My good - and bad - meetings at party conference

Last year my diary largely consisted of meetings with organisations keen to introduce themselves to new MPs. In Liverpool my week was packed with speaking engagements, fringes and receptions.
Despite this I still found time for a few meetings with fantastic organisations such as Whizz-Kidz, Tearfund and Macmillan Cancer Support. It’s always great to catch up with charities and get an update on the work they are doing in my constituency.
One of my favourite moments this year was attending the ‘Scouts Speak Up’ event. This is where young people have the opportunity to meet their MPs and talk about what really matters to them. I spoke to a group of scouts from Liverpool who wanted to know the best way to get politicians to attend their events and gave them my top tips – hopefully they found them useful.
Unfortunately, not everything I did was worthwhile. With conference time at a premium I’m still unhappy with the housing association who secured a meeting on the premise that their activity was super-relevant to my constituency (not true). Two minutes into our discussion, and it was clear to me that I was just a tick-box exercise as they rattled through their list of points (none of which I now remember) – not good.
This time last year, in a post-conference analysis for Public Affairs News, I captured a number of ‘lessons learnt’, which I planned to stick to this year. I have to confess I wasn’t able to keep to most of them. One of them was that I wouldn’t agree to any breakfast events. But, as a member of the (small) shadow DECC team with many organisations keen to secure our participation at early-morning discussions, I just couldn’t resist.  
The reality is that conference doesn’t provide enough breakfast, lunchtime and evening slots for all the fringes I’d like attend. And there will always be organisations for whom the September gathering is the only location where they are prepared to meet. So I’m not going to make any promises for Manchester next year. I know I’m unlikely to keep them.

7th October 2011 by Luciana Berger MP