The NEC had determined a limit of 3,000 delegates for the Conference. In line with the Constitution, which stipulates that 90% of voting delegates should come from branches, 2 700 were set aside for branch delegates. It was not however possible to adhere strictly to proportional representation as statistics provided by the regional offices could not all be relied upon to be accurate. A political solution to this problem was therefore arrived at by the NEC, with the agreement of the regions, which allocated total delegations to regions. Distribution to the branches was left to the discretion of the RECs.

Delegates were categorised into Participating Delegates, which were further categorised into Voting and Non-voting; Observers, and Others.