23 January 2012 – 2:20 pm
So the Government have launched another consultation, this time about whether to introduce a register of lobbyists. There is currently no regulation in the UK around lobbying the Government and the proposed register would require an individual or organisation to be registered before their lobby will be considered by Government. Having spent 2 1/2 years on a [...]
18 January 2012 – 8:25 am
Yesterday I attended a workshop as part of Community Action on Health and Newcastle CVS’ research to find out how the VCS think the NHS reforms in Newcastle will affect them. The discussion started promising as the results from the GP research was shared; 26 out of the 31 respondents said they believed the VCS [...]
22 September 2011 – 11:15 am
I am spending the day prearing for the Public Services White Paper consultation event taking place tomorrow at the Cente for Life. There are around 70 people attending the event and they will all have a lot of information they will want to feed into the response that we will be submitting. At the beginning [...]
9 September 2011 – 4:22 pm
Whilst it might be a very quiet afternoon in the office; I know the VCS will be out there working hard to bring about change to benefit their local communities. To help I have been developing webpages with information and tools about where support is available to help you campaign to influence policy. From blogs, to [...]
Last week was such a busy week that my feet barely touched the ground and upon reflection I have to say the highlight of my week was a round table event to discuss ‘What Next for Policy Development in the North East’. We had two great speakers; Abigail Scott Paul from Jospeh Rowntree Foundation and [...]
I attended a meeting yesterday, which followed on from NEPACS’ conference in May. The purpose of the meeting was for prison officers, VCS organisations and national organisations to discuss next steps. It was fantastic to hear that because of the funding received from the Policy and Representation Partnership that so much partnership working has come about [...]
After a very relaxing and extended Easter Break I have been ploughing through my emails and been catching up with people. To my delight I have been speaking to many organisations about ideas for the Policy and Representation Partnership Policy work for year 3. The closing date is looming (13th May) but that does still give you [...]
I have been lucky enough to spend two days with the Parliamentary Outreach team being trained on how to deliver workshops about how parliament works, the roles of MP’s, how to bills progress though Parliament and so much more. Over the next few weeks I will be digesting what I have learned and will be [...]
We held another great Policy forum yesterday except this one was different to our usual quarterly policy forum events. This event was all about Dissent: we heard from 4 great speakers, who all gave hints and tips on how to influence policy. The event sparked very interesting discussions and debates from how to use social media tools, [...]
Each year the Policy and Representation Partnership chooses six policy topics to be examined through research, gathering the sector’s views and producing a policy paper which is shared with statutory policy-makers. Over the past few weeks the Partnership asked the sector to rank the priorities which we should be focusing on in our third and [...]