Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would add sunset clauses or temporary standing orders that lapse unless they're renewed; all of those kinds of things can provide a safeguard. I'm sure that after the crisis there will be a number of reviews of the different ways and the different aspects of the experience. I

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Thank you very much.

Procedure and House Affairs committee  If I could perhaps give one example, standing orders are only permanent until they're not, once it's not written into tablets of stone that standing orders can never change. I think of a previous experience of a completely different crisis, for example the expenses crisis that

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I think it's quite striking that pretty much all the parliaments we looked at have managed to keep functioning in one way or another during the pandemic, even the ones that initially just went into a long recess or suspended for a while. Pretty much all of them have decided to do

Procedure and House Affairs committee  It's a very interesting question, and I'm sure there must be examples around the world. The only one that comes to me immediately is my own country, in the U.K., where there have been particular worries about Scottish MPs who physically cannot get to Westminster because there are

Procedure and House Affairs committee  There are a lot of issues in that question, I think. I'll try to be brief. One of the initial questions about legitimacy I think has been covered earlier by saying, “What is your legal basis for having a virtual parliament at all?” That will vary from country to country, whether

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Somebody once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” I think there are a lot of innovations and experimentations that previously people would have said were too difficult or impossible, but it has been proven that, suddenly, they're actually not so difficult and can be done

Procedure and House Affairs committee  Well, I think that this has been a very interesting piece of work that we've done in looking at the different responses from other parliaments. I would say as well that the website of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, IPU, is an excellent resource, which they are constantly updating

Procedure and House Affairs committee  I would just add that I think that in all spheres of life, in business or in social life, we're not doing the same number of things that we were doing prior to the crisis, and that's inevitable really. What we found when we were looking at the different parliamentary responses w