The House of Lords needs much wider reform than removing the automatic right for aristocrats to sit - Yorkshire Post Letters

The government expects to have removed by the end of the year the automatic right for any aristocrats to sit in the House of Lords and I welcome this. I wish they were also removing the automatic right for the Archbishops and 24 other senior bishops to a seat.

And beyond that, I wish they would take away from Prime Ministers the right to make appointments of life peers; life peers are supposed to be chosen for experience and expertise so please can the House of Lords Appointments Committee take over fully the power to make appointments, using a very simple system whereby each important seam of our society is given a number of places in the H of L and they then decide on their nominees, to serve for perhaps 10 years at the most.

Examples of ‘important seams of our society’? Sports, broadcast media, engineering, civil engineering, renewable energy, arable farming, hill farming, marine farming, deep-sea fishing, biological sciences, theatre, television, education, special needs education, refugees charities, house-building, heritage, horticulture.

Perhaps each devolved assembly (Scotland, Wales, NI, ‘Greater Lincolnshire’ whatever that is, West Yorkshire, Liverpool City Region, Greater Manchester etc) could each nominate one place.

We probably need no more than 400 seats. What to do with the current members (700 or so life-peers)?

Simple - give them a year to get themselves adopted by one of the chosen ‘seams’ and if not adopted they're out (doubtless with a generous severance payment to compensate them for losing what they thought was a gravy-train to see them well into their old age).

This would mean an end to the cronyism and party-political-domination which infect the current set-up and it would allow the House of Lords to substantiate its claim to legitimacy through merit.

I am against the idea of electing the House of Lords; we struggle (in vain) to find 650 credible and honest representatives for the House of Commons so I can't see where we might find another few hundred for the House of Lords, nor do I rate very highly the ability of the electorate to make informed choices when voting.

Perhaps we could have a series of articles in The Yorkshire Post setting out various options for House of Lords reform?