This year the PPA attended more conferences than ever before, which reflects the rise of multi-party politics. The public vote is no longer clearly split between two main parties, and our engagement priorities have shifted after last year’s developments with Reform and the Greens in particular, whose policy priorities for the next election are still in early stages of development.

Labour’s conference, however, offered the clearest signal of what’s coming down the track: our reflections are below. 

Artificial Intelligence 

AI was everywhere in Liverpool this year, with the Prime Minister having set the tone the week before by announcing that AI will be at the heart of the UK’s 2027 G20 presidency, culminating in a Manchester summit in November 2027. The question for the creative industries is whether that global push on AI principles and standards will also cover fair value for the content models are built on. 

The newly elevated AI Minister, Kanishka Narayan, was arguably the busiest person at conference. He did nearly 70 speaking engagements in three days, which shows how much AI dominated discussion this year. Across his sessions, including a fringe with OpenAI, a few themes stood out.  

The first was framing. Narayan argued that Britain’s public narrative has tended towards tech scepticism, and that the tech world has “lacked soul”. He sees the biggest opportunity as fighting for technology policy as something values-driven, a national mission serving shared aspirations rather than a niche question for tech policy circles. He said AI’s place in Cabinet is a clear symbolic statement of that, and that at the next election the question won’t be whether Labour is pro- or anti-AI, but whether it is the party of a values-driven future. 

The second was British agency. Narayan was candid that the UK doesn’t have a frontier AI model and that, in the last technological wave, “Britain just didn’t build”. His answer has two stages. In the short term, the UK should build capability as quickly as possible to secure a seat at the table. In the longer term, the UK should convene, and trade on trust: without a frontier model, the UK has its best shot as the trustworthy actor, using that leverage to shape the technology with British values. 

The third was work and licensing. At the IPPR, Prospect and Google fringe, his message was “augmentation, not automation”. When PPA asked what the government will do over the next 12 months to support a thriving licensing market, he said the question is not just how licences are secured, but who benefits from them. We’ll be holding the government to that, and making the case that publishers, and the editorial teams behind trusted brands, must be among the beneficiaries. 

Trust, platforms and disinformation 

Trust was also the thread running through DCMS discussions. Lisa Nandy described social media platforms as “toxic, angry, poisonous, harmful spaces”. She noted that the Online Safety Act took eight years to reach Royal Assent and signalled faster action through greater use of secondary legislation. She also flagged the regulatory gap around AI chatbots. 

A session on London as a target for disinformation heard Emily Thornberry warn that responsibility for misinformation is split across seven ministers, which “is as good as none”. Dawn Butler called for fines for algorithms and the companies behind them and described online radicalisation as a national health emergency. The panel backed prominence for trustworthy information, a key proposal in the Media Green Paper. 

PPA’s view is that any statutory definition of trustworthy news must recognise trusted editorial brands across B2B and consumer media. Much of the most harmful misinformation is about health, money and the manosphere, and consumer titles with professional editors, fact-checking and complaints processes are countering it every day. 

UK–EU relations 

Europe was one of the big themes of the week. Two events on the subject were particularly insightful: Beyond the Border: revitalising the UK–EU trading relationship, hosted by the University of Liverpool Management School and the Chartered Institute of Export & International Trade, and a King’s College London panel on how the Burnham government should approach its EU agenda.  

Discussions centred on compliance burdens for businesses and alignment between UK and EU regulations, where the UK matches its rules and standards to the EU’s, to reduce trade barriers and border checks. The timing of these conversations was apt, given the Prime Minister has said the government is considering steps to bring the UK closer to the EU. He has also confirmed he will attend the UK–EU summit in November. It is the main political moment for agreeing new steps in the post-Brexit ‘reset’ of relations.  

For those selling to readers in the EU, customs charges on low-value parcels and packaging requirements under the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) continue to be a concern. We’ll keep pressing for these to feature in the government’s discussions with the EU and will update members after the November summit. 

Public service broadcasting and the BBC 

At the public service broadcasting reception, we heard from Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, who has kept her role in the new Cabinet. With BBC Charter Review under way, we’ll continue to make the case that a more commercialised BBC would have an anti-competitive advantage and risks undermining commercial publishers. 

Get in touch 

If you’d like to hear more about any of these conversations, or have issues you’d like us to raise with government, please contact us at charlotte.jeffreys@ppa.co.uk or eilidh.wilson@ppa.co.uk.