Last year, legislators quietly defied former governor John Rankin on a key governance reform, ignoring his request to boost transparency by scrapping stringent rules that restrict public access to their Register of Interests.
The move, however, didn’t become public until last month, when Governor Daniel Pruce approved it following a nine-month delay. Mr. Pruce’s decision to back the HOA over his predecessor appears to resolve a conflict that emerged out of the 2022 Commission of Inquiry report, which called for the register to be made public as a check against legislators’ years-long failure to record their interests as required by law.
The government agreed to follow that advice, but a July 2022 amendment opening the register to public scrutiny also included unusual viewing restrictions that drew a sharp rebuke from Mr. Rankin.
“Anyone wishing to view the register must make a written application and pay a fee for each member whose record is inspected,” Mr. Rankin complained in December 2022. “The registrar must verify the identity of the person inspecting the register and keep a record of every person inspecting it. In addition, a person who is inspecting the register must do so in the presence of the registrar and, most restrictively cannot make any kind of copy or, it would seem, even notes of the content of the register.”
Publishing information from the register is also prohibited.
Such restrictions, Mr. Rankin said at the time, “run counter to the principle of transparency” and make the register public only “in a highly limited way.”
Rankin’s assent
Though Mr. Rankin ultimately assented to the bill in question — the Register of Interests (Amendment) Act 2022 — he asked the HOA to revisit it in 2023 to lift the restrictions and to require senior public officers to register their interests too.
In March 2024, HOA members revisited the law as requested, but the proposed amendment addressed only one of the viewing restrictions Mr. Rankin had complained about: It would have removed the $15 fee then required to view each HOA member’s interests. After a lengthy public debate — which focused mostly on whether or not senior public officials should be included in the register — the House passed the law with amendments last April.
A lengthy delay followed before Mr. Pruce assented to the law — known as the Register of Interests (Amendment) Act, 2024 — on Jan. 16 of this year. The final legislation first became public when it was Gazetted on Jan 21.
The new law reduces the fee to view each HOA member’s interests from $15 to $10 (instead of abolishing the fee entirely as initially proposed), but it keeps in place all the other viewing restrictions criticised by Mr. Rankin.
Other amendments
The amended law also includes a new registration form for HOA members to declare their interests, and it tweaks the definitions of “child” and “spouse” to be more inclusive.
It does not add public officials, whose interests are instead to be recorded in a private register created by a separate law.
Response
When the Beacon asked Premier Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley why the HOA didn’t lift the viewing restrictions Mr. Rankin opposed, he stated that members were “satisfied with the framework for accessing the register previously enacted.”
He added that the framework is “consistent with what exists” in other overseas territories.
The Governor’s Office told the Beacon that Mr. Pruce assented to the law “in line with his responsibilities defined” in Section 79 of the Constitution. That section outlines the assent procedure.
The office did not say whether Mr. Pruce shares Mr. Rankin’s concerns about the viewing restrictions.
British Caribbean News