As a veteran of the Party’s candidates process – Returning Officer, candidate assessor, member of Regional and State Candidates Committees – over more than thirty years, you might not be surprised to find that I’ve been following the debate on this ornate, detailed constitution proposal with some interest.

And, whilst the General Election review published in January was, whether inadvertently or by design, somewhat bruising towards those who have been at the heart of running selection and approval processes over past years, what it stated as desirable outcomes had a lot of merit. Getting candidates in place earlier, finding and developing more Returning Officers and candidate assessors, and increasing transparency and consistency across the piece, are all obviously sensible.

The “solution”, however, appears to be to take responsibility from the structures that currently exist and replace them with a new Federal one, in the expectation that it will do a better job.

This may or may not be true. It does rather depend on who takes on the new responsibilities, how well they are resourced and how well they work with a core group of volunteers who will still be relied upon to do the “grunt work”. For very few people act as Returning Officers and candidate assessors “because it’s fun”. They do it predominantly because someone has to do it, and they fit in it around a range of other commitments.

And trust me, being a Returning Officer, especially for a target seat, is a pretty thankless task. Candidates can be challenging, partly because winning a selection is the first step to a potential future as an MP, members occasionally rude and thoughtless (it never ceased to amaze me how often people assumed that I was a Party employee) and the processes cumbersome and legalistic. There are a lot of dependencies too, which a Returning Officer can’t always control.

But, from a campaigning perspective, I can entirely understand the frustrations that an imperfect and sluggish candidate pipeline causes. As campaigns become more professional and data-led, our professional team know what is needed for success. And the core responsibility of any Candidates Committee worth its salt is to enable that as best it can.

The current structures place responsibility in the hands of State Candidates Committees (and, in England, Regional Candidates Committees) to address all of these issues. And, it is suggested, some are evidently better at that than others. I would be foolish to claim that the State and Regional committees all do an excellent job, but is it really the structures that are failing, or is it merely easier to bypass them with a new professional core team?

“Out with the ancien regime, in with the new technocracy” is a decent enough slogan, and there’s no doubt that as the regulatory and legal obligations upon political parties become more onerous and financially costly, bringing responsibility closer to the professional team at HQ has its charms. And I acknowledge that, for Westminster elections, the historic allocation of responsibility for organising candidates to the State Parties deserves at the very least a revisit. Times change, and you don’t have to do things the same way just because.

The challenges of how more Returning Officers and assessors will be found, or how they will be upskilled, as touched upon by Victoria Collins yesterday, are answered predominantly by “it will be better”, which offers little reassurance to a career bureaucrat and sceptic. The vision of a more orderly selection programme may run into the same problems of a lack of Returning Officers and enthusiasm from Local Parties unless (and possibly even if) this new structure can actually change some things for the better.

This is not a plea to preserve the status quo. As a member of a Regional Candidates Committee, I have an obligation to work with my colleagues and our various stakeholders – Campaigns Officers, candidates, Local Parties and the wider membership – to deliver our part of the wider campaign strategy. Change should come where it is needed. But I’m not convinced that this does much more than move responsibility from one part of the Party to another, rather than addressing the underlying problems as they are evidently perceived and genuinely exist.

And, regardless of the outcome of the debate on Saturday afternoon, the wider argument should serve as a reminder to all of us that the Party is only truly successful when campaigns, policy and the bureaucracy work in harmony rather than in opposition.

* Mark Valladares is a member of the East of England Regional Candidates Committee.