Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidates
Here’s the list of the Liberal Democrat Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs) for the next general election. If you’d like to help them, a great way to start is by joining the party.
Liberal Democrat candidates by constituency
Jump to the constituency you want:
A-D / E-H / I-L / M-P / Q-T / U-Z
Liberal Democrat PPCs A-D
- Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake’s former constituency): Bobby Dean
- Cities of London and Westminster: Edward Lucas
Liberal Democrat PPCs E-H
- Guilford: Zoe Franklin
Liberal Democrat PPCs I-L
- None announced yet.
Liberal Democrat PPCs M-P
- None announced yet.
Liberal Democrat PPCs Q-T
- None announced yet.
Liberal Democrat PPCs U-Z
- Wimbledon: Paul Kohler
Related candidate information
After a list of current Liberal Democrat MPs? That’s here.
Interested in becoming a candidate yourself? Take a look at this inside story.
What is a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC)?
Before an election, candidates are often called Prospective Parliamentary Candidates (PPCs) rather than just simple candidates. Here’s why…Way back, the law around election expenses made it very advantageous to avoid officially declaring someone to be your candidate until a few weeks out from polling day. Doing so delayed the point at which campaigning costs had to count against the fixed constituency election expense limit. The later the limit started, the more campaigning you could get in beforehand and then the more campaigning per day you could do during the controlled period as the limit had to stretch over fewer days of campaigning.
As a result, all parties took to using the phrase “Prospective Parliamentary Candidate” or PPC to describe the people they had selected who were going to become their candidate but had been selected sufficiently far in advance that they didn’t want to be called candidates yet. There was then usually an official adoption meeting much closer to the election at which the PPC would be adopted from a field of one and transformed into an official candidate.
These days, there is much less benefit from going through these legal hoops. That’s partly because the variation in time period which your constituency expense limit has to cover depending on when you start calling yourself a candidate has been greatly reduced. It’s also because there is now so much that can be legally excluded from constituency expense limits.
The PPC phrase, however, hangs on both out of habit and because in some very close contests it can still bring some value. It also helps distinguish between someone who has been through the party’s approval process and so is eligible to apply to be a PPC (often called ‘approved candidates’) and someone who is actually a PPC.
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