Noticeboard

Future of the Weekly Information Bulletin

The House of Commons Information Office has been undertaking a strategic review of its operations. As part of this some of its core activities have been reviewed and assessed as to how it might best achieve its aims.

The Weekly Information Bulletin (WIB) is a long standing publication that has changed relatively little in appearance despite the advances in IT that have taken place during its existence. Behind the scenes the compilation of the data used to produce the Bulletin is increasingly accomplished using databases that are updated daily.

An outcome of the review has been that the HCIO stops producing a hardcopy Bulletin subsequent to the General Election. There has been very little response to the note placed in the WIB over the past few weeks but from what response we have had, it would appear that the main sections used are Forthcoming Business and the Public Bill List. We believe that we could provide this information electronically in a more up to date way than would be possible with a weekly hardcopy document. We could even provide the ability to download printable pages (comparable to the format in the WIB) up to date as of the same morning.

We intend to conduct a proper consultation of subscribers to the Bulletin to ensure that the information our subscribers find useful will be replicated in a useful format through the Parliament website. In the meantime, we will continue to produce a full electronic version of the Bulletin (in pdf format) until we have suitable replacements in place.

Please email all comment to hcinfo@parliament.uk

The next Bulletin will be published on Saturday 3 April 2010

Budget:

The Budget statement took place on 24 March 2010

By-elections:

Following the death of the Member for Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland, Dr Ashok Kumar,

on 15 March 2010, there will be a by-election. Details to be announced.

Following the resignation of the Member for Strangford, Iris Robinson, on 13 January 2010,

there will be a by-election. Details to be announced.

Following the death of the Member for North West Leicestershire, Mr David Taylor, on 26 December 2009,

there will be a by-election. Details to be announced.

Private Members' Bills:

The Private Members Bill Ballot took place at 10am on Thursday 26 November 2009

The Private Members Ballot Bills were presented to the House on Wednesday 16 December 2009

The Leader of the House has announced that the following Fridays are allocated for the consideration of Private Members' Bills during the 2009/10 session:

2010: 29 January; 5 and 26 February; 5 and 12 March; 23 and 30 April and 7 May.

House of Commons calendar for the 2009/2010 session:

The Leader of the House announced the following recess dates for the 2009/2010 session:

Christmas recess 2009

The House rose on Wednesday 16 December 2009 and returned on Tuesday 5 January 2010

Spring half term recess 2010

The House rose on Wednesday 10 February 2010 and returned on Monday 22 February 2010

Easter recess 2010

The House will rise on Tuesday 30 March 2010 and return on Tuesday 6 April 2010

www.parliament.uk

The Parliament website provides information on parliamentary proceedings, membership of both Houses and general information on a wide range of parliamentary matters.