IN a recent letter in the Journal Frank Parkinson raised the important point of the number of MPs we have and appeared to bemoan that their number will soon reduce.

In my view the reduction from 650 to 600 does not go far enough, and the number of Lords at 813 is also far too many.

Frank needs to ask himself why other countries can get along with far fewer members of their upper and lower chambers than we can.

For example, America has around 38 times the land mass of the UK and five times our population, yet its lower chamber (House of Representatives) has only 435 voting members and its upper chamber (the Senate) has only 100.

I cannot see why we need more than America.

The only difficulty would be determining how to allocate seats in our upper house.

Currently the Conservative Party has around 31 per cent of seats, Labour 25 per cent and the Lib Dems 13 per cent. Plaid Cyrmu has two seats and SNP none, with the rest being made up of bishops, cross benchers and independents.

Clearly major reform is needed, possibly along the lines of a democratically elected upper house that is not elected at the same time as the lower house, to try to ensure that the houses do not completely mirror each other.

Peter Paddon

Hollins Close

Tyldesley