LOCAL MP Ellie Chowns says she has been ‘disillusioned’ by her first three months in Parliament and is pressing for moves to make it work better.

Writing on the Politics.co.uk website, Dr Chowns, whose North Herefordshire constituency includes parts of Ross-on-Wye, said she had so far found her new workplace ‘archaic, full of unwritten rules and was eye-wateringly inefficient’.

She said she had been ‘blown away’ by the response to her speech in the Commons on modernising the House.

Dr Chowns observed that the time-honoured tradition of MPs passing through lobbies to vote is ‘a total waste of time’ and suggested:  “MPs could vote electronically in a matter of seconds, then get on with serving their constituents.”

The former MEP explained that Westminster could benefit in other ways from being more like the European Parliament and added: “Without the voting lobbies, the Commons chamber could be remodelled as a ‘hemicycle’, rather than the current face-to-face format.

Dr Chowns pointed out that getting to speak in the chamber requires bobbing up and down, sometimes for hours on end and added: “In the European Parliament, it was all done electronically in advance and there’d be a published list of who was speaking and in what order.

“Given that Parliament is shortly to be given a huge and costly refit,” She wonders: “What is stopping us from following suit?”