Yesterday was the deadline for making submissions to the Party Reform Commission set up by Nick, in conjunction with the party’s President and Chief Executive (Simon Hughes and Chris Rennard).

The team actually carrying out the review are Chris Bones (whom I don’t really know but has a very impressive management background, as well as a long party history), Duncan Greenland - a councillor and as Chair of the party’s Federal Finance and Administration Committee probably has a strong claim to be the most powerful person in the party that you’ve never heard of; Kate Parminter, who I had the pleasure to work with in the Meeting the Challenge group a couple of years ago, and has a long track record of successfully transforming party operations in the past, and Paul Burstow MP, the Chief Whip in the House of Commons.

I think having the review itself is a very good idea and hope it does what it has set out to, to reform the way the party does things, to help us achieve the aim that the new Leader set out, to achieve 150+ MPs over the next two General Elections.

There is some doubt over exactly what its remit covers and how broad it is - and I may say that a few conversations that I have had with people I would expect to know about this, have not necessarily helped to clarify this for me (rather the opposite, in some cases”¦). The review group itself has put various pieces of information, including their formal terms of reference, here - but these are perhaps necessarily not entirely specific.

For what it’s worth my own best take on what it is really intended to do is to look at the party’s operations, particularly in Cowley St and other party staff who are not employed there, rather than a review of formal party structures as such. That’s not to say that there may not be some knock-on impacts on our beloved Conference and committee structures, but I don’t think this will be where the primary focus is - certainly I hope they won’t be proposing much in the way of constitutional change as I think this would be a very unhelpful distraction for the next 6 months or a year (depending on whether they get any constitutional amendments finalised in time for the May deadline for autumn Conference!). I have generously said as much in my own submission to them.

The deadline yesterday means that various submissions have been being frantically finalised over the last few days. I know several local and regional parties, and individuals have put in answers to the specific questions they have asked - and presumably they have also had a large number of individual submissions from people I don’t know personally! The two senior federal committees that I’m part of - the Federal Policy Committee (FPC) and Federal Conference Committee (FCC) have each put in their own submissions, and another senior party member has shown me his own substantial submission to them, as well as my own which covers a range of proposals for how the party could do things better to try and achieve 150 MPs - some of them issues which I have talked through and gathered comments on on this blog, and others which I have not.

So now I assume that Kate, Duncan, Chris and Paul have a very large amount of reading to do over this weekend and the next few weeks! We wait to see what they come up with - they have promised to hold several consultation meetings around the country, including at spring conference, and some conversations with submitters that they think are particularly worth talking to. They’ve said they’ll produce their final report by May - and I hope they’ve had some good recommendations to take forward, for the future success of the party!