
Ministers sloppy in giving responses
The government’s ministers have been criticised by the Presidium of Parliament for being too slow in a specific and important parliamentary area, according to the Speaker of Parliament Søren Gade. They are too slow to answer committee questions tabled by MPs, Gade says in a letter to Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen. “The Presidium finds the current statistics on the ministers’ response times very unsatisfactory and wants the proportion of timely answered committee questions to increase significantly in the future,” the letter says, calling the questions “a central tool in parliamentary work”.
The answers are, writes Gade, used to hold the government accountable and develop new policies. Therefore, they must be answered on time. According to a response time statistic Gade sent with his letter, the Speaker sshows that in the fourth quarter of the last parliamentary year – from 1 July to 2 October – ministers have given timely final answers to 39 percent of the questions. /ritzau/