I RELY on electronic data and communications for almost every aspect of my job and I am also passionate about saving taxpayers’ money so you might think that I would have supported the recent call from the House of Lords to end the centuries-old tradition of printing laws on vellum made of calf or goat skin to save £80,000 a year.

Far from it! In my view, unique traditions like this are often worth preserving and often decisions like this are made for short-term gain but cause long-term pain.

That is why I made sure to attend the debate last week, originally called for by my MP neighbour James Gray, to make sure that this 1,000-year-old tradition continues.

As the debate went on, the compelling facts just kept on coming. First, compared to paper, vellum lasts a long time. Dig into the archives of the UK's parliament and pull out the oldest extant law and you'll find a very old document, first inscribed in 1497, while original copies of the Magna Carta, signed more than 800 years ago on vellum, still exist.

Any archivist will tell you that paper is just not as robust; decay, chemical changes, insects and animal damage, tearing, rubbing….the list goes on.

But what about bits and bytes I hear you cry, everything can be reduced to binary codes these days and stored that way. Well, if you are like me you will have shoeboxes jammed with content stored on old floppy disks and minicam cartridges – remember them? – which have long outlasted the technology designed to read the information and are almost unusable without a real effort.

During the debate we heard great arguments about supporting heritage and traditional crafts and then the Minister debunked the cost numbers, saying that vellum was actually cost effective: storing the Magna Carta in this way has cost, so far, £6 a century which seems like the bargain of the Millennium.

After such compelling arguments I almost ran through the voting lobby, so keen was I to keep this traditional material and was delighted when the house agreed with me in this decision and even more so when I learnt that the Queen identified her chosen candidate for her new High Sheriff of Wiltshire - Swindon born explorer David Hempleman-Adams by a centuries-long process of “pricking the vellum” with a silver bodkin that is said to have once been owned and used for the same purpose by Queen Elizabeth I – literally making a pin prick against his name on a vellum list. Long live her Majesty – and long live vellum!