MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Falklands report on constitutional change ready for public scrutiny

The process of bringing about changes to the Falkland Islands Constitution, took a further step forward last week with the publication for public comment of proposals by the Select Committee on Constitutional Reform.

The committee is composed of all eight members of the Islands' Legislative Council and headed by Mike Summers.

Impetus for constitutional reform and with it a general streamlining of governmental procedures followed the suggestion in the 1999 UK White Paper on the Overseas Territories that all should examine their constitutions and constitutional relationships with the UK, to ensure that they suited all the current day circumstances. No time limit has been placed on the review, and it is considered that getting all the constituent parts right is the most important issue.

Speaking to members of the local media and later to the listeners to Falkland Islands Radio's ?One to One' programme, Councillor Summers said that the proposals in the paper did not differ significantly from those outlined in the Committee's last report published just before last November's General Election, except in the section that dealt with government structure. "This edition of the Select Committee is very much of the opinion that there should remain three members on Executive Council and the other five members who are not on Executive Council should be the principal portfolio holders".

This arrangement, said the Councillor, would allow for a division of responsibility between the members of Executive Council who would be the senior division-making body and chairs of portfolio committees, who had have the ability to make a certain number of delegated decisions, which would then be passed up to Executive Council for ratification, but need not necessarily all be reviewed in any detail, if at all.

While much detail was still to be worked out, Councillor Summers indicated that the principle change would be a clearer definition and separation of the roles of members of the Islands' Executive and Legislative Councils, with increased possibility for scrutiny of the process by which decisions were made.

The previous Legislative Council, while not being, in Summers' words, "wedded to the idea" of all eight members being members of Executive Council (ExCo) had thought that it was the only solution and the idea had achieved majority support. The new Select Committee, on the other hand, had taken the view that having all eight members of ExCo would not be particularly productive and made the possibility of scrutiny more remote.

The proposed new system would improve the decision-making process with some decisions being passed down from the three person ExCo to the five other members of the Legislative Council (LegCo), sitting with increased powers as chairpersons of a smaller number of re-grouped government committees: Health and Education Services, Camp (Rural) Issues, Public Works and Land Use, Industry and Services and Corporate Services.

While the position of the five portfolio holding councillors would still fall short of full ministerial accountability, Summers said that it was "very much part of the thinking that councillors should be accountable to the public for the decisions that they make." Passing much of the decision-making down to committee meetings held in public would increase the transparency, which was part of this government's stated aims and a key issue in the constitutional reform process.

With the publication of the Draft Report of the findings of the Select Committee on the Constitution, there will now follow a period for public consultation before a final draft is made ready for presentation to the Foreign Commonwealth Office. . Due to some delays in arriving at this stage, the timetable for this presentation has been changed with the expectation that it will now happen in November of this year, rather than September, as was originally planned.

John Fowler (Mercopress) Stanley