AN EXCHANGE in the States yesterday between Housing minister Dave Jones and Health and Social Services member Mike Hadley over licence issues was an interesting illustration of how the Assembly has changed over the years.

Not that long ago, question time was something to look forward to. While not on a par with PMQs in the House of Commons, where the premier and leader of the opposition attempt to score political points, it was nevertheless an opportunity for active deputies to trip up the then presidents of committees and highlight inconsistencies or inefficiencies within them.

As such, it was used to good effect and a number of representatives made their name from deft – and unscripted – follow-up questions.

Inevitably, therefore, a change in the rules of procedure was introduced to enable question time to be limited to 30 minutes. More recently, further restrictions have been introduced to give ministers a catch-all cop-out on supplementaries so they can sidestep the trickiest ones.

Deputy John Gollop has already revealed that asking questions is frowned upon and Deputy Hadley was ticked off yesterday by the Housing minister for wasting precious States time by asking questions to which he already knew the answers (although that was disputed).

Yet the criticism rather misses the point: question time exists to tease out information that might not otherwise emerge. It is – or it should be – an opportunity to put ministers on the spot and, let’s not be coy about this, catch them out.

The ‘one has spoken…’ approach to government is increasingly alienating islanders who see little or no scrutiny of ministers, policies or performance and question time is at least one opportunity of redressing that balance.

It is also something of an antidote to an increasing problem – debate by email.

Members’ inboxes are overflowing with circulated comments from colleagues and lobby groups so that many of the points that would emerge on the floor of the House have been gone over exhaustively thanks to Hotmail.

While there might be a corporate agenda, deputies are there as people’s representatives and should be asking difficult questions, no matter how much ministers try to silence them.