comes down to it,

Fuel duty, air passenger duty, business rates on ports,

Or even on St Pancras station who saw a 300% rise in their business rates.

Or simply taxes for owning a car, van or Motorbike.

Rather than an engine of growth for our country,

Labour view transport as a cash cow for which to feed their welfare obsession and their union paymasters.

Transport policy, as we have heard from our panel,

Should be about making it easier and cheaper to get around our country.

Because when you do that, you make it easier to work, businesses, trade and the economy to grow.

Our Conservative approach is common sense.

Stop making it more expensive to get around Britain,

Start by not imposing costs and barriers,

And make a proper plan, like the one we're working on,

To remove the barriers holding business and people back.

That's why Kemi Badenoch and I launched our plan for drivers in April in Swindon,

We wanted Conservatives to speak loud and unapologetically for our motorists,

With practical measures to make their lives easier.

Axing fuel duty, yes, also opening up bus lanes and restricting their hours operation,

Providing an extra hundred thousand driving tests.

Yes, to get more potholes fixed,

Yes, scrap the ZEV mandate and end banket 20mph speed limits right across the whole country.

But when it comes to transport, fuel duty shows that this is a matter far beyond individual motorists,

Because as Shadow Business Secretary, Julia Lopez and I were repeatedly told,

By truckers on a recently, one of our sexy transport visits,

This one to the truckers in Thurrock last week, when you increase the cost of diesel, increase the cost of moving goods.

Put their costs up and everyone pays the price,

Because it goes straight through to supermarket shelves across the country. 

But there is another huge buyer to get Britain moving,

We need people with the skills,

And that is one of our big announcements here today.

At the moment we have serious shortages across transport sector because people aren't seeing a future in transport.

60,000 HGV drivers need to be recruited and trained every year.

Just 287 new UK aircraft-maintenance engineer licences issued in 2025.

Rail is crying out for a plan to make it safer, more productive and more modern.

And Britain could be 5,000 skilled seafarers short by 2035.

So our skills package is all about good, sensible, conservative, rooted, principled supply side reforms.

Finding the barriers stopping people getting into these jobs and dealing with them.

You can fly a plane or drive an HGV aged 18. 

So it is ridiculous today, that there is a 50-kilometre restriction on you being able to drive a bus until you are 21. 

Conservatives will remove that.

Someone can be trained and qualified for the job, then we should let them get on and do that.

We will also make it easier for experienced people in schools, hospitals and community organisations to drive minibuses.

Anybody who passed their driving test before 1997 can already do this, we are going to bring it back.

If you are 25 years old and passed your driving test at least 5 years ago, you are going to be able to drive the community Scouts' minibus around again.

We will restore national HGV Skills School Bootcamps and bring back the much-wanted HGV Parking and Driver Welfare Scheme.

And we will tackle skills shortages in aviation engineering, maritime sectors as well, with much overdue work to improve safety and productivity as we modernise rail.

It is an absurdity that we are now seeing driverless cars on our streets, yet we cannot have driverless trains on our tube networks or our train networks across the country.

These are practical reforms that get more people into skilled jobs, give businesses the workforce they need and increase the productive capacity of our economy.

And finally, we have to talk about infrastructure, because it simply costs us far too much money to build things in this country.

We have ended up with a system where projects take too long and cost too much.

Look at what is happening before we have even built anything.

Look at the Lower Thames Crossing, as we have just heard about from Ben,

£300 million on a planning application hundreds of thousands of pages long.

Heathrow's third runway planning application alone is expected to cost nearly a billion pounds.

And in the end, who will be paying that?

It will be you, in your flights.

We absolutely need sensible local mitigation and proper scrutiny.

But nationally important transport infrastructure cannot spend year after year trapped in planning, paperwork and legal challenge while costs spiral.

As Rachel and Ben said, we have got to cut back on these burdens, bring down costs, and get some political drive back behind our transport system and our economy.

That means overhauling judicial review for crucial transport projects.

It means a proper long-term pipeline, so we stop this ridiculous, expensive stop-start approach where skills, equipment and expertise disappear between projects.

And it means having a nucleus of real engineering, procurement and commercial expertise at the heart of government, people who learn from one project to the next, know what things should cost and can challenge contractors as well.

And the prize, the prize ladies and gentlemen, if we get this right, is massive.

We can substantially reduce what it costs to build infrastructure, and then we can deliver more infrastructure, for more people, delivering more opportunity in every part of the country.

I visited the communities living alongside the A303 at Stonehenge.

Nearly £200 million spent before the scheme was cancelled by this Labour government.

Taxpayers paid the bill, and local people are still stuck with the traffic.

So that, for me, is what Getting Britain Moving Again is all about.

Make it cheaper and easier for somebody to get to work.

Make it cheaper and easier for a business to move its goods.

Get the drivers, engineers, seafarers and skilled workers we need to keep the country moving.

And then make sure that when taxpayers spend billions on essential infrastructure, Britain actually gets the roads, railways and capacity it paid for.

Because transport should be one of the clearest examples of Getting Britain Working Again. 

A worker who can get to a job.

A business that can get goods to customers.

A haulier who can move food without pushing up prices.

A family that can afford to drive, commute and go on holiday.

And a country that can build the infrastructure it needs at a sensible price. 

Based on clear Conservative principles,

We must get Britain building.

So we can Get Britain Working Again.

Thank you very much.