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Herefordshire’s new Green 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 said she had so far found her new workplace “archaic, full of unwritten rules and eye-wateringly inefficient”.

She had been “blown away” by the response to one of her first speeches in the Commons in late July on modernising the House, which got over a million views online.

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Its time-honoured tradition of MPs passing through lobbies to vote is “a total waste of everyone’s time”, with a “huge opportunity cost” in time lost to debating or other parliamentary business.

“Alternatively, MPs could vote electronically in a matter of seconds, then get on with serving their constituents,” she writes.

The former MEP for the West Midlands added that the Palace of Westminster could benefit in other ways from being more like the European Parliament, which divides its time between Brussels and Strasbourg.

Without the voting lobbies, the Commons chamber could be remodelled as a “hemicycle”, rather that the current face-to-face format which “heightens polarisation and feeds oppositional, performative politics that ordinary people are fed up with”, she said.

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Getting to speak in the chamber meanwhile requires “bobbing up and down every few minutes for sometimes hours on end”.

“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,” she writes.

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

Dr Chowns has also presented a bill to Parliament, the Water (Agricultural Pollution) Bill, which she said “draws attention to the fact that the government's own Water (Special Measures) Bill makes zero mention of agricultural pollution – despite the fact that it is such an important problem”.

She is also among 30 MPs, including her three Green Party colleagues, to sign a letter published today (October 22) demanding that Chancellor Rachel Reeves impose a wealth tax on Britain’s richest people in next week’s Budget, rather than make spending cuts.