Congratulations to the newly promoted seats
Annual tiering review
FCEC’s big annual task is doing our part in the annual review of our constituency and local party tiering - that is which of the Advanced, Moving Forward Plus, Moving Forward, Development, and Start-up tiers each constituency / local party is in.
This is very much a collective exercise across the party, with Regional Parties, State Parties, and the Federal Party working together to assess the performance and potential of places. Although some decisions rest with FCEC, they are based on recommendations from all those involved.
For the higher tiers, there are sometimes conditions added, such as requiring a seat to select a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) promptly in order to be in the Advanced tier. The widespread availability of public MRP data for seats also provides a useful health check against what the party’s internal data is showing, especially when MRPs are carefully filtered for the high quality ones with a strong track record at predicting Lib Dem performance.
For obvious reasons, the details of which seats are in which tiers is not made public. But I’m glad to report that overall the tiering review this time has resulted in many more seats moving up than down, with a good spread, both geographically and in terms of politics, for those promotions.
Well done to everyone who has worked so hard in those places to earn promotion!
Selection timetable
At our last meeting, FCEC also discussed the new party-wide selection timetable for Westminster Parliamentary selections. Again, this is very much a collaborative exercise involving Regional Parties, State Parties, and the Federal Party working together.
Having a coordinated timetable like this is an important part of how we’re improving our Parliamentary selections process. It also allows our candidate selections to be fully integrated with our wider party plans, such as getting more candidates in place sooner in weaker seats, so they have a longer run at that key task of building up the local party and campaigning capacity. PPCs used to play a key role in doing this in many seats, but the pattern in the last few Parliaments of those outside target seats often only being put in place very late in the day meant there simply wasn’t time for them to get much training or support for this task nor time from them to do very much on this front.
A shared, planned timetable also allows better planning and sharing of resources, such as being able to work backwards from knowing how many Returning Officers will be needed to what training needs doing and when, and then to how many new volunteers need to be found.
You can see from the selection advertisements on the party website what a wide range of different types of seats are now selecting, reaching well beyond simply a handful of our strongest areas.
Other news
Josh Babarine’s latest update as President covers the latest steps in the party strategy review as well as campaigning in the Clacton by-election.