POLITICAL PARTIES, according to some press reports, have been engaged in secret discussions about increasing the number of seats in the House of Representatives, from 56 to 70, before next year’s parliamentary elections. It appears that the move is geared towards satisfying the needs of the bigger parties, which have too many people waiting in the wings for parliamentary seats, than the needs of our society.

This was apparent from the justification given for the idea. As a result of population increases, Paphos and Larnaca were each entitled to an additional seat; this gave rise to the idea of giving four extra seats to these two smaller electoral districts and creating 10 seats that would go to candidates who did not represent any specific district and would be elected from a separate list.

Another justification for increasing the number of seats was that there was a big volume of work at the legislature that could not be done efficiently by the existing number of deputies. This is a nonsensical argument when we consider that we have a presidential system in which deputies have much less to do than they would have in a parliamentary system.

Perhaps the legislative workload has increased since we entered the EU, but so has deputy absenteeism. Only a few weeks ago, House president Marios Garoyian publicly complained about the high rate of absenteeism, especially at committee meetings, and was looking at ways of tackling the problem. Increasing the number of deputies, because many deputies cannot be bothered to show up for meetings, is not the answer.

The existing number of deputies is more than enough to deal with the legislature’s work if they focused on this work, instead of using House committee meetings as talking shops for current affairs. Far too many committee meetings are called, not for the discussion of bills but for deputies to debate items that have been in the news. The current trend is for deputies to operate as commentators on public issues rather than as legislators, because they know this how to get on the television news and boost re-election prospects.

Nobody does this better than the Greens deputy Giorgos Perdikis, who, just a few hours after Tuesday’s sea tragedy in Paphos, was on radio informing us that coastguard boats were old and unsafe. Immediately after the European Court of Human Rights decision a House committee convened to discuss the ruling, for no obvious reason other than for deputies to express views that might be reported on the TV news.

Under the circumstances, there is no need for more deputies. What there is a need for is for deputies to focus on legislative matters, instead of spending all their time operating as news pundits.