The Federal Board report usually goes through fairly uncontroversially. However, there has been a bit of drama at the past two conferences. In Spring important board business relating to the disciplinary process was withdrawn at the last minute after a serious error was discovered.

This delayed desperately needed improvements to the disciplinary process until now. You can find out more about the detail here in the Board report.

Thankfully, those changes, which make the process quicker, less stressful on those using it and on those administering it and clearer, passed easily this afternoon.

Last Summer, the Federal Board started operating in a different way. One of the Thornhill Review’s 78 recommendations was to improve the governance of the party and make the Federal Board smaller. The Board decided to delegate most of its powers to a small, mostly not directly elected people. As a directly elected Federal Board member, I opposed it from the outset. If such a centralising power grab was being done in a council, we would be up in arms about it. I always think it is very important to live our values and I don’t feel that the Steering Group project does that. We are a member led organisation but we concentrated power into too few hands.

When the project was renewed this Summer, the Board agreed to my suggestion that we should put something to this Conference. So a motion was submitted to give it legitimacy but this was not accepted by the Federal Conference Committee.

However, Will Barter, formerly from Cambridge but recently moved to Bromley asked for a separate vote on the part of the Federal Board report relating to the Steering Group. He told Conference:

Ultimately, we are a member-led party and we are proud of that. But we have had a “major change in how the party is run” that has been carried out without the sign-off of members.

This vote now gives us a say. It doesn’t give us the chance to provide the scrutiny that is our right and role as members – to confirm the set-up of the group, or to confirm whether we judge it a success.

But by rejecting the lines in this report that say the pilot will continue, we can take the time to make sure that this is how we want our party to be run. We can pause until we get that chance to confirm the set-up of the steering group, until Mark brings us a constitutional amendment on his “major change”.

Those lines in the Federal Board report were rejected by 101 votes to 93.

The Board was always going to bring proposals for its future structure to Spring Conference to be implemented in time for the federal committee elections this time next year. Until then, the Conference vote presumably means that the Steering Group pilot cannot continue.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings