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This was a rather unusual meeting, in that it was dominated by one very large agenda item, discussing the idea of a registered supporters scheme. In fact, for the first time, we applied our 9pm meeting guillotine and postponed some other discussions to our July meeting.

We started in the normal way with staff reports. The committee was enormously impressed by the retention rates the Membership team have achieved this quarter, currently standing at 94.5%. That’s a fantastic achievement, and a credit to the team’s hard work. The Membership team have also started tracking Exit data – reasons why people have decided to leave. This is a really helpful innovation. It will be shared with State Parties but not beyond that for now, as it is obviously quite sensitive data. The team agreed to consider whether there was a way to share the data with local parties, but we need to find a reliable, secure system to do that and this is a brand new metric we are monitoring. I’ll let you know if that starts to be filed somewhere that local parties can view it. 

We did also note the changes to the Membership Incentive scheme – essentially this model gives a percentage of each member’s joining subscription back to the local party they live in. The system is being changed to reward renewal as well as recruitment, with a portion of subscription fees being paid to local parties in the second and third year of a person’s membership.

The Training team are doing great work too. The Autumn Conference training schedule is in the last stages of being finalised. They have slightly changed the process for allocating training sessions this year. All providers were asked to bid for courses, and given themes that the training should focus upon. Then everyone’s ideas were collated and where more than one provider wanted to run a course, they were asked to join forces, collaborate and present a joint course. We are also welcoming some new providers, to expand the training offer that members can enjoy at conference. It’s exciting to see this coming together so well and we will be monitoring feedback closely after conference to see if participants enjoy these co-presented sessions.

The Diversity and Candidates team are currently without a “Head”, as the recruitment of a replacement for Arfan Bhatti is not yet concluded. However they still submitted a report, and we were delighted to hear of some very pro-active ideas for measures that could improve diversity among our approved candidates. We look forward to more concrete suggestions once the team leader is in place.

Then we came to the largest agenda item, the idea of a registered supporters scheme.

The Federal People Development Committee met on 20^th March for our Spring meeting.

We started with the usual staff reports from the Heads of Training, Diversity and Membership. We were delighted to welcome Greg Foster to the meeting in his new role of Head of Membership and Engagement. Despite only starting that week he had a full and fascinating report for us about the new innovations the Department is trialling with member communications, like the recent survey and chatbot pilots.

We congratulated Greg, and Rachel Palma-Randle as Director, for the membership retention rate this quarter reaching 93%. That’s down to a lot of hard work across the team, and deserves applause.

The committee was also very pleased to see the report from Dan Purchese as Head of Training, outlining the anticipated training provision over the next 18 months. It was particularly good to see that he is planning to reinvigorate the network of volunteer trainers, working in close co-ordination with Sarah Green and the Training Subcommittee. We are all very hopeful that this renewal of the partnership between staff and volunteers in the training field will bring a lot more training into life.

Arfan Bhatti as Head of Diversity in HQ reported on the drop in the number of women applying for PPC approval compared to 2017, and agreed that he would look into this more to see if trends can be identified and remedies proposed. He also reported on the proposal of creating candidate diversity targets for regions, that feeds into some of the other diversity work being developed in the Party.