One of the adverse effects of the awful General Election result has been a significant drop in Party income, as we are now of much less interest to potential donors and people who wish to exhibit and hold fringe meetings at Conference. That means that we have to look at radical measures to cut costs so that we can deliver the maximum political effect on our reduced income. One area we should look at very closely is the location of Party HQ and whether we need have staff in an expensive central London location. The easy answer would be to move to another, cheaper London base, but that in my view would be a mistake – we should be asking if most of our staff need to be in London at all or whether they could be based somewhere else, where rents and salaries are lower.
Without a detailed knowledge of who does what at HQ it is difficult to know how many people we would need to keep in London – the press team of course and anyone who needs daily personal contact with Tim and the MPs. But looking at the latest organisation chart it is difficult to see why the people who work on IT and digital, compliance, conference, Membership and Finance need to be in London.