Federal Party News
Federal Policy Committee - meeting report March 2023
FPC's March 2023 report
JH
30 Mar 2023
FPC meetings report: February 2023
JH
13 Mar 2023
After a break in January, we’ve had two meetings in February, including a full-day in-person annual awayday. In those discussions we’ve been focussing on three or four main things which I’m very happy to report back to you.
The first is work on developing the pre-manifesto paper which we plan to bring to this autumn conference. A common comment on recent election manifestos and pre-manifestos has been that they contain excellent detailed policy, which are often very well received by commentators, voters and members – but that they do not articulate as well as they might an over-arching theme, or “narrative”, of what draws the individual policies together and expresses our underlying approach. We’ve therefore been doing considerable work on this. In parallel we have been thinking about the content of a small number of headline policies which substantiate and exemplify the overall theme and the many specific policies in it. This work is at an earlier stage, but we plan to develop it further over the next few months.
Secondly, we have been keeping in touch with our working groups currently developing policy in a pretty wide range of areas. We have held very useful discussions with Stuart Roberts (chair of the Food & Farming group), Rosie Shimell (chair of the Opportunity, Skills and Training group), and Christine Cheng (chair of the International Security group). All three groups have now published full consultation papers and will be holding formal consultation sessions at the York conference. You can find their papers here: https://www.libdems.org.uk/conference/papers/spring-2023
As ever, I strongly encourage anyone with an interest in those areas to read and comment on them at this stage. The final debate at conference offers only a chance for a very few amendments, often focussed on any major areas of disagreement. At this consultation stage, however, there is a real chance both to influence and change their overall direction, and to contribute smaller but important details. This is the real opportunity to influence what the party decides in these areas.
A key focus of all working groups is ensuring that their work allows us to bring to conference policies which are not just right for the country, but help us as a party make political progress by helping us to win votes and seats.
We have also had excellent discussions with Layla Moran MP and Richard Foord MP in their capacities as respectively the party’s foreign affairs and defence spokespeople, about their portfolios and the work they are doing in Parliament.
One of the topics we discussed at our awayday was our future programme of policy development, beyond our current working groups. In fact, partly because of the cancellation of last autumn’s conference, we do have quite a large number of working groups developing papers which we hope to bring to both autumn conference this year, and spring conference next year. However two areas where we did agree that we think the party’s policy does need further thinking, are on some of the questions about the future of work, and about science and innovation. We expect to advertise over the next few weeks for members of either one group, or two separate groups, to look at them. We also want to take a fresh look at our existing policies in a few areas, and so later in the year as we start to move closer to the general election will do some work, probably not through in working group format, on “health in the community”, crime and policing, high streets, and business regulation.
Lastly, now that we have a new committee in place, we are renewing again our focus on engaging members further in policy development and discussion. A key route for this for us is the Party Bodies Forum (PBF), bringing together Affiliated Organisations (formerly SAOs and AOs), and FPC member Tara Copeland held a discussion with them this month. We also plan to use the early development of the general election manifesto as a way to engage more party members in policy discussion. We are also keen to take a significant step forward in helping to make our policies much easier for our campaigners and members to find. This is a well recognised need in the party, which we are keen to meet; the challenge has been finding the right way to do it. We are planning to start a project which we hope will do this effectively, and should have more to say on this over the next few weeks.
So we have plenty of work under way and plans for the future. In the meantime, our policy papers that we finalised last year, for a Fairer Society, and for a More Caring Society, will be coming for debate to the York conference, and we look forward to the debates on them.
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