Federal Policy Committee

March 2024

FPC has had two meetings in March. We have discussed our business for spring conference – principally our paper on international security, Liberal Values in a Dangerous World, which we were very pleased was welcomed by conference. We have also given our views to the consultation about autumn conference, and the implications of any changes to it for the policy process.

We have continued to work on the manifesto, especially the costings of our policy proposals. We will once again have a fully costed manifesto whose figures balance, as we are very confident will again be recognised by independent experts, if not by our opponents.

We have also done a bit of thinking about policy work into the next parliament, and have decided to commission two new working groups, with the aim of bringing papers from them to Autumn conference 2025.

The first will be a wide policy review, taking stock of the broad new political circumstances at the start of the next parliament, how our existing body of policies measures up against that, and then outlining a further programme of policy development. This is something we did around the 2005, 2010 and 2015 elections and is much broader and more political than usual policy working groups. If you are interested in this, the previous papers are numbers 76, 100 and 125 at https://www.libdems.org.uk/members/make-policy#policy-papers.

The second new working group will be updating our policies on climate change, including adaptation measures necessary to change the way we work and live as a result of the changes which have already happened and which will now occur in the future.

We expect to advertise for applications for members of these working groups over the next couple of months, so please do keep an eye out for them if you are interested.

With that, we are now off for a couple of months to focus on the May elections, before returning in late May and June to finish up three policy papers to bring to autumn conference.