Holiday reading?
July 20, 2016If I’m reading the Parliament website correctly (and always assuming nothing has changed with the change of Prime Minister), then Parliament “rises” – goes on holiday – tomorrow, 21st July. They will be off for the summer, coming back briefly for ten days in September before the party conferences, until term starts properly again on 10th October. (And even then the poor dears will need a break for a week in November – what DO they do all day! – to see them through to Christmas.)
It really makes you wonder about the 65 open consultations listed on the gov.uk website today, doesn’t it? Are people really going to give up some of their time to give their views on, say, the future of the inter-city West Coast rail franchise (closes 8th August) or the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) assessment: second independent review call for evidence (closes 16th September) when the Minister who signed off on the actual consultation may not be in place when the results are in, and in any event policy priorities are likely to have changed?
HMRC has six open consultations: each of them opened on 26th May and each has a closing date in August (and, great flying spaghetti monster, after all this time and a positive recommendation from the House of Lords Merits Committee why can gov.uk STILL not manage to let you list consultations in order of closure date???)
HMRC also has a new minister: Jane Ellison MP, the new FST. Maybe the most useful thing she could do on her last day before the recess might be to have a quick look at the six consultations, check whether they still align with the new priorities she’s (presumably) going to be setting for the department, and decide whether they need to go ahead. It’s my guess that a notice on the website (plus an email to “stakeholders” and other “usual suspects” who might be working on responses to the consultations) to the effect that they’ve been put on hold: take the summer off and come back in September… might be quite welcome. What do we think?
tiintax 
Leave a Reply