What have we learnt from the open primary?

The Macclesfield Open Primary on paper was a step in the right direction. We all want more control over who represents us - and allowing people to chose candidates for one particular party is a good way to do this.

However, I wouldn't say it was a resounding success. Assuming that we put aside the rather irregular methods used in the shortlisting process, there was still a few problems with the primary itself.

The communication regarding the whole process should have been much better. There was confusion as to who could register and attend, and who could submit questions. Confusion was inevitable, but none of the communications I saw managed to iron out the queries - and printing the wrong phone number on the first batch of leaflets was just embarrassing.

But for me the major failure was about time. We want to encourage a wide range of people to get involved. Some of these don't have time to spare, some will have families and for some it will be medically not possible to sit in a school hall for five hours. This is where we have really failed with the primary concept. Many people couldn't attend for these reasons, and worse still some attended by weren't allowed to vote because they hadn't seen all the speakers.

Although several hundred people registered, I'm told that less than a couple of hundred actually attended. In order for us to consider primaries a success, the numbers need to be in the thousands, not the hundreds.

The postal ballot is the way to go - but we need to curb the cost. Perhaps we could reduce this by doing it online, and by having papers available on request.

In the run up to the voting deadline we could hold a series of hustings to allow candidates to get their views across. One in a school hall, one in a shopping centre, one in a bar on a Saturday night. Mix it up a bit and try and make sure different formats to suit different types of candidates.

Without this the fad won't last. It just won't be possible to tell the media that the candidate was "selected by the people" when we have a process that so blatantly restricts who can attend.