The good people at Silicon.com have informed us that iPads are (probably) going to be allowed in the House of Lords. Has a rare blow been struck for modernity in what often appears an archaic institution, beholden to strange conventions and even stranger titles?

Not quite. Because, while it appears that the Lords Administration and Works Committee understand how the device could replace a "pad of paper for speaking notes", they're deeply concerned that peers might use the device to 1) send messages and 2) conduct research during a debate.

Heaven forbid that peers should look up a report online, or receive an important update from a colleague that would help them better scrutinise some ill-thought-through legislation. If this report is to believed, peers must only have the information available to them when they walked into the chamber, and no more. Any benefits from them being better informed are cancelled out by the possibility of them finding something out that is "not generally available to other participants". Truly bizarre.

How exactly they intend to police this is also not clear. A noble Lord browsing through a speech on their iPad looks much like a noble Lord checking his email or browsing the web. That said, I'm all too familiar with how difficult it is to get a mobile signal on the Parliamentary estate, so perhaps they just hope peers will get tired of moving around the red benches, trying desperately to get a decent 3G signal.

So what started as a promising headline ends up with the revelation that the Lords think iPads are good because, unlike laptops, they don't make a clacking noise and are a decent substitute for A4 paper when it comes to reading speeches. If this is rather strange point of view anything to go by, it looks like their emergence from the dark ages isn't on the cards for the near (or even distant) future. What a shame.