All-Party Parliamentary Groups (APPG) may be informal but they provide a great service in the UK’s democracy. In good hands, they can foster better relations with other countries or they can keep a weather eye on an authoritarian regime. They can bring into sharp focus a policy issue that might otherwise have been forgotten.
In that vein, I set up the APPG on acquired brain injury, which produced an important report with a list of recommendations following a series of roundtables with patients, families and practitioners. Just before Christmas, that bore fruit in the shape of a government commitment to launching a new national strategy on acquired brain injury, which will be drawn up by a programme board jointly chaired by Gillian Keegan, the minister for care and mental health, and me. So, an APPG can make a big difference. And the vast majority are run simply and cheaply on the back of the enthusiasm of a few MPs and peers, without any financial requirement at all.
APPGs are also an important way of baking cross-party working into the parliamentary system. No MP can launch their own APPG with the support of their party mates alone – they need genuine cross-party support. Voters regularly tell us that the more cross-party working there is in Parliament, the better.
