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August 2008
Exhausting but VERY SUCCESSFUL – THE FINAL YEAR Warwick meeting
The National Policy Forum held its final year meeting at Warwick University at the end of July, and after a long and tiring weekend, we agreed a policy platform to form the basis of the next general election manifesto. As constituency reps we were very pleased that we managed to get so many ideas from local parties agreed in the documents, especially given that the CLP representatives had taken forward over 2,000 amendments on hundreds of subjects. A number of the CLP amendments were on the same or similar issues to those raised by the unions, and the CLPs, trade unions and socialist societies worked very well together in the negotiations.
The rest of this report gives a summary of the amendments to party policy put forward by the CLP reps and accepted by the whole Policy Forum. It is impossible to cover every issue in detail and so this is a snapshot of the issues raised most often by local parties in the South East and across the country. The final documents with all amendments will be available shortly and we will let you know when and where you can get hold of them.
The Process at Warwick
The Warwick meeting was an intense process. On Friday we had meetings with ministers to discuss our amendments. Even with amendments being grouped into subjects, there were still hundreds of meetings, and as a SE team we had to attend meetings throughout the day (from 8.30am to 10pm). Where there were clashes, we arranged separate meetings with ministers. After that long day, Saturday split the forum into groups and each group covered all the subjects during that day, including a chance to raise amendments that had not been discussed yet.
By the end of Saturday we had achieved consensus on most issues, but the Sunday saw votes on the issues where movers wanted to ask for a vote. By this stage, most remaining amendments fell as they had very little support. There were some votes where amendments succeeded – labelling of fur in products, votes at 16 and regulation of estate agents all won large support, and there were some issues that got support from more than 25% (but less than 50%) – these amendments will go to annual conference.
Key issues
There has been significant movement on council housing by the government, which meant that most people were able to sign up to consensus wording on social housing funding. The NPF also agreed that the Lords will be 100% elected.
There were a number of other themes that had a higher profile than before. Policies involving the use of co-operative and mutual solutions (including in housing) got widespread support and general agreement that they should be used more often. Climate change concerns featured heavily too, and constituency reps got commitment on a number of key new policies.
Success for the SE reps
Obviously our main job was to represent the amendments sent in by the SE parties. As a region we submitted one of the biggest batches of amendments, but here are just some of the issues we achieved success:
increase in nursery entitlement to 20 hours per week; ban on teaching creationism in schools as science; monitoring of NHS dentist access, to ensure better coverage; free health checks for all adults that require them; more support for credit unions to ensure national coverage; simpler tax credit system; national employment law phone line; more alternatives to custody for young offenders; housing co-ops to have equal status for social housing; tougher emission standards for road vehicles and all public sector vehicles to be greener; feed-in tariff for microgeneration; greater protection for the rainforests against biofuel production.
And as mentioned in the Guardian, Liv Bailey led the lobbying and moved the amendment that received unanimous support from the CLPs and unions to lower the voting age to 16.
What happens next?
The amended documents will be issued during the summer, and debated at Annual Conference in Manchester in September, where minority positions will also be debated and voted on. The documents will then be used as the basis of the general election manifesto. The NPF will meet again to revise the documents in the light of developments. But this does not mean parties should not send in submissions to the commissions, as the manifesto itself will take these into account too. So keep sending your submissions and ideas into the commissions (and cc us!)