James Graham has a piece on openDemocracy on policy making in the Lib Dems, in which, amongst other things, he bemoans the lack of local involvement in policy making:

That isn't to say that the quality of debate at Lib Dem conference isn't high; the problem is the level of debate up until that point. "Consultation" such as it is involves a three hour debate on the Sunday morning before party conferences followed by a narrow window of opportunity to make written submissions. In many cases the working group will have already pretty much decided 90% of the paper by that point. Local parties as an entity contribute very little to policy overall; very few have regular policy discussions, let alone formal ones which actually feed into the process. Indeed, Unlock Democracy research suggests that of the three main parties, the Liberals discuss policy less than either of the other two at a local level, despite the much greater power their local parties theoretically wield.

Coincidentally this came up in a fringe session at Saturday's South Central regional conference chaired by Chris Marriage, chair of the South Central regional Policy Committee. I had a few things to say at it which I think would help address this apparent lack of localised discussion, and since I got all excited about it, I went straight out and got two signatures on a nomination form to be on the regional policy committee and hey presto! was returned unopposed.

I observed that with the new system of calling on a standing panel and not advertising individual policy working parties at a federal level there is, if anything, even less of an opportunity for individual members to get involved just in an area they have an interest in. Further, there seems to be ever less opportunity for local parties and other bodies to get policy motions debated at conference. Some would say this is just a function of having ever more business to conduct at busy conferences and others perhaps more cynically that FPC/FCC don't want so many "oddball" motions slipping into a carefully media managed conference agenda.

It was stressed that in theory at least regional policy committees were there to set policy for that region rather than being a regional branch of FPC, and that much is accepted, for the moment. But need it be that way? Could we have a mechanism where regional policy committees have a remit to help develop policy making capacity at local party level and then filter local submissions and champion them up to federal level?

Chris suggested that perhaps there ought to be a place as of right for a representative of each region on FPC. I think that is not possible - FPC is already big enough. But perhaps what there could be is a committee - perhaps meeting just two or four times a year - of representatives from each regional policy committee that could have some presence from FPC and a right to submit ideas (and fully worked up policy papers if available) into the FPC process.

Here in Oxford East we do have policy discussion type meetings - "Pizza and Politics" and so on - and I am somewhat shamed to say I have not yet made it to one. They seem at the moment mostly to be a vehicle for explaining and debating existing policy. I think an early one though sought to debate the Tax Commission I consultation paper before it went to conference and feed into that process.

I hope I'm not pre-empting my first meeting of the regional policy committee but I think I would like to make this a task of mine on that committee - to get in touch with local parties and try to get them to do more "blue sky thinking" with their members with the aim of getting the best of locally generated policy ideas and championing them up to federal party and federal conference level - to give local parties another shot at getting their ideas debated in the big tent.