House of Lords should be no place for party politics and retired MPs – Yorkshire Post Letters

A WORTHY column as ever from Tom Richmond (The Yorkshire Post, May 29), sensibly calling for further reform of the House of Lords.

I don’t think elections are the answer – we can’t find enough talent to fill even the House of Commons and it’s just too difficult for the public to know who is likely to be an effective member and who is not.

Time for Lords shake-up as BBC bigwigs keep peerages after Bashir scandal – Tom Richmond

We definitely do need an Upper House to check the workings of the Commons, with around 200 members, but they need to be people with detailed experience and impressive track records in specialist fields.

The seats should be divvied up across sectors representing civil society, the arts, science, medicine, IT, charity, engineering, sport, political parties, religions (grudgingly), law, constitution, education, business, military, etc.

Each sector would choose its representative(s) and would be free to change them at any time up to a maximum term of 10 years. I suppose that we could also have one elected representative for each region, and one of those regions could be Yorkshire as proposed by your columnist.

Above all, the Upper House must be as far removed as possible from the deadly embrace of the political parties.

It should have power to remove ministers from office if they go badly astray – a power which is sorely needed right now but which is not held by any element in the UK polity.

From: David Downs, Sandal, Wakefield.

HOW does a theatrical background qualify Tracy Brabin to address the issues set out in Jason Millett’s article (The Yorkshire Post, May 27) where he suggests that the most successful mayors will be those delivering sustainable economic growth to help the UK “build back better”?

I ask therefore that Tracy Brabin informs the West Yorkshire public, preferably through The Yorkshire Post, how she intends to achieve the objectives set out in Jason Millett’s article.

From: Hilary Andrews, Nursery Lane, Leeds.

AMAZING to hear that if Dominic Cummings had been in charge of the pandemic nobody would have been seriously ill or died. His TV appearance was a “me, me, me” fest. Most of the patients discharged into care homes were certified by doctors as being free from symptoms and the asymptomatic spread of the virus was unknown at that time.

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