Regular plenary sessions of the House of Representatives resume on Monday, August 23 with the chamber’s leadership expecting the submission by the executive department of the National Expenditure Program containing the proposed P5.024-trillion national budget for 2022.
Speaker Lord Allan Velasco will preside over the sessions that will be personally attended only by a representative of the minority and majority bloc. The rest of the House members will be participating via zoom video conference.
Regular sessions were suspended from August 6 to August 20 due to the enhanced community quarantine imposed by government, resulting in loss of time in the floor deliberation and passage of numerous bills.
Velasco said the House has to work double time on pending measures that it should have already taken up had the NCR not been placed under the strictest quarantine classification for two weeks.
“We will tackle as many bills and resolutions as possible to make up for the time lost during the ECQ,” Velasco said.
Once the NEP is received by Congress, Velasco said the House Committee on Appropriations, chaired by ACT-CIS Partylist Rep. Eric Yap, will begin the budget deliberations as soon as possible.
“We are ready to carry out our constitutional duty of carefully scrutinizing the NEP and eventually pass a national budget that is truly reflective and responsive to the needs of Filipinos as COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on people’s lives and the economy,” Velasco said.
Last August 2, the House leadership decided to suspend plenary sessions while the NCR was under ECQ from August 6 to 20.
During the two-week lockdown period, all meetings were held via videoconferencing and congressional offices were closed. Only Secretariat personnel with extremely essential tasks were allowed to report physically to the office.
Such measures, according to Velasco, were necessary as authorities tried to contain a fast-spreading outbreak of the highly infectious Delta coronavirus variant in NCR and other regions across the country.
A recent memorandum issued by Secretary General Mark Llandro Mendoza provides that the House will resume plenary sessions on August 23 under the hybrid platform.