Accommodation and parliamentary process issues dominate House's 2020 budget

The upcoming relocation of the House of Representatives to its new interim accommodation at Bezuidenhoutseweg in The Hague dominates the 2020 budget of the House, along with plans to strengthen the parliamentary process

Binnenhof

Attention will furthermore be paid to the House's access to information and the visibility of the House's work, wrote Ms Khadija Arib, President of the House of Representatives. The main features of the House's budget for next year are:

  • In 2020, the relocation of the House to its new interim accommodation at Bezuidenhoutseweg 67 and the start of a large-scale renovation of the Binnenhof complex will leave their mark on the House of Representatives. A very special and exceptional occasion: for the first time in more than 200 years, the House of Representatives will hold its sittings elsewhere, be it for a limited period of time.
  • Making effective use of the instruments available to the House remains another key issue. Around the 2019 summer recess, the Working Group on the Revision of the Rules of Procedure is expected to submit its recommendations for strengthening and, where necessary, modernizing the parliamentary process operations. The implementation of these recommendations is expected to last until well into 2020.
  • The House's access to information remains an important issue as well. A key feature in this are the new operating procedures of the committees of the House, which get their own staff members to gather information on behalf of the committee in a goal-oriented way. At the heart of the issue, however, is the adequacy of the information provided to the House by the Cabinet.
  • In recent months, 'employee experience' and 'feeling socially safe at work' have been given ever more attention within the organization of the House of Representatives. The Presidium finds these two very important and intends to continue paying attention to them unabatedly.
  • The work of the House of Representatives must be visible and comprehensible. To achieve this, the House intends to involve citizens more actively in its work, for example by offering webinars and by organizing V100: one hundred citizens are invited to help the House fulfil its task of scrutinizing the government.
  • The Presidium also points out that 2020 will be a special year, given that it will be 75 years since the end of the Second World War, which also marked the start of the recovery of our parliamentary democracy. That will be commemorated, among other things, in the course of our Open House days.