Mary Lowe, who spent nearly 27 years in the States from 1994, said that she only missed three meetings during her entire tenure, and questioned the commitment of some current deputies.
Just five out of 38 deputies have attended 100% of full meetings of their committees in the last 12 months. Deputy Montague was the only committee president to attend all of his committee’s meetings for the full duration.
‘For actual committee work, this is quite shocking. This is only the principal committees and there’s only one president who attended all of the meetings – not all the presidents are even attending,’ she said.
‘There are members on there that have no other work and they haven’t been attending either, or they’ve only attended part of a meeting.’
Of the three meetings Mrs Lowe missed during her time as a politician, one was for illness, for one she was fog-bound, and the third was due to having a sick relative in hospital.
‘When I was president of a committee, I would speak to the members beforehand. If they couldn’t attend and missed three meetings, unless it was for illness, I would be asking them to step down,’ she said.
‘It’s all very well promoting themselves with all the work they’ve got on but it’s misleading the public when someone else could be contributing and adding to the work of that committee.’
She said it was clear that the figures for the past six months showed that some deputies were not as committed to the role as they should be.
Some argue that the output of deputies cannot merely be measured by attendance at meetings. But Mrs Lowe, who most notably in her time in the States led the Home Affairs Committee, said attending meetings was what deputies had been elected to do.
‘Depending on the committee, most of them are only meeting three-weekly or monthly and yet they can’t attend a meeting. It’s absolute nonsense to say that they might be doing other work,’ she said.
‘There needs to be some serious questions asked as to why they’re not attending meetings.
‘You can understand why so many deputies did not want attendance records to be published and for the public see that their commitment isn’t there.’
Committee attendance records used to published every six months.
Mrs Lowe said that all attendance records should be publicly available, including those for meetings of the States of Deliberation.
She also suggested there should be a column stating whether a meeting was attended in person or remotely via Microsoft Teams.
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