Well perhaps it's a conversation for another day, but the Lords is a massively over-inflated place, populated in part by a rather large number of very elderly people who tend to turn up for a snooze and their three hundred quid daily allowance. I was in the audience of Question Time in 2002 and Bumblebee picked me out to make my comment. I said, in front of three million people, that I thought that an elected Lords was a bad idea, and I still think that now. We have enough trouble getting a decent turnout for general elections, even worse for by-elections and council elections. I think that elections for the Lords would attract low turnouts, and low turnouts are absolutely terrible for democracy. We need a national conversation about the Lords. How many members (I'd suggest 200 maximum), what the party balance should be, what the balance between party and crossbenchers should be, how we fix it after general elections so that the balance remains fair, etc. We need experts in there but we also need people who are not part of the establishment. We don't need political appointees and we definitely don't need clerics unless they are proven experts in other fields. I suppose we need an independent panel of very wise people to vet suggested members and to keep that balance. I also suppose that I'm in cloud cuckoo land.