Member

Amendment 8 from my noble friend Lord Trenchard suggests a further way of narrowing down the 48 million potential candidates by suggesting that it be restricted to those who have served as a Member of Parliament, a Member of your Lordships’ House already, a member of one of the devolved Administrations or of “a Principal Council”—I presume he means an upper-tier local authority—for three years or more. That gives us a reasonably broad base, and I was attracted by what he set out as his motivation of ensuring that we have a less metropolitan voice in your Lordships’ House, but it is still a relatively narrow cadre of people. Even accounting for the greater number of independent representatives that we often see in local government, it is inevitably slanted towards the party political, or those who have picked up all the bad habits as well as the undoubted virtues of electoral politics.