Moving Forward in the West Midlands

9.05.00pm GMT Sun 5th Feb 2006

Moving Forward in the West Midlands

Earlier today we held the first Moving Forward Day in the West Midlands. The Moving Forward project is designed to help build Parliamentary seats so that they can win at some point in the future, obviously there are a number of seats in the West Midlands we hope to win in 2008/9 but this project is really concerned about building seats to win after that - which with some seats could be a twenty-year project.

It was well attended and I certainly hope that all the participating seats got something out of, apart from the promise of money to help with FOCUS in the short term. Certainly the Moving Forward Seats will benefit from extra training and support, limited funding and being including on bulk-buy deals.

We had a fairly diverse set of seats with about half fighting Labour and half fighting the Conservatives which will make for some interesting logistics when organising training for these seats - I suspect we will have quite a lot of sessions where we split into two groups.

After the session we set the next dates and and I will be emailing the Moving Forward Seats on Monday with that, information about the FOCUS money and details of the Conference training for Moving Forward Seats.

After the meeting six of us got stuck in the lift for an hour which provided a rather annoying end to the day!