Badenoch sets out tax pledges as Conservatives face polling gap after conference speech

Kemi Badenoch used her speech at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham on 7 October to promise inheritance-tax relief on family homes and argue that her party was on a path back to power. The proposal would matter to families planning to pass on a home, but it remains a pledge for a possible future government. Polling before the speech showed a gap between Badenoch’s improved personal standing and the Conservatives’ support among voters.

What Badenoch promised on inheritance tax

The Independent reported that Badenoch pledged to remove inheritance tax from family homes and allow couples to leave an additional £1 million tax-free. She did not promise to abolish the tax at the conference, describing full abolition as an ambition when affordable. The distinction leaves the family-home proposal as the immediate conference pledge, with wider abolition dependent on a future affordability judgment.

According to the Associated Press, Badenoch said the Conservatives would not announce tax cuts without explaining how they would be paid for. AP described a speech centred on economic conservatism, including proposals to cut taxes, loosen regulation and reduce welfare spending. The reports establish what she proposed, but do not establish that any of those measures has been implemented or give their full costs.

The Independent also reported her call for a third runway at Heathrow and her argument that a future Conservative government should put economic growth at its centre. Those are positions set out at the conference, rather than decisions to build a runway or changes already made by a government.

Why the Conservatives’ polling remains the test

YouGov’s analysis published before the conference found that 28% of Britons would consider voting Conservative, six points more than a year earlier. Yet only 14% named the party as their main voting intention, a rise of two points. A larger pool of people willing to consider the party therefore had not translated into a comparable increase in those saying they would vote for it.

The same YouGov analysis put the Conservatives’ average voting intention at 14% in September, below the 15% recorded in the three months before the May 2025 local elections. It found that 20% of Britons thought the party was ready to return to government, while 59% thought it was not. Those figures describe opinion before Badenoch’s 7 October speech; they cannot measure its effect.

There was a stronger improvement in YouGov’s measures of Badenoch herself. Her net favourability had risen 20 points over the previous year to minus 15, while her net perceived job-performance score had risen 39 points to plus one. YouGov said its trackers suggested that improvement had levelled off since June. Asked to describe her in their own words, 40% of Britons used at least one negative term and 31% used a positive one.

A separate Opinium survey of 2,050 UK adults, conducted online from 30 September to 2 October, put Badenoch’s net approval at minus one, up two points. It put Prime Minister Andy Burnham at plus eight and reported that he led Badenoch by 21 points when respondents were asked who would make the best prime minister. The poll, too, predates the conference speech.

What remains open after the conference speech

The BBC’s account of the speech identified the central challenge: Badenoch’s personal poll numbers were improving, but the same could not be said of the Conservatives as a whole. The available polling does not show whether her tax pledges or conference message changed voters’ views after she spoke. It does show why a claim of party recovery cannot be assessed solely through ratings of its leader.

Before the speech, Badenoch told Sky News that the Conservatives would not win an election held then and predicted a hung parliament. She said she would prefer another election to a deal with Reform UK if no party could form a government, and that she wanted to win Reform voters back. Whether the party can do so, and how it would fund and deliver the measures announced at the conference, remain unresolved.