High Peak Liberal Democrats

Federal Policy Committee Awayday

FPC members met for an awayday meeting on Saturday 19 May 2018, with a focus on reviewing our overall plans for policy development and how they can most usefully contribute to the party as a whole. It was an upbeat meeting, with lots of positive ideas for our next steps.

We started with a briefing from Nick Harvey, the party's Chief Executive, on the party's overall direction and current objectives, so that FPC's plans could contribute most usefully to that. This led on to a presentation of some recent research and polling on messaging. Next we reviewed a paper on the "Left Behind" written by a group of Lib Dem peers led by William Wallace. This all led on to the current draft of our own paper on key Liberal Democrat policy themes, drafted by Duncan Brack in discussion with many others, which we plan to bring to autumn conference this year.

We had a number of in-depth discussions drawing on all these items and much else, leading to some conclusions about our own key policy messages and our own detailed policy development plans. It is clear that the core liberal ideas of both fairness and opportunity will be key, and these and others will feature in our themes paper. We discussed our own programme of policy development work in this context too, and in addition to our current plan, we will commission a policy paper with proposals for helping the least well off in society. We will be refining this idea further over the next few weeks.

In the afternoon we moved on to getting ahead with our discussion of several policy papers before the deadline for motions for autumn conference at the end of June. Sally Burnell, an FPC member and member of the working group on immigration and identity, presented the current outline of their work. The FPC considered a request from Lib Dem Immigrants to recall the consultation from this paper. We decided against this because the working group had addressed specific concerns by running further consultation, and the initial consultation also produced useful feedback that had been incorporated into this draft. FPC welcomed the work that has been done on the policy paper and had a useful discussion about a wide range of detailed points.

Mike Tuffrey, chair of the policy working group on the 21st-century economy then introduced their work. Again, many specific points were discussed, as well as the need to link up much of the material in the paper to some of the high profile big questions facing the future of the UK economy, including technology and the wax and possible wane of globalised trade, and the liberal response. Both papers will come back to FPC again before being submitted for autumn conference.

Finally, FPC discussed two process issues. We agreed a plan for how we will draw up a manifesto should an early General Election be called. This builds on the successful approach used last year, with an additional emphasis on closer working with other parts of the party, especially the campaigns and elections function. We appointed Dick Newby to chair the - necessarily extremely brief and intense - manifesto process in such circumstances. These plans are for an early GE possibly called at short notice; we will discuss and consider plans for a 'normal' GE held four or five years after the last one, in the autumn. We expect that that will, as usual, include wide consultation with the party as a whole.

We also reviewed the process we have used for appointing chairs of policy working groups. The key skill for performing this role well is managing discussion between members of the group, the parliamentary spokespeople, other senior party stakeholders, FPC and others, and so the strongest candidates are people who have experience managing this kind of discussion. We want to actively encourage anyone who has a good potential working group chair for upcoming groups to suggest, to give their name to the policy unit. We always spend considerable time on promoting diversity among both working group chairs and members, and will continue to put a lot of effort into encouraging people from under-represented groups. We always report planned policy working groups well in advance (at least months in advance, and sometimes years!) so anyone with an interest in a particular area has plenty of time.

I was personally really encouraged by this meeting. FPC and the party's policy development function is working more closely with other parts of the party than it has for a long time, and this can only be to the benefit of the party as a whole.

* Jeremy Hargreaves is one of the Vice Chairs of the Federal Policy Committee.

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