FOI 22-23: Working days and Assembly business

Information Standards Freedom of Information Response

Our Ref: FOI 22-23

23 August 2023

Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“FOIA”)

I am writing to confirm that the Northern Ireland Assembly Commission (Assembly Commission) has processed your request dated 4 August 2023 in line with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. In your request, you asked:

“Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and the set-up of the first NI Assembly;

How many working days have been available for Assembly business up to 31st July 2023?

Secondly, out of this total of possible working days, how many actual days in this period has the Assembly been in session (excluding holidays)?”

How many working days have been available for Assembly business up to 31st July 2023?

The Assembly Commission does not hold information in relation to your request.

How many actual days in this period has the Assembly been in session (excluding holidays)?

The Assembly Commission does not hold information in relation to your request. The Assembly Commission does hold raw data, which is relevant to your request but anticipates that the dataset would require material alteration, reorganisation and adaptation in order to comply with this request.

Furthermore, the FOIA does not require the creation of datasets, as defined in section 11(5) of the FOIA, for publication, nor does it require datasets to be updated if they would not otherwise have been updated as part of our statutory function.

In order to provide advice and assistance under section 16 of the FOIA, you may also wish to consider the context outlined below.

The Standing Orders of the Assembly include the following definitions:

• “Public holiday” includes Christmas Day, Good Friday, any bank holiday and any other day appointed as such;
• “Sitting day” means a day on which the Assembly sits in Plenary;
• “Working day” means any day which is neither a Saturday, Sunday, public holiday nor day when the Assembly is in recess.

Assembly business includes Plenary sittings and Committee meetings.

Plenary

The Standing Orders make provision for the Assembly to sit in Plenary session on Mondays and Tuesdays when these are working days. If business is not concluded on a Tuesday, the sitting may continue on Wednesday. When this happens, it is considered to be one sitting (i.e. a single order paper and minute of proceedings) even though the Assembly will have been sitting for two days. Sittings may also be scheduled on Wednesdays and Thursdays, particularly when there is a large volume of business to be conducted, but the Assembly rarely sits on Fridays to allow MLAs to focus on their constituencies.

Since the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement in 1998 the Assembly has held 1,015 Plenary sittings. As explained above, some of these may have spanned more than one sitting day.

Committees

Committees may sit on any day of the week. The vast majority of committee meetings are held on a Wednesday or Thursday.

Agendas and minutes of proceedings for all Plenary sessions, and for all committee meetings, are available on the Assembly website. These include the dates on which the proceedings took place.

You have the right to request a formal review by the Assembly Commission and if you wish to do so, please write to me at the above address. If after such an internal review you are still unhappy with the response, you may appeal to the Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 5AF which will undertake an independent review.

The Assembly Commission may publish details of your FOI request and its official response within the organisational disclosure log. The request will be completely anonymised and you will not be identified in any way. This is to meet the requirements as laid out by in the agreed publication scheme with the Information Commissioners’ Office.

Yours sincerely

Data Protection and Governance Officer