You want to get things going
in your constituency.
Here's how.

You've joined Restore Britain. You believe in what the movement stands for. But when you look at your own constituency — your own patch — there's nothing there. No branch, no committee, no meetings. Just you, and the feeling that someone should do something.

This guide is for that someone. It walks through exactly what setting up a local constituency branch involves — the real steps, the real difficulties, and how to get past them.

It starts with one person

The national website has policies, a join page, maybe some social media. But none of that translates to organised activity where you live. Nobody is canvassing your wards. Nobody is planning a campaign for local issues. Nobody has even mapped out which council areas your constituency covers.

The good news: you only need two more people to change this.

Find your founding three

You need someone willing to chair meetings (the Convener — probably you, since you're reading this), someone to handle admin (the Secretary), and one more. They don't need experience. They need to be willing to show up.

Try the national member directory. Try local social media. Talk to the person who's always arguing about politics at the pub. You'll be surprised who says yes.

Know your patch

Before you can organise a constituency, you need to understand what it actually contains. How many wards? Which councils? Does it cross local authority boundaries?

This matters because council boundaries affect everything — which councillors to liaise with, how planning applications work, where school catchment areas fall. If your constituency spans two or three councils, you need working relationships with all of them.

The tools problem

Now you have three people and you know your patch. Time to actually work together. You need file storage, video calls, a group chat, a shared calendar, and task tracking. Each ward needs its own folder. Each officer needs the right permissions.

You can cobble this together with WhatsApp, Google Drive, and Zoom. Most groups do. But then your membership data lives on Google's servers, your conversations are on Meta's platform, and when someone leaves the committee they take half the institutional knowledge with them in their personal accounts.

Growing the structure

With tools sorted, your branch starts to grow. The trick is letting the structure grow with it — don't build for fifty people when you have five.

At each stage, new roles appear because you need them, not because an org chart says so. Nobody appoints a Policy Officer when there are four members. But when you hit fifteen people and someone starts researching local planning issues, you've found your Policy Officer.

The working groups

Most of the actual work happens in five groups that people self-select into:

Don't start all five at once. Most branches begin with Campaigns and add the rest as people appear who want to lead them.

Your public face

At some point — ideally before your AGM — you need a public website. Somewhere that people in your wards can find you, see what you stand for, and learn how to get involved.

What if someone had already done the hard parts?

We went through every chapter of this story ourselves, in Orkney & Shetland — one of the most geographically challenging constituencies in the UK. Two island councils, thirteen wards, officers on different islands, eighty kilometres of open sea between them.

It took weeks. It was mostly technical. The actual organising — the human part — was the easy bit once the infrastructure was in place.

So we automated it. All of it.

The website is yours immediately

Your constituency gets a public site at your-constituency.restorebritain.space built with modern open-source tools — Astro and Svelte — that are fast, accessible, and pleasant to work with. You can edit content through a visual CMS in your browser. No coding needed.

Use it for as long as you like. If you eventually want to build your own site on your own domain, you'll have a working example in front of you and a structure other constituencies are using too. There's no lock-in.

The internal platform is a head start

The Nextcloud collaboration platform comes with your ward folders, officer accounts, working group spaces, calendars, and task boards already configured. You don't have to fill it with data — use it as a ready-made structure to organise around.

It's free. There's no catch.

We provide this because we know how hard the technical parts are. They require knowledge from multiple domains, and it takes real effort even if you have all those skills in one place. Most people don't. We did it once properly so that every constituency can benefit. All the tools are open source. Your data stays on self-hosted servers — no Big Tech, no third parties.

Common questions

Get started

If any of this is useful and you'd like help setting up your constituency, get in touch. We're members like you who built some tools and want to share them.

restorebritain.org.uk