Why MLAs are sitting just one day a week – but not out of laziness

Traditionally, the full Assembly has sat for what are known as plenary sessions in the chamber on Monday and Tuesday each week, with the remainder of the week taken up with committee hearings and constituency business.

However, the unprecedented three-year absence of either devolved government or devolution has created multiple backlogs, one of which is behind the decision to hold as few full sittings of the Assembly as possible for the immediate future.

Major new laws are passed by the full Assembly as primary legislation and involve protracted debate and scrutiny.

However, often those laws then give departments the power to make secondary legislation – generally involving less controversial areas such as technical details of how the law will operate.

That legislation receives less scrutiny than primary legislation, but is still meant to be seen and approved by MLAs either before becoming law or immediately after that has happened.

If those laws are passed using what is known as the ‘negative procedure’, they automatically become law at the point when they are created and can only be overturned if the Assembly votes to block them within 10 sitting days.

There have now been five sittings of the Assembly since 2017, leaving just another five sitting days in which to complete scrutiny of all the secondary legislation made over the last three years.

That backlog now stands at more than 600 pieces of secondary legislation, much of it exceptionally technical. Therefore, MLAs have agreed to hold just one sitting a week to allow committees as much time as possible in the circumstances in which to provide at least some scrutiny of the laws which civil servants have been making without any democratic oversight since 2017.

Some of the regulations cannot be scrutinised in any meaningful way because the provisions to which they relate have already passed.

For example, The Dundrod Circuit (Admission Charges) Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2019 increased the maximum cost of a ticket to last year’s motorcycle race to £30 while among the other legislation is road abandonment orders for roads which have already been built over.

The legislation spans everything from zoo technical standards and the marketing of bananas to judicial pensions and social security payments.