Federal Policy Committee

FPC meetings report November 2024

As things have settled down since the election, we have had a few changes to FPC’s membership. Firstly, Mark Johnston has stood down from the committee and following a re-count of the election, Alyssa Gilbert has been elected in his place. Mark was our representative to FIRC; Keith Melton has been elected to replace him in this role.

Parliamentarians have re-jigged their appointments to FPC, with Layla Moran MP, Dick Newby and Jenny Randerson standing back from the committee. We thank all those leaving the committee for their contributions, and welcome new members Chris Coghlan MP, Alex Brewer MP, Joshua Reynolds MP and Edward Morello MP. 

At our October meeting we had a good discussion with our new foreign affairs spokesperson, Calum Miller MP, focussing particularly on Ukraine, the Middle East, Sudan, Europe, and Chagos. We also had an excellent discussion with Mike Dixon, the party’s chief executive, about the current political situation, and opportunities and challenges for us. This is extremely helpful for helping to ensure our work is as politically useful for the party as possible.

David Chalmers, the chair of FIRC, gave us an update of the motions discussed recently at the ALDE Congress in Portugal, some of which were very interesting. And we had a full discussion about further ways we can seek to engage as many party members as fully as possible in discussing and developing policy. Over the next few weeks a key focus here will be doing so through our Policy Review. Members of the group are attending all English regional conferences to hold consultation sessions, and in the new year there will be a variety of online-based consultation activities, as well as a full consultation session at spring federal conference in Harrogate.

At our November meeting our main focus was a number of items intended for debate at spring conference. Our policy paper on Science and Innovation, including AI, has been in development for some time now, including much consultation across the party, and was pushed back from this autumn’s conference by the General Election. This week we finalised this paper, which proposes a major package of policies to help build a successful technology and science sector. This includes ways to make radical improvements in public services from the NHS to the justice system and councils, as well as improving the wider economy and tackling social inequality and climate change. The whole education, universities and research system is key to this, as well of course as the private sector. Lastly it makes proposals to help society get the benefit from AI and machine learning, while also regulating it appropriately.

It is a very substantial piece of work and we are very grateful to the working group, especially Dr Jonathan Everett who chaired it and Joe Wright, the policy unit staff member working on it.

We also approved a motion for spring conference proposing improvements to animal welfare in the farming sector, which grew out of the recent wider policy paper on farming.

We had a discussion, one of many she has been having, with Christine Jardine to discuss and contribute our ideas to the motion she is developing on equalities which she plans to propose to spring conference.

Lastly we had a good discussion with Tim Farron about the General Election Review which he is chairing. Unsurprisingly this had a particular focus on the role that policy did and can usefully play in a campaign, as well as touching on a range of other ideas arising from the general election.

A key piece of work for the committee remains the Policy Review which is now under way, and we are looking forward to further discussions with it – which will of course draw heavily on the ideas that party members contribute to it – which will be very important in determining our future programme of policy development.