Protect our Scrutiny hearings
INCREDULITY was strained when it was announced a month ago that the Scrutiny Committee was postponing its planned session with the Education, Sport & Culture Committee because it was being claimed that the livestreaming element of the process was breaching data protection legislation.
This is just the kind of thing that the Office of the Data Protection Authority doesn’t need – semi-spurious claims which damage the reputation of data protection in the eyes of the reasonable person.
Fortunately, although she did the right thing by immediately buying herself some time and postponing the hearing, it was clear that Scrutiny Committee president Yvonne Burford had little truck with this argument and appeared determined instead to push through what may have been seen as a ‘minor local difficulty’.
Scrutiny hearings with this government have been one the biggest successes of the term, properly putting committees and presidents under the microscope and unearthing plenty of news lines and genuine concerns at the same time.
Rather than have them clamped down upon, we should be seeking Scrutiny hearings to be held more regularly, as a particularly useful and successful way of holding senior policymakers to account.