Lib Dem Voice has learned the sad news from Cowley Street:
The Liberal Democrats are having to begin a redundancy process to reduce the number of POLD [Parliamentary Office of the Liberal Democrats] staff by over 20 positions. This is following the confirmation that the party will not be receiving Short Money.
The losses will take place in the Policy and Research Unit, Media Office, and the Leader’s Office. The party will retain a Media Office and a scaled-down Policy department.
POLD staff have been told that they will be consulted, as the party seeks to arrive at a effective and viable new staff structure. There will be a fair and open selection process for the remaining jobs. All staff who are leaving the Liberal Democrats will be given every possible support to adjust to their new situation and to find new jobs.
It’s worth noting that the Conservative Party had to make a similar round of redundancies recently – a source says that some 70 staff are being laid off – a similar percentage to the losses in our own Parliamentary Office.
It’s not that the Liberal Democrats have been singled out for special treatment, though of course this doesn’t lessen the pain for the party. This is simply what political parties do when they go into Government. Without the Short Money, which is paid to Opposition parties to help with the costs of carrying out Parliamentary business and running their Leader’s Office, strain will inevitably be placed on the Federal Party’s budget.
At Lib Dem Voice, we’re very sorry for the job losses after staff put in so much hard work during the General Election.
One consolation is that “Worked for the Liberal Democrats during General Election 2010” will be a very good thing to put on the CV.
We wish all departing staff the very best for the future, with our thanks for your hard work which helped lead the Liberal Democrats to Government.
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25 Comments
Really sad to hear this. I’ll declare my interests (to avoid any scandal!) that firstly my boyfriend is one of the casualties, and secondly, I met the majority of people working in Cowley Street and the Leader’s Office in my time as Chair of Liberal Youth – they do an incredible job, often going beyond the call of duty and I’ll be sad to see them go. Good luck to everyone in what they move on to do.
The challenge now is for FE and FFAC to make some really tough choices in this round of party budgeting. We need to make sure we’re getting value for money on everything that we give out to SAOs and others. This also includes being far better at supporting those who spend the money the party gives out – something that was never perfect when I was Chair, but definitely improved in my time in the role.
Sad news, but the right thing. How on earth you thought you would still receive this money is beyond me.
RIP PRU
sadly missed, warmly remembered.
But as we’re now in government, don’t the new increased salaries (from opposition back bencher MP to Cabinet Minister) make up for this lose of funds?
The “YES CAMPAIGN” for the AV referendum might start recruiting soon?
@Arthur – only if ministers are made to pay their salaries into the party funds.
Ministers could donate to the party, but it’s likely they’d donate to their own local parties – for the obvious reason that this helps them get re-elected!
Parliament remains woefully under-resourced for the vital job it does. This is, in part, a historical anomally. For most of its history, Parliament has been a club for “gentlemen” – people of independent means who would have considered it beneath them to take money off the state, and preferred hunting and whoring to surgeries. Only in recent times has Parliament developed a complex committee structure that requires at least some Parliamentarians to be specialists and is unable function without an army of permanent researchers. It is in this context that we should view the media-inspired so-called “expenses scandal”, a ruse by the Barclay brothers and their ilk to weaken Parliament and emasculate democracy in this country. I don’t suppose the oligrachs sunning themsevles in Catalonia last weekend will be crying their eyes out at today’s news.
This is sad news, finding additional funding is a continual issue…
Question: why is this money only avalable to opposition partys, I don’t see how we would need it less now that we are in government?
@David L G the theory is that as part of the Government we now have access to Civil Servants the short money is there to stop access to civil servants creating an inbuilt advantage for the party that forms the Goverment over opposition parties.
Difference between Cabinet and backbench salary for five people = about £240,000 (net of tax). Short money = about £1.5 million, I believe. Even if you add in the various junior ministers and assume that none of them should receive any additional personal benefit for being ministers, it doesn’t come close to closing the gap. (Not that I think it should – the parliamentary party does now have access to civil service expertise that it never had before – but no one should think that these redundancies are due to newly enriched cabinet ministers being stingy.)
Although this is not reassuring, it happens after every general election.
At this moment in time we have more members than we have had for a long time.
Local parties need to make themselves compelling to these new members, or else our membership will go down and with less income the party will have to make more redundancies.
Does Liberal Youth publish its accounts, project-by-project yet? Perhaps something the candidates for Chair could promise?
The English Party is now effectively making councillors pay a a levy from the allowances into a local fund to enhance campaigning and so on. This is not being extended to MPs, MEPs and Lords. Perhaps it should be with the caveats about hardship which also apply to councillors.
I would rather have Short money (and the Lords equivalent) than Special Advisers. We will still have some party activists paid for by the state, but under this fiction inflated by New Labour, if not invented by them.
When Andrew Lansley announced the abandonment of the Ara Dazi reforms of the Health Service in London, not a word of criticism was voiced from the Parliamentary Party. This is not necessarily because Lib Dem MPs think Lansley’s shameless act of populism is right, or out of deference to the Coalition, it may simply be that they are insufficiently au fait with a very complex issue. The Parliamentary Party desperately needs researchers who have the time to read the voluminous studies that show that polyclinics provide a better and safer service to patients and reduce inappropriate use of A+E. If we don’t find a way to equip our MPs with specialist advice fast, we are going to end up powerless to fight for our constituents’ best interests.
The problem is that the Libdems cannot use the Civil Service in the way that they used the party’s staff. Civil servants are bound, rightly, by rules about being impartial and by (wrongly) lots of restrictive, self-imposed bureacracy (there is a culture of knocking off at 5 no matter what’s on and of saying ‘ that;’s not my job, gov’). Party staff, by contrast, were able to be much more political and generally were committed to the cause, unlike civil servants. Therefore the party isn’t getting a like-for-like replacement of resources. The thing that makes it doubly sad is that we aren’t the Government, we are merely part of the Government, and so don’t actually have access to the full range of governemnt departments that a majority governing party would have. So there is a case i think, of allowing some short money to continue to be paid to the party in recognition of this.
Ultimately, i think that, in order to avoid relying on foreign billionaires and militant unions, there will need to be some public funding of poltiical parties according to share of the vote at the end of the day.
“Ultimately, i think that, in order to avoid relying on foreign billionaires and militant unions, there will need to be some public funding of poltiical parties according to share of the vote at the end of the day.”
Quite right Dominic, but while you get the Telegraph running headlines like “MPs can break expenses rules, watchdog decides” – http://bit.ly/al0E32 – over a story reporting that the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority has sensibly had another look at it’s own rules and revised the limits placed on all MPs when employing staff and renting office space in their constituencies, then that day will never come.
Senseco- exactly right, and agree with you on Darzi. Lansley’s ‘power to the GP’ stuff is really, really terrible and I hope that we can distance ourselves suitably.
@Steve No, LY doesn’t do that for a number of reasons. Mainly time pressure on the office and Exec. Also because a number of budget streams tend to fund each project, so can be a little tricky to divide them all so it’s clear.
We did/do submit accounts to the Electoral Commission though. And our accounts are produced in a format that was agreed with the party’s finance people.
Surely it isn’t only those Lib Dems in government who we should consider tithing but the SPADs. After all some of them now have well paid governemet jobs now while the people they used to line manage are out of work. I would have thought this would at least help cover the current funding gap. To be honest we really need the press and policy people to supply the wider party and camapigners with information on what is happening and how we should be selling the coalition on the ground.
http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/06/special-expediency/
Anyone fancy commenting on this? Or are you only bothered about consistency and principle when you’re in Opposition. Clegg needs to answer for this.
William: Clegg’s comments refer to a proposal for reforming the system, not a promise to unilaterally move to paying SpAds out of party funds when no other parties have done so. As the OP makes pretty obvious, the party isn’t in a great place as things stand, so it’s pretty odd to expect them to put themselves at further disadvantage by voluntarily doing this when the Tories, for instance, aren’t. If Clegg can change the system more broadly to bring this reform in alongside a bunch of other things, that would be a good thing. But I don’t see he’s being inconsistent at the moment.
William,
Andy’s right. If the SPADs are to go then it has to be unilateral – why should the libdems be the only ones not to benefit from advice and support when our opponents get spads, especially when our opponents are also funded by unions and dodgy millionaire businessmen? that would be a way to guarantee a smaller liberal voice in future and to hand power to the labservtaives for ever. The system needs to change – i suggest lobbying your mp to campaign for it.