Federal Policy Committee

September 2024 

FPC has had two meetings since the election.

 At the end of July we had an initial review of how the manifesto we had worked so hard on for two years had gone down in the wild, and were pleased to note a lot of very positive reception for it. We were particularly pleased that polling from Yougov showed that the top 7 most popular policies from any party were all Liberal Democrat ones! It was also very interesting to read that research by More in Common showed that although there were a variety of effective reasons why people voted for us, including simply getting the Conservatives out, and trusting our local candidate, the most powerful reason of all was one of our policies (on health & social care), with 4 of the top 8 reasons being specific policies of ours.

We then had a discussion reviewing the priority areas that the new government had set out in its King’s Speech, and how as a party we were responding to them.

At our pre-conference meeting in September we appointed members of our two new working groups: the policy review (chaired by Ed Davey) and on climate change (chaired by Duncan Brack). Interest in these was extremely high, with 413 members applying to be members of these two groups. Sadly this means that a lot of members have not been able to be appointed to these groups, to keep them to a manageable size – but as always, there will be many opportunities for all members to contribute to their work as it develops. We thank all those who took the time to applied to be part of these groups.

The first opportunity for members to contribute to their work will be consultative sessions that both of these groups will be running in Brighton – on Saturday morning (climate change) and Sunday afternoon (the policy review). Please do come along and feed in your views – or after the session.

Our working groups on Opportunity & Skills, and the Future of Work, will also be holding consultative sessions on Saturday lunchtime in Brighton. All these four groups (plus our fifth on Science & Innovation) will be proposing papers for the two conferences in 2025 – but now is a much more effective time to contribute to their work than when they come to conference for vote, by when they are already finalised. The committee had a brief discussion of the Opportunity & Skills paper, and a full discussion of the Science & Innovation one, at our September meeting.