Jeremy Corbyn will be granted a pass to Labour’s conference in Brighton later this month and will be free to address fringe meetings despite currently sitting as an independent MP, a party spokesperson has said. The former leader, who had the whip suspended by Keir Starmer last year, has applied for a conference pass and accepted invitations to speak at several events, the Guardian understands. Amid a growing row about whether Corbyn should be allowed to attend, a spokesperson said: “He’s definitely not barred: of course he will be getting a conference pass.” The last time Corbyn attended Labour conference in 2019 – also in Brighton – it was as party leader, when the event was curtailed after the supreme court struck down Boris Johnson’s prorogation of parliament. Three months later, the party plunged to its worst electoral defeat since 1935. Starmer’s team had faced a mounting backlash after the chair of Young Labour, Jess Barnard, complained she had been told Corbyn would not be allowed to speak at the group’s conference event. Labour sources said the Young Labour event was a formal part of Labour conference, and as such the speakers would have to be vetted separately. But they confirmed Corbyn would be allowed to speak at fringe meetings in the conference centre, which do not form part of Labour’s formal programme or take place on the main conference stage. Corbyn supporters had warned that rejecting his conference application would be a provocation by Starmer. “He is a Labour member: he should be entitled to attend any meeting in the conference zone,” said Richard Burgon, the Leeds East MP who chairs the Socialist Campaign Group of leftwing MPs. “If the leadership decided to bar him from the conference, they would be doing so as a provocative act towards the membership, hoping that more leftwing members leave,” he added. Corbyn will also be free to address events at the World Transformed event, which is taking place outside the formal conference zone. One senior party aide said the leadership had faced a “lose-lose” decision about whether to admit him to the main conference venue, raising the spectre of Boris Johnson’s packed-out speech at Tory conference in 2018 during Theresa May’s premiership. Corbyn had his membership of Labour restored last November by the party’s ruling national executive committee (NEC), but Starmer has declined to restore the whip, meaning Corbyn now sits as an independent. Starmer told the Guardian last month that in order to be welcomed back into the fold, Corbyn would have to apologise for, and take down, comments made in the aftermath of the publication of the damning Equality and Human Rights Commission report on Labour’s handling of antisemitism complaints. In a statement that remains online, Corbyn claimed the scale of antisemitism in Labour was “dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party”. Starmer’s team hope the first in-person conference since he was elected leader will be a showcase for Labour’s values and policies. But a row had already erupted about Young Labour day, which was meant to form part of the usual conference schedule. Barnard has complained that Young Labour has not been given the support from the party’s general secretary, David Evans, that it needed to hold an event, and was told it would not be allowed to have Corbyn as a speaker. The NEC recently agreed to proscribe four leftwing groups. Some MPs claim Starmer is carrying out a purge of Corbyn-supporting elements of the party, though the leadership say they are simply following through on their determination to root out antisemitism.