The first meetings of the Joint Committee which is going to examine the Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill took place last week, as Lord Norton has already reported. The team undertaking this “pre-legislative scrutiny” is formidable indeed. Looking round the table and noting a bevy of professors, distinguished lawyers and former very senior civil servants – not to mention some very clever MPs from all three parties – I was again struck by a dilemma : do we want legislators to be experts themselves, or do we want them to have broad judgement to be able to decide which experts to trust?

I often hear people (and not always Peers themselves) saying how wonderful it is that the Lords contains so many experts. The problem with this is that we are mostly, by definition “ex-experts”. By the time a lawyer, general, doctor or any other professional has reached the top of that tree, and has been appointed to sit in the Lords, he or she will probably have retired and will soon be out of touch. After five or ten years they certainly will be less likely to have kept up-to-date.

Yet when a Committee like this one invites evidence from serving academics, civil servants or campaigners they may well feel intimidated by the ranks of “Great & Good” around the table.

I don’t claim any specialist expertise, but (I hope) I have acquired some commonsense through a range of jobs and experience in the real world, outside as well as inside politics. The most impressive Peers, to my mind, are those who use their judgement based on what they see today, rather than rely on the crutch of outdated “expertise” to support their preconceptions!