Health officials' worries led to livestream cancellation
CONCERNS raised by Health staff were a trigger for Scrutiny calling off a public hearing this week.
A hearing with Health & Social Care committee members and senior staff went ahead on 1 March and was livestreamed on YouTube.
The fall-out from officials’ concerns led to Scrutiny calling off its public hearing with the Education committee earlier this week, for fear of breaching data protection laws.
HSC president Al Brouard yesterday backed his officials’ right to raise concerns, but insisted that would not prevent his committee from appearing at future Scrutiny hearings.
‘The issue of livestreaming was brought up prior to the HSC Scrutiny hearing, and some concerns were discussed among the team,’ said Deputy Brouard.
‘It is perfectly appropriate for people to be able to raise concerns about being filmed and to discuss them in an open and transparent way.
‘The team took part in the knowledge of being filmed on 1 March and the committee and staff will be pleased to continue to take part in further Scrutiny reviews.’
Scrutiny president Yvonne Burford cancelled Wednesday’s hearing with ESC less than 24 hours before it was due to start after rejecting States officials’ advice either to stop streaming hearings on YouTube and restrict broadcasts to a Guernsey audience, or to put a video of the hearing on the States website and require viewers to log in to watch it.
Deputy Burford hopes to resume livestreamed public hearings ‘within weeks’.
The authority yesterday said there were no legal reasons why Scrutiny should be prevented from holding public hearings or livestreaming them online.
And Deputy Burford’s committee received the public backing of Policy & Resources president Peter Ferbrache and the presidents and vice-presidents of all but one of the States’ six principal committees.
Deputy Ferbrache, Neil Inder, Peter Roffey and Lindsay de Sausmarez said they had never raised concerns about the livestreaming of Scrutiny hearings, were unaware of concerns raised by their officials, and would be happy to take part in future livestreamed sessions.
ESC vice-president Sam Haskins said that his committee understood why Scrutiny called off Wednesday’s hearing but wished it could have gone ahead.
‘Neither ESC or its officials raised concerns with Scrutiny about the hearing,’ said Deputy Haskins.
‘While supportive of Scrutiny’s decision that it felt the hearing needed to be postponed, ESC and its officials were also disappointed as considerable efforts had been made to prepare for the hearing.’
Deputy Haskins and his president, Deputy Andrea Dudley-Owen, were due to appear at the public hearing, supported by six senior officials, including director of education Nick Hynes and head of education operations Sophie Roughsedge.
Deputy de Sausmarez said it was important that live-streaming made Scrutiny hearings more accessible to a wider range of people.
‘I can’t really see the difference between Scrutiny hearings being open to the public and recorded on Hansard, and Scrutiny hearings being open to the public, recorded on Hansard and being made available via livestream and playback,’ she said.
Home Affairs president Rob Prow was unable to reply in time for publication.
