Another week and another new Bill. As if we’re not doing enough already!

Yesterday saw another six-hour slog in the committee stage of the Marine and Coastal Access Bill – day eight, and we still haven't got to the exciting coastal access part.

But it’s a worthwhile Bill and taking part feels like doing something useful.

Today is the first day ‘on Report’ for the awful Local Democracy Economic Development and Construction Bill, probably the worst Bill I’ve taken a close interest in during nearly nine years in the Lords.

So we start again with the utterly silly eight pages of detailed new laws about presenting petitions to local councils.

I put down a raft of questions about how government departments deal with petitions. Of course the answer is that by and large, they don't.

If you are lucky you’ll get an acknowledgement and then an answer as if it were an ordinary letter, and that’s it. Surprise, surprise, the proposals for councils in this Bill are all ‘do as we say, not as we do’ – and what they say is daft anyway.

And then tomorrow it’s the second reading debate on the new Bill – the Political Parties and Elections Bill.

There’s a lot about party funding and spending but the original suggestions of a big clamp-down on ‘unfair’ funding and ‘unfair’ spending seem to have evaporated.

For instance, there is nothing in the Bill that will stop Lord Ashcroft in his office at Conservative Central Office from showering local Conservative parties with the money to churn out vast amounts of leaflets and direct mail in marginal seats such as Pendle.

You make up your own mind about whether that kind of ‘heavy brass’ targeting is fair or unfair.

What is never fair is playing the postal vote system to manipulate people’s votes in ways that they do not properly understand – or worse, as we’ve seen in a series of court cases around the country in recent years.

I have no doubt that postal voting on demand is wide open to rigging, and is anyway inherently wrong since the secrecy of the ballot simply cannot be ensured.

This new Bill does nothing to tackle this problem. But I shall use the debate tomorrow to raise the question yet again.