Federal Policy Committee meetings report Autumn 2025

FPC’s three meetings this autumn, our last before a new committee is elected in the internal elections, have focussed mainly on discussions with our working groups developing policy papers for conferences next year.

We have twice discussed with Cllr Katie Mansfield the plans the group she is chairing are working up for supporting and revitalising high streets and town centres. These range from improving the physical spaces, to supporting businesses, including into the digital age, bringing in new services, building on BIDs, and reviewing the potential contribution of the planning system.

Our discussions with Dr Mohsin Khan have focussed on the mental health group’s work on fighting back against the Labour government’s deliberate de-prioritisation of mental health, through a range of measures on access to services and overall resourcing, as well as the role of social media.

Our discussion with Ben Jones covered the range of current challenges in international security, from Ukraine and Gaza to others, and public attitudes in the UK towards them. Many of the questions here are about how Liberal Democrats apply our well-established and long-standing principles on internationalism, security and the UK’s global role, to these fast-changing scenarios.

On primary care, we have talked about the whole range of challenges this sector is currently facing, particularly in the context of the many changes the government is seeking to implement. Many of these of course link closely to questions facing the whole of the NHS. We are keen that to ensure we develop proposals which tackle the public’s highest priorities for primary care, notably improving access to GPs.

We have talked about the work of the Defending Democracy group, including changes needed to the regulatory regime, as well as other crucial measures to restore public confidence in our democratic and public institutions.

And our Economy group, being led by Julia Goldsworthy, is considering a huge range of questions and ideas for promoting a more thriving UK, from the role of the economy in the broadest sense and the limitations of conventional measures such as GDP, to specific measures to promote investment and broad engagement so that the whole country feels the benefit of economic growth.

In addition to our working groups, a discussion with (then) Home Affairs spokesperson Lisa Smart MP covered a wide range of topics including immigration, digital ID cards, women’s safety, fair policing and the right to protest. The government has been making far-reaching proposals in all these areas, and it was useful to exchange views about what the right liberal responses are in some of these areas which are not always politically easy for us.

We discussed the amendments proposed to the papers we took to Bournemouth conference, most of which we were happy to support. After Conference we were then pleased to note that generally Conference welcomed the papers and supported them strongly.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is bringing significant change to many areas of work, including within the party, and we have discussed both the opportunities and challenges it can bring to improving our policy development. Clearly our fundamental policy development process will not change, and we discussed a range of key AI risks including inaccuracy and hallucination, bias, transparency and data protection questions. We also noted its potential use, if properly managed, in helping to sift and find useful information amongst high volumes of policy input. This is an area we will continue to watch.

And lastly, we said farewell to each other! Both Ed Davey and Mark Pack thanked us for our work. We noted that over our three year term we have worked on sixteen policy working groups and papers, plus two pre-manifestos and one full-scale policy review – as well as the small matter of one General Election manifesto! We put a huge amount of time into the manifesto over many meetings, discussing carefully both its big-picture aims and how we communicate that, and then also line by line many hundreds of specific policies. We were thrilled that it played a useful role in our most successful General Election ever, with polling showing most of the most popular policies from any party, came from the Liberal Democrat manifesto. We noted that, compared to many party committees which meet 4-6 times a year, we work hard with about 12 meetings a year, and that we have (mostly) enjoyed working together!