The latest round of appointments to the House of Lords certainly stirred up a degree of controversy. I wouldn’t try to justify these latest appointments – one party has managed to appoint eleven new peers when the electorate voted in just eight MPs! But I regret that the argument about the House of Lords is biased against what is an important institution.

The House of Lords has taken around 800 years to get to where it is today. That is a remarkable process of progression – more than any other legislature in the world. The same applies to the House of Commons and that is why our system of Parliamentary democracy is the envy of the world and the model many legislatures base theirs on. But we are odd in so far as we don’t have an elected upper house: we have the peculiarities of the House of Lords instead. But until it is clear what they actually do, it is hard to understand why we have this current system.

The Lords is a revising chamber. They inspect the legislation that comes out of the Commons to ensure that it makes sense and that it is workable. Whilst some legislation starts in the House of Lords – the Assisted Dying Bill is one such example – the point of the Lords is to scrutinise the ideas of the democratically elected Commons, which is elected democratically on a manifesto to make laws and govern the country.

It is because of this scrutiny that we have so many peers. The fact is, we need people with a wealth of experience in many different areas to be able to bring to the debate the expertise we need to make good laws. Specialist single issue MPs have to be supported by parties in the House of Commons because they have to be able to decide on every bill passing through. But single issue politicians come into their own in the Lords because that is exactly where their skills and expertise is needed. By drawing on their extensive and specialist skills, we get better laws.

With an average age of 69 years, the turnover is fairly high.

So whilst I do fully understand the accusations of crony-ism – handing out awards to politicians who have been paid to do a job (and not always very well) is not something I support – the Lords do have an important executive role to play.