The military-appointed National Legislative Assembly will officially remain on the job until May 23, nearly two months after the election and a day before the new parliament is expected to convene.
Somchai Sawangkan, secretary-general for parliamentary operations, said the NLA would meet until March 15 at the Parliament House at the Royal Plaza in Bangkok. After that date the building will be returned to the Office of His Majesty’s Principal Private Secretary.
Legislators will then have to gather at temporary meeting sites as construction is still continuing on the new Parliament buildings on Kiak Kai Road — four years behind schedule and hundreds of millions of baht over budget.
The NLA will deliberate bills pending second and third readings until March 8 while some bills will be left for the newly elected parliament, Mr Somchai said.
From March 9-15, it will consider 60 reports of various panels to be sent to the cabinet. After reviewing the suggestions, the cabinet will send them to related agencies.
The Office of His Majesty’s Principal Private Secretary had allowed the NLA to use the building on U-Thong Nai Road until March 15. Therefore, the NLA will meet there three to four days a week starting next week, Mr Somchai added.
“If there is a need to meet after that date, we’ll use the meeting room of TOT Plc on Chaeng Watthana Road, which charges 100,000 baht a day,” he said.
If the new parliament building is still not available by May, newly elected legislators will also have to use the TOT facility at a monthly rate of 1 million baht.
The new complex, called Sappaya Sapa Sathan, is located on a 120-rai plot on the bank of the Chao Phraya River in the Kiak Kai area. It has 424,000 square metres of usable space and cost 23 billion baht to build.
Under a contract signed in 2013, the building was to have been completed in 2015. However, there were numerous delays due to the slow handover of the site to the contractors, problems with soil removal, as well as several requests for design changes and a longer construction period.
The latest estimate is that construction of the new complex will be completed in June or July.
The NLA, one of the “Five Rivers” of the junta, first convened in August 2014. Most of the members are government officials, both retired and active, and more than half are soldiers. Fewer than five percent are women.
According to Internet Law Reform Dialogue (iLaw), over the course of almost five years, the NLA had passed 412 bills as of Monday.
iLaw noted the NLA has sped up passing bills since late last year. From Jan 18 to Feb 18, it passed 66 bills, or 2.5 a day, compared with 12.1 per month (in four months) in 2014, 7.5 in 2015, 6.1 in 2016, 4.8 in 2017 and 6 bills a month in 2018.
