Labour Listens was a consultative exercise by the British Labour Party. It was appointed after Labour's third successive defeat in 1987 to discover why Labour was unpopular and to help the party formulate policies more in tune with public opinion. The Labour leader Neil Kinnock called it "the biggest consultation exercise with the British public any political party has ever undertaken". In September 1987, the chairman of Labour's home policy committee, Tom Sawyer, wrote in The Times: