 2020 hasn't been the year that we imagined. It's been a year when we've been separated from our families, friends and many of the activities we love. But the spirit of our communities, the sacrifice of so much has helped us through the pandemic. And as we rebuild, we cannot shy away from the fact that our national recovery will be difficult, but we can't just seek to make up the ground that we've lost since March. We've got to set our sights higher. It falls to this generation, to this government, to this party, to take the opportunity to transform our country fundamentally and permanently for the better. Here's the NHS app, here we go. Successful check-in, Upsbridge Liveley, look at that. Nice to see you, nice to see you. How's things doing? We've been quite busy. I'm so pleased to see you open and treat you well. Business booming. Good. Good to see you. Glad to hear it. How are you doing? How's business? Is it all right? Actually, I've been very busy throughout this year. We're there for all the patients. We're still open. Thank you for everything you've been doing. We must seize this opportunity to build back better, build more houses to give people a chance to have a home of their own, build more hospitals and rebuild more schools so that public services have the tools they need. Build the infrastructure that will transform and level up all parts of the UK. Build a stronger union, build a greener economy, build a fairer society, and build a better United Kingdom. Our plan to transform this country will not be blown off course. At the election, we promised to recruit 20,000 more police officers. We've already recruited 4,300. We promised to deliver 50,000 more nurses with 14,000 already in place. We promised to get Brexit done and we left the EU on the 31st of January this year. Now is the moment to harness the extraordinary national spirit we've seen in the last few months and build back better. Good morning, conference. I want to begin by thanking you for everything you did at the election. Pounding the streets in the middle of winter, prodding leaflets through the letterbox and into the jaws of dogs to save this country from socialism and to win this party, the biggest election victory in a generation. I was gonna say how great it is to be here in Birmingham, but the fact is that we're not in Birmingham. This is not a conference hall. And alas, I can't see any of you in front of me. There's no one to clap or heckle. I don't know about you, but I have had more than enough of this disease that attacks not only human beings, but so many of the greatest things about our country, our pubs, our clubs, our football, our theater, and all the gossipy gregariousness and love of human contact that drives the creativity of our economy. And so I wanna thank you all for zooming in, and I can tell you that your government is working night and day to repel this virus, and we will succeed, just as this country has seen off every alien invader for the last thousand years. And we will succeed by collective effort, by following the guidance earned with the help of weekly and almost daily improvements in the medicine and the science. We will ensure that next time we meet, it will be face to face and cheek by jail. And we're working for the day when life will be back to normal. Flying in a plane will be back to normal, and hairdressers will no longer look as though they're handling radioactive isotopes, and when we can go and see our loved ones in care homes. And when we no longer have to greet each other by touching elbows, as in some giant national version of the birdie dance. I know the people of this country are going to defeat this virus because I've seen how the country's responded before. With the energy and self-sacrifice of the NHS, the care workers, the armed services, the spirit that was incarnated in the bounding, boundless devotion of Captain Tom Moore. But after all we've been through, it isn't enough just to go back to normal. We've lost too much, we've mourned too many. We've been through too much frustration and hardship just to settle for the status co-ante, to think that life can go on as it was before the plague. And it will not, because history teaches us that events of this magnitude, wars, famines, plagues, events that affect the vast bulk of humanity as this virus has, they don't just come and go. They are more often than not the trigger for an acceleration of social and economic change because we human beings will simply not content ourselves with a repair job. We see these moments as the time to learn and to improve on the world that went before. And that's why this government will build back better. And to explain what I mean by build back better, I'll use a medical metaphor. I've read a lot of nonsense recently about how my own bout of COVID has somehow robbed me of my mojo. And of course, this is self-evident drivel, the kind of seditious propaganda that you would expect from people who don't want this government to succeed, who wanted to stop us delivering Brexit and all our other manifesto pledges. And I can tell you that no power on earth was and is going to do that. And I could refute these critics of my athletic abilities in any way they want. Arm wrestling, leg wrestling, coverland wrestling, sprint off, you name it. And yet I have to admit the reason I had such a nasty experience with the disease is that although I was superficially in the pink of health when I caught it, I had a very common underlying condition. My friends, I was too fat and I've since lost 26 pounds and you can imagine that in bags of sugar. And I'm gonna continue that diet because you've got to search for the hero inside yourself in the hope that that individual is considerably slimmer. And when you look at the general economic condition of the country when we went into lockdown, there was an analogy, a similarity because we were on the face of it in pretty good shape. We had a record number of people in jobs. We had record low unemployment. We were seeing growing exports. And of course the only reason as Rishi Sunak has pointed out that in the last few months we've been able to cope with the cost of the pandemic to look after jobs and livelihoods in the way that we have is that in previous years we had sensible conservative management of public finances. And yet if you looked more carefully, you could see and indeed many of us said so at the time that the UK economy had some chronic underlying problems, long-term failure to tackle the deficit in skills, inadequate transport infrastructure, not enough homes people could afford to buy, especially young people and far too many people across the whole country who felt ignored and left out that the government was not on their side. And so we can't now define the mission of this country as merely to restore normality. That isn't good enough. In the depths of the Second World War when just about everything had gone wrong, the government sketched out a vision of the post-war New Jerusalem that they wanted to build. And that's what we're doing now in the teeth of this pandemic. We're resolving not to go back to 2019 but to do better to reform our system of government, to renew our infrastructure, to spread opportunity more widely and fairly and create the conditions for a dynamic recovery that is led not by the state but by free enterprise. We need to move fast, not just to deal with the immediate economic fallout, but because after 12 years of relative anemia, we need to lift the trend rate of growth. We need to lift people's incomes, not just go back to where we were. And it's clear from COVID that we need the economic robustness to deal with whatever the next cosmic spanner may be hurtling towards us in the dark. And the only way to ensure true resilience and long-term prosperity is to raise the overall productivity of the country. And the bedrock of national productivity is of course something that we are responsible for, having great public services on which everyone, families, businesses, investors can rely. That means first, a great health service. And so it's right that this government is pressing on with its plan for 48 hospitals to count them. That's eight already underway and then 40 more between now and 2030. We need to get on with recruiting the 50,000 more nurses. And I'm proud that we have 14,000 more since this government came into office. 14,000 more nurses now under this conservative government in the last year. And yet, that isn't enough. We've seen the frantic global scrabble for vaccines, for therapies. And so now we're doubling our funding for all types of revolutionary scientific breakthroughs with a national advanced research and projects agency. And while we're at it, we'll do what all governments have shirked for decades. We will fix the injustice of care home funding, bringing the magic of averages to the rescue of millions. COVID has shown a spotlight on the difficulties of that sector in all parts of the UK. And to build back better, we must respond. Care for the carers as they care for us. And if we're to raise productivity and encourage investment in the UK, then there is one thing we must do as a matter of basic hygiene and that is to fight crime. And so yes, we are fulfilling our manifesto commitment to put another 20,000 officers out on the street. And I'm proud that we've already recruited almost 5,000 but fan though I am of the police, we need to see results, not just spending. So we're also backing those police up, protecting the public by changing the law to stop the early release of serious sexual and violent offenders and stopping the whole criminal justice system from being hamstrung by what the home secretary would doubtless and rightly call the lefty human rights lawyers and other do-gooders. And in spite of the pandemic, the home secretary and I are having regular comp stat style sessions with the chief constables when we look at the crime data across the country and compare performance and work out what we can do to help. Town by town, we're rooting out the county lines, drugs, gangs that are causing so much misery. And in that sense, our agenda is basic social justice. When I talk about leveling up, I mean making the streets safer for everyone. And when I talk about leveling up, I mean not just investing massively in our schools, delivering on our promise to raise per pupil funding to 4,000 pounds per head in primary school and 5,000 pounds per head in secondary school as well as a 30,000 pound starting salary for teachers. I'm thinking not just about the inputs, but about the outputs, the changes in the lives of young people. And so I want to take further an idea that we've tried in the pandemic and to explore the value of one-to-one teaching, both for pupils who are in danger of falling behind and for those of exceptional abilities. We can all see the difficulties, but I believe such intensive teaching could be transformational out of massive reassurance to parents. It's in crises like this that new approaches are born. And last week, we grasped a nettle that has intimidated governments for the last century. We effectively broke down the senseless barrier between further education and higher education so that it's just as easy to get the funding you need for a training course in engineering or IT as for a degree in politics or economics. Because we're offering every adult four years of funded post-18 education, a lifetime skills guarantee, a lifetime skills guarantee. From internet shopping to working from home, it looks as though COVID has massively accelerated changes in the world of work. And as old jobs are lost and new jobs are created, we're offering free training for adults without A-levels in vital skills, from adult care to wind turbine maintenance. And the COVID crisis is a catalyst for change. So we need to give people the chance to train for the new jobs that are being created every day. And there's one area where we are progressing with gale force speed, and that is the green economy. The green industrial revolution that in the next 10 years will create hundreds of thousands, if not millions of jobs. I can today announce that the UK government has decided to become the world leader in low-cost, clean power generation, cheaper than coal, cheaper than gas. And we believe that in 10 years' time, offshore wind will be powering every home in the country with our target rising from 30 gigawatts to 40 gigawatts. You heard me right. Your kettle, your washing machine, your cooker, your heating, your plug-in electric vehicle, a whole lot of them will get their juice cleanly and without guilt from the breezes that blow around these islands. We will invest 160 million pounds in ports and factories across the country to manufacture the next generation of turbines and will not only build fixed arrays in the sea, we will build windmills that float on the sea and after deliver one gigawatt of energy by 2030. That's 15 times floating windmills, 15 times as much as the rest of the world put together. Far out in the deepest waters, we will harvest the gusts and by upgrading infrastructure in such places as Teeside and Humber and Scotland and Wales, we will increase an offshore wind capacity that is already the biggest in the world. As Saudi Arabia is to oil, the UK is to wind, a place of almost limitless resource, but in the case of wind without the carbon emissions, without the damage to the environment. I remember how some people used to sneer at wind power 20 years ago and say it wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding. Well, they forgot the history of this country. It was offshore wind that puffed the sails of Drake and Raleigh and Nelson and propelled this country to commercial greatness. This investment in offshore wind alone will help to create 60,000 jobs in this country and help us to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. Imagine that future with high skilled green collar jobs in wind, in solar, in nuclear, hydrogen and in carbon capture and storage. Retrofitting herds, crime source heat pumps. Mother nature has savaged us with COVID, but with the help of basic natural phenomena, we will build back and bounce back greener and this government will lead that green industrial revolution. We will create the conditions for individuals and for companies to flourish with a high skill, low crime economy. And if there was a physical audience in front of me now, I would solicit cheers by shouting out the details of our revolution in transport infrastructure. The a-roads were going to upgrade, the rail lines were building or electrifying, the simple ways in which we will improve your lives, your daily commute. But we must be clear that there comes a moment when the state must stand back and let the private sector get on with it. I have a simple message for all those on the left, the Labour Party, who think everything can be funded by Uncle Sugar, the taxpayer. It isn't the state that produces the new drugs and the therapies we're now using. It isn't the state that will hold the intellectual property of the vaccine if and when we get one. It wasn't the state that made the gloves and the mask and the ventilators that we needed at such speed. It was the private sector with its rational interest in innovation and competition and market share and, yes, sales. We must not draw the wrong economic conclusion from this crisis. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, has come up with some brilliant expedience to help businesses to protect jobs and livelihoods. But let's face it, he has done things that no conservative Chancellor would have wanted to do, except in times of war or disaster. This government has been forced by the pandemic into erosions of liberty that we deeply regret and to an expansion in the role of the state from lockdown enforcement to the many bailouts and subsidies that go against our instincts, but we accept them because there is simply no reasonable alternative. And yet on the left, in the Labour Party, there are many who regard this state expansion as progress and who want to keep the state supporting furlough forever, keep people in suspended animation, and who want to keep the state pre-empting and spending almost half our national income. We conservatives believe that way lies disaster and that we must build back better by becoming more competitive, both in tax and in regulation. We need to make this the best place to start a business, the best place to invest, and we need to unleash the urge not just to build, but to own. We need to fix our broken housing market. When COVID struck, there were millions of people, often young people, who found themselves locked down in rented accommodation without private space, without a garden, forced to use ironing boards for desks and bedrooms for offices. And I know that there are many people who are, of course, very happy with renting the flexibility that it offers. But for most people, it is still true that the overwhelming instinct is to buy. And many of them simply can't, not because they can't afford the mortgage, but because they can't afford the deposit. And the disgraceful truth is that levels of owner occupation for the under 40s have plummeted in this country and millions of people are forced to pay through the nose to rent a home they can't truly love or make their own. Because they can't add a knob or a knocker to the front door. And in some cases, they can't even hang a picture. They'll only pass it on to their children. Yes, we will transform the sclerotic planning system. We will make it faster and easier to build beautiful new homes. Without destroying the green belt or desecrating our countryside. But these reforms will take time and they're not enough on their own. We need now to take forward one of the key proposals of our manifesto of 2019. Giving young first-time buyers the chance to take out a long-term fixed-rate mortgage of up to 95% of the value of the home, vastly reducing the size of the deposit and giving the chance of home ownership and all the joy and the pride that goes with it to millions who currently feel excluded. We believe that this policy could create two million more owner-occupiers, the biggest expansion of home ownership since the 1980s. We will help turn generation rent into generation buy. We will fix the long-term problems of this country not by endlessly expanding the state, but by giving power back to people, the fundamental life-affirming power of home ownership, the power to decide what color to paint your own front door. With our long-term fixed-rate mortgages, we want to spread that opportunity to every part of the country. And that is the difference between us conservatives and the Labour opposition. They may have million-pound homes in North London, but they deeply dislike home ownership for anyone else. We want to level up. They want to level down. We're proud of this country's culture and history and traditions. They literally want to pull statues down to rewrite the history of our country, to edit our national CV, to make it look more politically correct. We aren't embarrassed to sing old songs about how Britannia rules the waves. In fact, we're even making sense of it with a concerted national ship-building strategy that will bring jobs to every part of the UK, especially in Scotland. And we believe passionately in our wonderful union, our United Kingdom, while the Labour opposition have done, frankly, nothing to defend the union and continue to flirt with those who would tear our country apart. And I say, frankly, to those separatist Scottish nationalists who would like this country to be distracted and divided by yet more constitutional wrangling, now is the time to pull together and build back better in every part of the United Kingdom. We believe in global Britain as a proud, independent and outward-looking country, and next year we will lead the world at the G7 and at the COP26 summit in Glasgow with three great campaigns to bring the world together, to heal the world, tackling the virus, tackling climate change and championing global free trade. We have confidence in our values and our diplomacy and being no doubt that they are secretly scheming to overturn Brexit and take us back into the EU. We believe in our fantastic armed services as one of the greatest exports that this country has. They, the Labour Party, can't even vote for measures to protect veterans from vexatious prosecutions 50 years later when no new evidence is supplied. And throughout this pandemic, it is this government that has taken the tough decisions because we believe that there are no easy answers while they've simply sniped from the sidelines. Well, my friends, we have no time now to focus on Captain hindsight and his regiment of pot-shots, sniped-shot fusiliers. I want you to raise your eyes, and I want you to imagine that you're arriving in Britain in 2030 when I hope that much of the programme that I have outlined will be delivered. And you arrive in your zero-carbon jet made in the UK and you flash your Brexit blue passport or your digital ID, you get an EV electric vehicle taxi, and as you travel around, you see a country that has been and is being transformed for the better. Where young people in their 20s and 30s have the joy of home ownership and where they can bring up children in the neighbourhoods where they grew up themselves, in the confidence that the schools are excellent and that crime is down, and instead of being dragged on big commutes to the city, they can start a business in their hometown, a place that has not only superb transport connections and green buses, but gigabit broadband and where the workforce is abundantly equipped, not just with university degrees, but with the technical skills that the new economy demands. And among other landmarks, you will see 48 new hospitals and a population that is healthier and happier and quite a bit thinner from a better diet and taking so much exercise in the new cycle lanes and walking among the millions of trees that have been planted and going for picnics in the new wild belts that now mark the landscape. You'll notice that the air is cleaner because most people are now drying EVs while some of the trucks are actually running on hydrogen and even some of the trains. And I believe you will see a Britain that is more united than for decades in its constitutional settlement, where Brexit has delivered a new excitement and verb, not just free trade and free ports, but control over our fisheries and the ability to do things differently and better from innovation in tech and data and finance to improving our standards in animal welfare. Yes, you'll see a country that scrupulously controls its own borders, but which is in some ways more cosmopolitan than ever before, welcoming scientists and artists and people of talent from around the world. A Britain that is proud of our culture and history and unashamed of our heritage, but also unblinkered about the present, embracing every person with love and respect, whatever their race or creed or gender or orientation. That is the Britain we can build in its way and with all due respect to everywhere else, the greatest place on earth. Indeed, that is the country and the society that we are in the process of building. And I know that it seems tough now when we're tackling the indignities and cruelty and absurdity of the disease. But I believe it's a measure of the greatness of this country that we are simply not going to let it hold us back or slow us down. And we're certainly not going to let it get us down, not for a moment, because even in the darkest moments, we can see the bright future ahead and we can see how to build it and we're going to build it together. Thank you all very much.