Who Makes LibDem Policy?

by Simon Robinson, 20 Feb 2026

In the Liberal Democrats, our members decide our policy. So says the LibDem website (https://www.libdems.org.uk/members/make-policy). And of course, that is how, in theory, the party works. The same page goes on to say, Liberal Democrat members can vote on all policy at our Party Conferences. No proposal can become Lib Dem policy until Conference has voted for it.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that it raised some eyebrows when on 25 January Ed Davey went on tv to propose a plan for the Government to sell ‘war bonds’ to raise money for defence. The issue here is not whether you think war bonds is a good or bad idea, it appeared to introduce a significant new Liberal Democrat proposal, announced without any prior discussion at Conference. And then 2 weeks later the same thing happened again. But this time it wasn’t an off-the-cuff remark in a tv interview: It was a planned news conference at which Daisy Cooper announced plans to break up the treasury to create a new Department for Growth, to be based in Birmingham. A significant new proposal, even formally announced on the LibDem website (https://www.libdems.org.uk/news/article/get-britain-growing-again), with no obvious sign of any prior consultation with the wider party. Not only that, but this announcement was clearly not urgent, and was made just a month before Spring Conference – at which a proposal for a new policy could presumably have been tabled and voted on.

So is there a wider problem here?

Well it’s not so simple. I can think of at least four sources of policy for the LibDems.

A vote at LibDem conference - often based on a set of recommendations by Federal Policy Committee (FPC)
Announcements by the leader or senior LibDem MPs.
A statement in an election manifesto (which again will have been overseen by FPC)
What the Government actually does (if the LibDems are in power).

(And that’s even before you consider the parallel situation for LibDem controlled local councils) And there are different pressures for each of these sources of policy. In an ideal World in a democratic party, a vote at conference would be definitive. That is after all the membership having its say. But in the real world, it’s messy. Attending conference is expensive and requires being available for the weekend - only a small proportion of the membership actually makes it. Having FPC research and come up with proposals may mean that the proposals are well thought out, but that takes many months, which isn’t much good when you have to respond to rapidly changing events within the daily news cycle. And when the policy comes up for a vote in conference, members are generally voting on a motion that contains a whole bloc of specific related proposals, so it’s not generally feasible for someone to say, I like this one but not that one. For example, in September 2025, LibDem conference was presented and voted to adopt a policy on transport, which included such proposals as building a new Liverpool-Manchester railway, and mandating that rights of way for walking and cycling are built alongside railway lines. Which way should you vote if you agreed with one of those but not the other one?

To be clear, issues like that shouldn’t be seen as anything bad: They are just an inevitable consequence of trying to set policy democratically. But what that does mean is that, if conference is to be authoritative, it can only realistically be authoritative on broad principles, not on detailed specifics.

Another problem is that conference tends to be made up of activists. Activists are an essential part of any party, and indeed of any democracy. But let’s face it, us activists tend to be passionate, committed and idealistic. And we’re often not very representative of the views of the wider population – who are after all the people we are trying to serve! That’s the so-called Activist-Voter gap – and is a problem that all political parties have.

Set against that, a hard-working MP is likely to be far more aware of the views of the population: MPs are after all constantly being contacted by constituents. And their need to face re-election every 5 years ought to give them at least some motivation to think about what Joe public wants, not just about what the activists in their local LibDem exec want. Plus of course, the LibDem senior MPs can – at least in theory – get together and decide on a response to some event a lot quicker than conference can do so (although that doesn’t necessarily mean the response will be well thought out).

And then we come to the manifesto. The party’s MPs and the party’s leadership are the people who are going to have to implement whatever is in the manifesto if the party manages to (gasp!) win an election. So whatever the manifesto says, it had better be something that the leadership are happy to take responsibility for and believe they can implement. Imagine if the manifesto was somehow written by some process involving the wider membership or the conference, and we put stuff in it that the party leader, with all his/her experience of actually being in Parliament, felt he/she could not in good faith promise to do! There’s a good reason why the manifesto is written by the leadership, not by conference.

And then we come to what the party actually does in Government. Here you immediately hit a reality constraint. What happens if you’re a Government minister and your civil servants and various experts are all telling you that what you said you were going to do is actually not possible, or will have some awful impact that you hadn’t realised when the policy was devised, or will be much more expensive than you thought? Of course, you’d really hope those kinds of things would have been thought out when conference voted on a policy or when the manifesto was written, but unfortunately, in the real world, things go wrong all the time.

So where does that leave us? Bluntly, it’s messy. Much as I’m sure we’d all love to have all members voting on definitive party policy, that’s probably not possible in practice. In reality policy emerges organically through the various different strands: Conference, the leadership, the manifesto. And that all mixes up to contribute to what might happen in Government. And those different strands can do no more than guide each other. If the party is functioning well and people are acting in good faith, then what the manifesto says or what Ed Davey announces on tv ought not to be too far different from what conference voted for, but it won’t be the same, and we have to live with that.

But even so, it does feel a bit odd when MPs at Westminster declare definitive policies without any obvious signs of consulting the wider party. I for one felt uneasy at the way our new policy for a Department for Growth, suddenly appeared. The absence of visible consultation to my mind didn’t sit right for a proposal that was not responding to an immediate crisis.

So should we be doing anything different? Off the top of my head, the only thing I can think of is, perhaps there could be some mechanism for the leadership to at least check with FPC before announcing non-urgent policies. But the risk is that any formal mechanism adds bureaucracy and workload to volunteers who already work very hard, and without actually producing better outcomes. So maybe for now, we just have to accept the situation and live with the occasional ‘Department for Growth’.

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Who Makes LibDem Policy?

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