While there were clearly multiple factors in this (not least the recession, Gordon Brown’s personal popularity and a ‘time for a change’ mood) there is clearly a link between the popularity of a party’s policies and its electoral fortunes.

There was nothing much wrong with the last manifesto but nothing much right with it either. I can’t remember, just a year later, a single exciting or inspiring pledge or policy.

Our current policymaking system, ‘Partnership in Power’, looks quite good on paper: lots of forums, lots of discussion, an emphasis on consensus.

But it fails to deliver on multiple levels. It hasn’t produced election-winning policies. And it hasn’t convinced members that they have a meaningful input into policymaking.

The whole system is opaque and Byzantine in its workings.

CLPs or individuals can spend a long time discussing and drafting a submission. It then just disappears into 39 Victoria Street, and what emerges is usually the office draft first thought of by a frontbencher’s advisers. There’s no mechanism for tracking where submissions have gone or why they were accepted or rejected.

We need to be frank with members that not everything they come up with will end up being policy. Some of it will, unfortunately, be a load of old cobblers. Lots of it will fail the most important test: will more people vote Labour because of this policy? We can’t expect frontbenchers to front up ideas they don’t agree with.

But we should at least do members and affiliates the courtesy of properly responding, saying who considered their idea, and why it has been rejected if it has. We can manage to do this when writing the local manifesto for council elections in Hackney, with no staff support at all, so while I understand it requires resources, I don’t accept it’s beyond Labour’s means to properly log and respond to all submissions.

Having watched their submissions disappear into the ether, most CLPs have understandably switched off from generating policy ideas. The flurry of branch, CLP and regional policy forum-style discussions that happened in the early days of PiP has largely ground to a halt. So new members, who might anticipate that being in the Labour party would involve an input into the policies we would try to win re-election on and then use to try to change the country, find there is usually no forum for them to do so. We don’t even know if their ideas would be useful or not because we’re not giving them the opportunity to express them.

At the top level, the policymaking structures seem to exist for the sake of it, or at best as a networking opportunity for ‘super activists’. I’m sure the National Policy Forum has held some enlightened discussions, but how many of their conclusions made it into the manifesto? There are layers within layers, with people thinking they have reached the inner sanctum by getting on the NPF, only to discover you need to be elected from that onto a Policy Commission. There’s a Joint Policy Committee, which I gather is important in the process, but fewer than one member in a 100 would know it existed.

I definitely don’t want to turn the clock back to the ‘resolutionary’ socialism of the pre PiP era. It was more transparent what happened to resolutions as they went up through the different layers of the party structure, but ultimately it was a process based on a binary confrontation – you were either for or against the NEC’s recommended response to a resolution. That was not conducive to thoughtful consensus-building. It was also a closed system with no input from outside the party, assuming activists, despite our lack of similarity to the wider electorate, had a monopoly of wisdom. And the idea that it was less controlled than the current system is nonsense – the party machine controls the process more, not less, if they think the manifesto is actually being written during the course of compositing and head-to-head rows at annual conference.

The best concept I have seen floated for policymaking comes from London NPF member Joanne Milligan. She has suggested that the NPF’s Policy Commissions should take on a scrutiny role, working in the same way as council scrutiny commissions and parliamentary select committees. They would run inquiries into different areas of policy, taking written and oral submissions of evidence from within the party and from outside experts (eg academics, NGOs, businesses). The policy recommendations they came up with would thus be evidence-based and hence likely to be of higher quality than policy based purely on people’s starting-point prejudices.

Peter Hain’s review of PiP seems genuinely open to ideas about how to do this better. I would urge CLPs and members to respond to it.

Personally I hope to see it produce a new policymaking process which:

• Is evidence-based
• Is transparent
• Provides pathways for ordinary members to feed in ideas and see what has happened to them
• Reminds members to apply the ‘will voters (particularly those in a marginal seats) like this or hate this’ test and road tests ideas with focus groups and polling
• Provides opportunities for people and organisations outside the party with evidence-based policy ideas or responses to our ideas, or just information that will help inform our policymaking, to submit
• Allows the frontbench to reject ideas that are not vote-winners but requires them to explain why they have rejected them

Luke Akehurst is speaking on this subject in Leicester on 17 February 2011. Please see all details here and do come along.