An online Parliament would provide us with better politics all round - Yorkshire Post Letters

I applaud the view expressed by Nigel Boddy in his letter which you published in The Yorkshire Post on December 7 (MPs should be housed in hostels rather than having London residences part-funded from our taxes) but I would go further.

Why have MPs spending so much time in London in the first place? MPs should stay in their constituencies apart from occasional set-piece occasions in Westminster. Draft laws should be reviewed and annotated in printed form, by MPs (and Lords) working at home or in constituency offices, on a government online system rather than being dragged through interminable readings and debates in both houses.

The five hours given recently to debate of the assisted dying bill was an extreme case but really, hour after hour of MPs bobbing up to make the same points over and over again but with special reference to the specific suffering of their own family and friends - there are just a handful of arguments for and against so why spend all this time when we hear that the parliamentary timetable is too congested?

And now the committee stage - perfect, surely, for online review of documents and video-conference meetings rather than MPs travelling to London, forced to stay (unhealthily) away from families, incurring huge unnecessary expense and limiting access to MPs by their constituents.

Meanwhile the Palace of Westminster faces a decade or more of long-overdue refurbishment, made longer and more expensive by the insistence that proceedings are to continue in-situ whilst the works continue around them.

Who will have the courage to challenge these arrangements and to bring Parliament into the modern era? We desperately need a broader cross-section of experience in Parliament and in government - more people from outside the fetid world of party politics would be attracted to the role if it were made less weird and absurd.