I don’t think Federal Council ever fully found its feet. And I think one of the fundamental reasons for this is that we never really understood what it was for. Was it intended only as an emergency brake for bad decisions made by a reduced size Board, or was it intended more of a broader Overview and Scrutiny function, equivalent to local government? My interpretation of the constitution was that it was the latter, but much of the discussion in Council focussed more on the former – which decisions should we call-in?

This fundamental tension is one the party must resolve if it wants a functioning Council. A productive relationship between the Board and Council isn’t one where the Council threatens use of a big red stop button constantly. Instead, the Council must trust the Board to do the right thing, with that trust being earned with Council being confident that the Board is doing the work to implement the party strategy, as agreed by conference, through proactive scrutiny. The use of a veto power should be an extreme one. Expense limits for the Presidential election was one of the few examples of the Council being effective at influencing the board, and we did not need to use the veto to implement this.

The current relationship has the Council sitting after the Board, with the Council finding out what decisions have been made afterwards, and only having the power to shape them after the decision has been made, often too late in a process to be meaningful. We can look at local government scrutiny for different ways of approaching this problem. The Board could have chosen to consult with the Council over this and for it to develop or agree recommendations to the Board over this, instead of the relationship being set up as an adversarial one of threatening to veto a decision.

And what is a decision? It seems to me that it is up for the Board to decide what is a decision and what is not. If a decision is delegated (either to another Federal Committee, or to the professional staff of the party), does that now mean it is outside of the purview of Council to review? Again, we can look to local government which has a clearer definition of what is a “key decision” that qualifies to be called in, which covers not only decisions from the executive, but officers too, strengthening oversight.

In our party, we could adopt a definition of a decision subject to call-in not only as one the Board makes as a result of a paper for consideration, but any with a substantial financial cost associated with it, or a decision of an officer that spans the remit of multiple committees. A valid question we could ask is should Council have been able to call-in the decision made within the party to reinterpret our election quota clauses?

One of the biggest negatives of Council was how disruptive some members of Council were, which originated particularly from those associated with the external lobby group “Liberal Voice for Women” which is attempting to force the party to abandon its principles of LGBT inclusion through the use of lawfare and attempting to ideologically capture the internal governance of the party. Those aligned with this group would frequently use both the meetings and the discussion spaces between the meetings to raise issues they were campaigning on but outside the remit of Council. Policy decisions and public statements on equality issues and childrens’ healthcare with which they disagreed (but nevertheless were party policy) were repeated arguments that did nothing but consume energy.

Too many discussions were not approached constructively by some of my colleagues in Council, who instead were openly hostile to the Board and President. Discussions were derailed by and insistence that their interpretation of a complex issue was the only correct one, and not being open to hearing alternatives. The toxicity grew to the point where I felt I had to withdraw from these discussion spaces and when Council meetings clashed with ward canvass sessions, going doorknocking felt like a more productive use of my time than sat on a Zoom call for yet another fruitless discussion.

There remains a big challenge for the new Council to reset that culture and clamp down on such disruption early to make it clear it is not acceptable. This must be combined with answering some of the questions set out earlier about the role of Council which would give better shape to structure discussions around.

If the Council wants to be more than an emergency stop button, it must figure out how it will work with the Board to ensure the Board is implementing party strategy. We attempted this with an attempt to scrutinise the part of the party strategy relating to technology by setting up a sub-group to report back to the wider council on our findings on how this part of the strategy was being implemented. However we were blocked in our attempts to gather evidence and understanding of how the strategy was being implemented by not being allowed to talk to staff members to collect this data. Council must have the ability to directly scrutinise the work of the party to evaluate whether the Board’s implementation of strategy is working. Relying on verbal reports from the President is not sufficient for deep scrutiny.

I decided not to re-stand for Federal Council so I won’t be there to help shape its second term, but I hope the cohort who make up the second term of it can better grapple with these challenges. As a concept, it has a potential to strengthen the governance and running of our party – but we’ve not yet seen this. To the next Council, I wish you the best of luck.

* Chris Northwood (she/her) is a councillor in Manchester, deputy group leader of the Manchester Liberal Democrats and outgoing member of Federal Council.