Federal Policy Committee meetings report June 2025

A key piece of work over the last year has been the Policy Review, which has had the remit of reviewing our existing body of policies against current circumstances, and then proposing an overall direction for our policy development through this parliament. I think this paper now sets out well a clear statement of the Liberal Democrats’ priorities, and a programme of future working groups to flesh them out in more detail. Particular thanks to Eleanor Kelly who as Ed’s vice chair of this group has done a great job of steering the group through this complicated and important territory. 

A large and industrious working group led by Duncan Brack has completed a full review of our party’s policies relating to climate change, resulting in an impressive paper which sets out our responses on a very wide range of aspects of climate change, including energy resilience and costs, ensuring the transition to a lower carbon economy is fair, and international co-operation. 

The committee has decided that a lot of policy development work from a working group looking at the future of work, which was chaired by Vinous Ali and which had been running since well before the General Election, would in present circumstances now best be taken forward by feeding this into a range of other working groups and other pieces of work. This will therefore now not come as a separate policy paper to conference. Other groups, especially our new one on the economy (see below), are therefore able to have a significant head start on some key areas. 

And the group which has now been working for no less than three years on policy on opportunity and skills, under the leadership of Rosie Shimell, has now finalised some very helpful proposals on how as a country we can both more effectively help people make the most of their individual potential, and also meet employers’ and the economy’s skills needs better. 

FPC is very grateful indeed to all the members of these working groups for their time and work, especially their chairs, and has spent a lot of time reviewing and finalising their proposals to bring to Conference. They will be published with the conference agenda which we expect to happen in early August. 

We have balanced concluding these working groups with setting up a new round of the next ones. They are based on topics identified by the policy review. We advertised for members to apply to be part of these in April and May, and are grateful to all those who applied. The approach we take to reviewing applications and appointing groups is set out at https://www.libdems.org.uk/members/make-policy/ (under ‘How are FPC working groups selected?’).

We have appointed a group on Defending Democracy, to be chaired by Sarah Lewis, which will focus on defending and promoting trust in our democratic institutions, protecting them from interference by others both inside and outside the UK, and ensuring they deliver effectively for citizens.

We have appointed a group on Primary Healthcare, under Kate O’Kelly as Chair. It will have a strong focus on improving access to GPs and dentists, as well as building a sustainable primary care system which works well with us all both to treat and prevent poor health. 

A group chaired by Ben Jones has been appointed to keep our policies on developments in international security under review. We feel as a party we have a strong set of approaches and policies (set out in the 2024 paper Liberal Values in a Dangerous World) but fast-moving international developments mean the party will want to keep a close eye on how these need to be adapted to changing circumstances over the next year. 

Lastly we intend at our next meeting to appoint a group to develop a clear Liberal Democrat narrative on how we can promote a thriving and sustainable economy, improve living standards and wellbeing, and expand opportunity. 

For the sake of completeness, although we haven’t discussed them in this month’s meetings, we also have working groups under way on mental health and high streets & town centres, developing proposals that we hope to bring to spring conference. 

At our next meeting we are also going to take a breather from all these specific policy papers to see what improvements we can make to some of our processes, with a particular focus on engaging members even more widely in policy development discussion. 

You can find further information about all of these groups, their remit and membership at https://www.libdems.org.uk/members/make-policy/