Conference will debate proposals which will improve the way we involve members in policy making and engage with our local communities.

Gordon Brown launched a consultation on the proposals the day he was elected leader of the Labour Party. Since then local parties, MPs and activists have fed in their views.

Conference delegates will get the chance to have their say and vote on the rule changes necessary to make these proposals a reality.

Launching these proposals, Gordon Brown said: “Just as our policies must change to meet new challenges, so too our party must change.  

“All of us share a responsibility to ensure that in the coming years the whole programme of our party is founded on listening to the aspirations of our whole country.

It means our membership reaching out to every local community; and it means proper consultation by the leadership with every member.”

Under these proposals the National Policy Forum will be strengthened and tasked with looking in detail at the issues conference agrees are the party’s priorities. And once a parliament every member will have their say in a one member one vote ballot on the party programme.

Ed Miliband, Minister for the Cabinet Office - and the minister tasked by Gordon Brown to draw
together our next manifesto, will kick off the debate setting out three challenges we have to answer as a party.

The need to give every member of this party the chance to shape what we do; to reach out beyond our party to the wider community we represent, and to ensure that whatever the demands of government, we remain idealists and never forget why we joined this party.

Ed is expected to say, “We have faced these challenges before and changed and now we need to change again.

“So we will make it easier for every local party to hold its own discussions on policy, their ideas will be part of the ongoing work of the policy commissions and they will be kept informed as policy develops.

“We need to better connect members to conference and conference to the policy forum.
 
“These reforms would mean that when conference votes for an issue to be a priority, the policy forum will then go to work on it.

“The point of these reforms is to make us a party that is fit to change our country through dialogue, debate and decision involving every member.”