Roughly 15% of all parliamentary questions asked during 2020 went unanswered, according to statistics compiled by the House of Representatives.

Parliamentary questions are one way in which members of parliament are able to hold the country’s executive to account. Any member of parliament is entitled to ask up to six questions in every sitting to ministers, or to any other member, about any parliamentary business for which they are responsible.

According to the Standing Orders of Parliament, ministries should reply to questions put to them within three working days.

This is the first in a series of articles analysing the work of Malta’s parliament and includes data obtained from annual reports on parliament’s work as well as information provided by the Speaker’s office. Some of the data has been scraped from parliament’s website.

A look at statistics for the number of PQs asked each year reveals a worrying trend, starting in 2012, of questions increasingly going unanswered.

That year, parliament ended the year with 55 unanswered questions out of a total of 7,679 submitted. No questions were reported to have gone unanswered between 2006-2012.

2012 was the last year under a Nationalist administration with the legislature coming to an abrupt end in December when then rebel PN MP Franco Debono voted against the government’s budget.

The vote led to the dissolution of parliament and likely explains the unanswered questions registered at the year’s end.

There was however no such election in 2013, the first under a Labour administration. That year, 456 PQs went unanswered – roughly 7% of a total of 6,964.

The highest number of unanswered questions was registered in 2017, the year of another snap election. The year ended with a whopping 1,439 unanswered questions – 23% of the total 6,275 asked.

Parliament has ended the year with at least a handful of unanswered questions every year since 2013.

What do you make of these statistics?