Federal Policy Committee

FPC report June 2024

In a transparent attempt to disrupt our committee’s work Mr Sunak went and got himself drenched in Downing St about three quarters of an hour before our first planned meeting since March. So we then abandoned that meeting to go and focus on Flying Starts, but have since held one meeting, which will be our last until after polling day.

The manifesto was already very close to complete and we have now brought it fully up to date, for example in relation to some developing world events. It remains very closely based on the pre-manifesto which conference approved in the autumn. We hope you will feel it both tells a good story about who we are and broadly what we’d do, as well as many many detailed proposals. It will of course as always be accompanied by a full costings document which we believe the reputable and independent think tanks and news outlets will, as usual, confirm as realistic and balanced.

(There’s a funny thing here – the Conservatives and Labour often do a very good job of persuading their media champions to dismiss our costings are completely made-up, apparently mostly by saying to them “it’s the Liberal Democrats, they probably haven’t bothered with doing the costings properly”. In fact this is the exact opposite of groups which do actually look at manifestos very carefully to make sure they add up – as for example in 2019 the FT, the Economist and the IFS, who all complimented our rigour).

In any case we hope you enjoy reading the manifesto when it is launched. We expect most people to read it in bits on a mobile phone and it has been written with that in mind, and will be fully searchable. There will also be a PDF available for people who want to read it the old-fashioned way!

The exact timing of the launch is (rightly) in the hands of the GE communications and media team, and not something FPC is involved in.

I do want to just pay tribute to my FPC colleagues, who have taken preparing this document extremely seriously over the last couple of years, from first concept to final detail. They have carefully considered literally hundreds of individual points in it and its (hopefully) success is theirs. And I want to pay even greater tribute to the work of the staff who have done all the very detailed background work and brought us proposals and options for the committee to make good quality decisions on. They are the reason it has been able to happen.

The Manifesto Group Chair, Dick Newby, has been a supremely reliable bastion to guide it through amidst all this discussion – as well as personally having with staff literally hundreds of individual consultation meetings with groups inside and outside the party to help prepare it.

Away from the manifesto, FPC was about to set up two new working groups, for a post-election policy review, and to develop policies on climate change. Applications to be on these groups closed in the week Parliament was dissolved. Clearly all of our focus will be on the election for the next few weeks. So while we have received and are grateful for these applications, we will not be looking at them and working further on this until well after polling day. We now expect probably to appoint these groups in the autumn. This will still give the groups sufficient time to develop proposals to bring to autumn conference next year, as planned.

We will also obviously not be finishing up the papers intended for this autumn conference, on Opportunity & Skills, the Future of Work and Science & Innovation. However we do hope that there will be ways to have some useful discussion of them in Brighton and will discuss this with FCC once planning for the conference gets under way. We will expect to bring them for final debate to spring or (perhaps for one) autumn conference next year.

We will also be asking FCC if it can allow some time in Brighton to gather members’ feedback on how the manifesto went down.

But in the meantime there is a General Election to make some real progress in! We hope you enjoy the manifesto, and have successful campaigning in your area.

28 February 2024

FPC has continued its work on developing the manifesto, with two meetings in February including an all-day in-person meeting. Substantial work has now taken place on it and we are very confident that whenever the General Election comes we will be fully ready for it with a strong and up to date paper. After the last two “snap” General Elections it has been good to be able to spend the time necessary to do it not in a rush.

We are extremely aware of the surrounding political circumstances and the need for the manifesto - like the pre-manifesto on which it is closely based - to serve the party’s wide political needs at the election. There has been broad input from the campaigning, strategic, communications and political parts of the federal party.

The budget on 6 March is likely to make some substantial changes to the government’s financial proposals. Our next piece of work is to review the costings of our own proposals in light of those. We are committed, as always, to producing a fully-costed package of final proposals.

18 January 2024

I must begin with an apology for the quiet on reports here from FPC meetings. Our September meeting was focussed on practicalities of our business at autumn conference, and we didn’t meet in August or October. So this is a report from our last three meetings, in late November, December and early January.

These meetings have been dominated by two themes. Firstly, following Autumn Conference’s approval of the Pre-Manifesto paper that we submitted to it, we have been working away on putting further finishing touches to it as we finalise it for eventual publication as the manifesto for the General Election. As always, we are highly conscious of the political context and how it can be politically useful (and if we are not careful, harmful) to us as a party. We expect to have completed this within the next few weeks so that it is fully ready for any spring election that might be sprung on us.

Secondly, we have been working on two policy papers for Conference. The International Security working group, chaired by Christine Cheng, has completed its work and we have held two full discussions with her, vice chair Jonny Singh and the group. This has an interesting range of proposals and we hope you will enjoy reading it. We have now submitted it, and if FCC places it on the agenda for York, we expect it to be published in early February. We have also talked about the Opportunity and Skills policy paper, with its chair Rosie Shimell. We will now not be taking this to spring conference this year, but to a future conference. This will allow it to fall into step with the Future of Work policy working group, with which it has some considerable overlap.