Regular readers of our different communications will know that here at APIL we utilise all sorts of political and parliamentary ‘tools’ to gather support for our campaigns. For this year’s Injury Awareness Week, the tool we used was a parliamentary drop-in event.

It’s the first time we’ve tried this approach for Injury Awareness Week, and I’m grateful to Douglas McAllister, the Labour MP for West Dunbartonshire, who hosted the event for us.

If you had an issue you wanted to highlight, and you wanted to gather political support, a drop-in event is a great way of making your campaign and its messages available to MPs, as long as you can find an MP who is willing to sponsor a room for you on the parliamentary estate. All you need once you’ve secured a parliamentary supporter is a simple, but eye-catching message. It also helps to have a photo opportunity, where MPs can hold a prop to show their support for your campaign. I don’t mean an extravagant prop. In our case, we handed MPs a cardboard sign which had the messages ‘I’m backing #IAWeek2025’ and ‘making injured people matter’. I’m pleased to say that none of the MPs who came to the event turned down the opportunity to show their support with a photo.

I’m not going to pretend these events don’t come with risks. There’s always the risk that MPs won’t turn up. Recent research from Westminster Public Affairs found that some MPs are invited to around 1,200 events each year in Parliament, but most MPs will attend only less than five events each week (remember that Parliament doesn’t sit every week of the year). So, you need to make your event appealing.

Thankfully MPs did turn up to our event, and we were able to talk to them about why injured people matter, and why injured victims of negligence should be at the heart of policymaking. It’s a vital message, because we know from experience that injured people can be an easy target for some politicians. Insurance premiums are too high? Blame injured people and restrict access to justice (though of course, restricting access to justice and limiting compensation doesn’t actually bring down the cost of car insurance, but that’s a whole different blog). Hopefully our event will make MPs think carefully if they’re ever presented with legislation which proposes a restriction of injured people’s legal rights.  

But our work with MPs, and getting them to understand why injured people matter, does not end with Injury Awareness Week. It’s part of all our campaigns and all our discussions with MPs. It’s one of the messages I’ll be taking with me when I head back to the political party conferences in October (another key political tool) and I’m already looking forward to reporting back from those events in a future blog.