In a speech to the Union of Shop, Distributive and Allied Workers on 27 April 2026, Prime Minister Keir Starmer used a conference address to present a joined-up account of the Government's domestic agenda. Rather than focus on a single announcement, he linked employment law, retail crime, cost-of-living support, skills policy, welfare change and energy security under one test: whether working people feel more secure in daily life. The speech opened with the case of Finnola, a shopworker and USDAW representative who described racist abuse at work and the pressure to return the next day because Statutory Sick Pay did not provide enough financial room to stay at home. Starmer used that account to argue that policy should be judged not by ministerial intent, but by whether it changes conditions on the shop floor.
On employment rights, Starmer said the Employment Rights Bill is now in force and described it as a shift towards workers in low-paid and insecure sectors. He listed day-one access to sick pay and paternity leave, the end of fire-and-rehire, stronger whistle-blower protections, tighter rules on zero-hours contracts, an end to gagging clauses in sexual harassment cases, stronger collective consultation rights and a higher living wage. In practical terms, the package he described is intended to reduce the penalty for being ill, raising a family or challenging poor practice at work. For retail, care, hospitality and logistics staff, those changes would matter most where a household has little savings and very limited room for a missed shift or sudden loss of hours.
Starmer reinforced that message with personal examples from his own family, referring to his sister's work in care and his late brother's experience of unstable employment. The point was political as well as personal: he framed the Government's task as making Britain work better for people on low pay, people with caring responsibilities and people whose talents are not always recognised by the labour market. That framing helps explain why the speech moved quickly from labour law into training and education. Starmer pointed to expanded apprenticeships, new Technical Excellence Colleges, more investment in special needs education and a guarantee of training, work support or an apprenticeship for every young person struggling to find work. Taken together, the offer is designed to show that employment protection and skills policy are being treated as two parts of the same problem.
The speech also pulled family budgets and child poverty into the same argument. Starmer cited the extension of free school meals, the rollout of free breakfast clubs in every primary school and the removal of the two-child benefit limit, which he said would lift nearly half a million children out of poverty. For policy readers, the significance lies in the way ministers are trying to connect welfare and school-based support to labour market participation. Breakfast clubs and school meals lower day-to-day pressure on family budgets, while changes to benefit policy reduce the depth of income loss for larger households. The Government is presenting these not as separate interventions, but as part of a wider attempt to make work pay and to cut the instability many families have faced in recent years.
On immediate living costs, Starmer repeated that rail fares and prescription charges have been frozen, renters have been given more power, ground rents have been capped and the living wage has been raised by what he described as a record amount. He also said household gas bills had fallen in April and would remain capped until July 2026, with fuel duty frozen until September 2026 and support in place for households that heat their homes with oil. The international context mattered to the speech. Starmer argued that the crisis around Iran showed how quickly overseas events can feed through into UK petrol prices and household bills. He said a COBR meeting on 28 April 2026 would bring in the Bank of England as ministers monitor the economic effects. The message was that short-term protection on bills is being paired with daily contingency planning rather than left to market movements alone.
That fed into the speech's wider argument about resilience. Starmer said the Government would not return to a policy model that simply absorbs each external shock and asks households to carry the cost. He linked the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash, Brexit, Covid and the Ukraine war to a longer period of weak wage growth, strained public services and low resilience. His answer was to present energy, defence and industrial policy as domestic security measures. He pointed to investment in clean British energy, closer European alliances, what he described as the biggest sustained defence investment since the Cold War, an industrial strategy, repaired public finances and the Pride in Place programme, which he said would give local people more control over how their communities are rebuilt. The most consistent thread in the address was that economic security, energy security and workplace security are now being treated as parts of the same governing project.
For USDAW delegates, the most immediate part of the speech was the section on abuse, assault and shop theft. Starmer said the Government is reforming policing to free up time and money for street and neighbourhood policing, with an additional 3,000 neighbourhood officers already on the streets and further recruitment to follow. He also said ministers had removed the rule under which thefts below £200 were less likely to be investigated properly, describing it as a signal that shop crime had been tolerated for too long. He coupled that with tougher punishment and a pledge to make abuse and assault of retail workers a specific criminal offence. That matters because retail unions have long argued that verbal abuse, racist harassment and violence are too often dismissed as routine occupational risk. By linking a dedicated offence to wider policing reform, the Government is trying to show that worker safety in public-facing jobs should be treated as a mainstream law-and-order issue rather than a narrow sector concern.
Starmer also pointed to enforcement technology already being used in some areas, where CCTV footage is sent directly to police systems. He said those pilots are producing roughly double the number of solved shop theft cases. If that result is replicated more widely, the change would be operational rather than rhetorical: faster evidence transfer reduces delay, lowers the risk of deleted footage and improves the chance that repeat offending is followed up. The broader purpose of the speech was to argue that the Government's offer to working people is not limited to pay packets or one employment law change. It extends to safer workplaces, more predictable hours, lower household costs, stronger local economies and a smaller exposure to external shocks in energy and security.
As a piece of policy communication, the speech was designed to make several reforms look connected. The Government's case is that workers should be able to feel change in three places at once: in the terms of employment, in the cost of running a household and in the ability of the state to keep streets and essential systems functioning. That is a demanding test, and several of the measures cited will be judged on delivery rather than announcement. Even so, the address offered a clear map of ministerial priorities for 2026: stronger baseline rights at work, tougher action on retail crime, continued cost-of-living protection and a larger push to reduce the country's exposure to external economic and geopolitical shocks.