To:
Mike Dixon, Chief Executive Officer, Liberal Democrats
David Crowther, Returning Officer
Sir Ed Davey, Leader of the Liberal Democrats
Subject: Notice of Objection to the Party’s Interpretation of Constitutional Quotas in Relation to the Equality Act
At 13:00 on the 27th of October 2025, an official statement concerning the reconciliation of the Party’s constitutional rules on federal body selection quotas with the Equality Act 2010, as interpreted in light of the April 2025 UK Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, was published on the Party website.
We, the undersigned, write to formally register our objection to the decision taken by the CEO and Returning Officer.
We believe that the legal advice underpinning this decision is inconsistent with both the letter and the spirit of GDPR, of the Liberal Democrats’ Constitution, and stands in direct contradiction to the clear will of Conference as expressed repeatedly, most recently in September.
Paragraph 5 of the Election Regulations states: "The Returning Officer shall ensure that comprehensive written guides and procedures for the use of the Returning Officer team, candidates and voters, are in place for each election at least one month before the opening of nominations in an election. These shall not, thereafter, be amended without good cause."
This decision requires the party to breach the GDPR rights and Human Rights Act 1998 rights of its trans and non-binary members. As the legal situation is unclear and the EHRC guidance this interpretation relies on has been withdrawn, we believe the Party would be justified in not changing the rules mid-election, and that the ‘good cause’ clause is not met.
A full explanation of our position is set out in the attached appendices.
We will continue to uphold the Liberal values of equality, consent, and self-determination that our Constitution enshrines. We urge the Party to do the same by rescinding this decision and restoring trust among its members.
Signed in unity,
The undersigned members of the Liberal Democrats
Appendix A — Narrative
At the 2025 Autumn Conference, a constitutional amendment (referred to in the Conference Agenda as Item F4) was submitted seeking to amend the gender-quota provisions of the Party Constitution to make them exclusive of non-binary identities and to apply quotas explicitly on the basis of assigned sex at birth. The proposers argued that this change was necessary to bring the Constitution into compliance with the Equality Act.
Conference disagreed. As the sovereign decision-making body of the Party, Conference overwhelmingly voted to move to next business, thereby rejecting the amendment. The trans and non-binary membership of the Party collectively breathed a sigh of relief.
Shortly after the close of Conference, the Executive of the LGBT+ Liberal Democrats was approached by the Chief Executive Officer and the Returning Officer. They informed the Executive that the group styling itself Liberal Voice for Women—authors of the proposed amendment—intended to compel the Federal Party’s compliance by threatening legal action. We were told in clear terms that the Party could not afford to defend such a case in court.
The CEO and RO sought the Executive’s opinion. This advice, communicated through the Executive’s Chairperson, Charley Hasted, recommended that the Returning Officer exercise their extraordinary powers to suspend the diversity-quota rules in their entirety. This recommendation was made on the basis that, in our view, the current legal situation makes it impossible to implement the quotas in a manner consistent with both the Party’s aims and objectives on equality and diversity and the requirements of law. Our advice further noted that there is no legal obligation to maintain diversity quotas, and that, as a non-governmental private members’ organisation, the Liberal Democrats are not bound by quota provisions designed for public-sector decision-making bodies.
From that point on, the decision was out of our hands.
The LGBT+ LibDems executive found out about this ruling at the same time as the rest of the Party and indeed the wider public, and we are accordingly outraged. The full reasoning and our next steps are outlined in Appendix B.
Appendix B — Reasoning
Appendix B provides the Executive’s detailed reasoning in support of the objection outlined above. It sets out the constitutional, legal, and procedural bases for our position, drawing on the Party’s own governing documents, relevant UK legislation, and established case law. The arguments presented here demonstrate that the decision taken by the Returning Officer and Chief Executive Officer is inconsistent with the Party’s Constitution, contrary to Conference’s expressed will, and potentially unlawful under both domestic and international legal frameworks.
The Executive believes that this decision is flawed on a fundamental level and we believe it will have far reaching consequences.
The EHRC have had to amend their "interim update" a number of times as it became apparent that the update was not compliant with other aspects of the law, and have now withdrawn their update entirely. Advice from the EHRC cannot be considered to be reliable in this manner.
The Party has taken a stance here which is explicitly trans-exclusionary. This is a clear contradiction of the views expressed by the Party at multiple successive conferences, shown by the multiple times when constitutional amendments identical to Item F4 have been rejected, as well as the Policy Paper Item F9 at Spring Conference 2025. The opinion of Conference has been unchanging and it is watertight. Constitutionally, Conference is enshrined as the sovereign decisionmaking body of the Party and this decision goes against what has been decided there. The values enshrined by conference are overwhelmingly trans-inclusive. Furthermore, conversations with the individuals who drafted the original entry in the Constitution have affirmed that their explicit intent behind the quota was for it to be trans-inclusive. Therefore, the decision of the RO and CEO to place their decisionmaking in a position superior to that of Conference is unconstitutional, not to mention illiberal and undemocratic.
A further major reason for this being flawed is that the decision of the Party suggests that ASAB will be extrapolated from one’s given gender and whether the individual has declared that their stated gender is different from their ASAB. This is a profound breach of privacy and is potentially legally irresponsible as a General Data Protection Regulations breach, as it is against the law to hold data on a person without their explicit written consent, which can be withdrawn at any time for any particular reason, including none. We believe that the inference of ASAB or determining congruence of gender with ASAB may amount to processing of special category data (or at least a high-risk inference) requiring explicit consent or other lawful basis. In our view no other lawful basis is demonstrably applicable. It also follows that holding or using ASAB data without consent may amount to a violation of the Party’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, specifically Goodwin vs UK 2002 as well as the Party’s legal obligations under the Gender Recognition Act 2004.
Provision for women-only shortlists was provided in the Sex Discrimination (Election Candidates) Act 2002. As such it will have been amended by the Gender Recognition Act 2004, meaning that trans women would have been legally eligible to be on all-women shortlists from the 2005 general election. While the Equality Act 2010 uses different language, the law remained the same. The Supreme Court ruling explicitly says that it will not remove existing rights from trans people. The ability for trans women to be on all-women shortlists is an existing right, and therefore should still be extant. What the Supreme Court may have done is recreate the incompatibility between UK law and the European Convention on Human Rights which was seemingly resolved by the Gender Recognition Act 2004. If the interpretation the party seems to have been given is correct, then that incompatibility has been resurrected. In such cases, the European Convention as implemented by the Human Rights Act 1998 always wins out.
From a legal and case-law perspective, the timing of this decision is highly irregular. Issuing it now—after the formal election process has commenced under Party rules, but before voting has begun—is tantamount to changing the rules of the election while it is underway. A reinterpretation of the rules is, in effect, a rule change: a new regime imposed midway through a process that had already been governed by a previously established constitutional and timetable framework.
In Evangelou & Ors v McNicol [2016] EWCA Civ 817, the Court of Appeal held that internal party elections must be conducted “in a fair, open and transparent manner, in accordance with the constitutional rules of the Party” (per Beatson LJ). Just as the court ruled that a retrospectively applied membership freeze date was ultra vires the Labour Party’s rule book, so too, in our view, does this decision unlawfully alter the ground rules once the election process has begun. Moreover, under the principle established in Morgan v Simpson [1975] QB 151, if the integrity of an election is compromised by a breach of its governing rules, the result may be rendered void. It is deeply concerning that, despite seeking the advice of King’s Counsel, such a fundamental flaw in legal logic can be identified through even a cursory review of publicly available case law.
Despite repeated appeals from LGBTQ+ members, the Party’s recent record on trans-inclusive policy—both in Parliament and internally—is profoundly disappointing. Only last week, the Parliamentary Party abstained on an amendment to the Sentencing Bill that would have required police to record all trans people accused (not merely convicted) of a crime by their sex at birth, rather than by their legal sex or gender identity, alongside extensive additional data. There was no defensible reason to abstain on such an amendment.
The LGBT+ Liberal Democrats therefore contend that we have reached the limits of quiet diplomacy. Many of us—particularly our trans members—now find our position within the Party increasingly untenable. We are grateful to you for reading to the end of these appendices, and we ask that, should you be elected to your respective Federal Body, you use every power available to restore the liberal and inclusive values that our Constitution promises, but which this decision gravely undermines.
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