The Senior Deputy Speaker
That the Grand Committee takes note of the report from the Corporate Officer of the House of Commons and the Corporate Officer of the House of Lords, Restoration and Renewal: Annual Progress Report 2024 (HC 228).
The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord Gardiner of Kimble)
My Lords, noble Lords know well that extensive and complex work is required to restore and preserve the Palace for future generations. I suspect, too, that noble Lords share my frustration that we are not further forward than we are. What I intend to highlight as I open this debate is the work undertaken, which is set out in the most recent annual report, and the path towards decision-making.
Most notably, the R&R client board, composed of the two House commissions, agreed and published the strategic case report, which sets out the future direction of the programme. Published in March 2024, the R&R strategic case sets out the three delivery options for how to restore this historic Palace, which the client board agreed should be developed in further detail.
The recommendations of the client board were informed by the extensive work of the R&R programme board in 2023. The programme board considered carefully 36 combinations of scope and delivery approaches to provide a shortlist for how R&R might be delivered. This was judged against a range of criteria, including value for money, health and safety implications, likely disruption to the work of Parliament and lasting benefits, including to accessibility and sustainability. This shortlisting process and the recommendations of the programme board informed the client board’s final decision regarding which delivery options should be developed into fully costed proposals. It is expected that this work will be presented by the end of this year to the Houses to make a decision on the preferred way forward.
The client board agreed to the development of a “full decant” option and a “continued presence” option, as recommended by the programme board, and requested that a further delivery option of a rolling sequenced programme of works to deliver “enhanced maintenance and improvement” also be developed.
Under the “full decant” option, both Houses would leave the Palace and relocate nearby on a temporary basis while the majority of the works are completed. The House of Commons Chamber would be prioritised for return to the Palace. The preferred location for temporary decant of the House of Lords would be the nearby QEII conference centre building for approximately 11 years, with continuing use of the existing southern estate—namely, Millbank House, Fielden House and Old Palace Yard.
The “continued presence” option involves the House of Commons Chamber and essential support functions remaining in the Palace throughout the works. The House of Lords would move out of the Palace for approximately 17 years until the works are complete, again with the QEII conference centre being the preferred venue. Other House of Commons functions currently based in the Palace would be relocated elsewhere on the existing House of Commons estate.
Finally, the “enhanced maintenance and improvement” option would be delivered as part of a rolling, sequenced programme of works. As far as possible, this option would be delivered in a business-as-usual environment, although up to 30% of the Palace may be decanted at any one time. As the client board commissioned detailed work on this option at a later stage in the shortlisting process last year, the timeline for EMI is still being worked through and will be disclosed in the costed proposals, alongside other comparative information.
Noble Lords will wish to know what improvements we can expect to see in the Palace following the R&R works. The client board agreed that a “reasonably ambitious” scope be adopted for the R&R works. This would see improvements to areas such as health and safety, including to fire safety and addressing asbestos; renewal of mechanical, electrical and other services—perhaps this week I should say heating; building fabric conservation; security protection measures; and accessibility. This includes improving audibility and increasing step-free access from 12% within the Palace at present to approximately 70%, with the highest step-free access provided in the most visited and used areas of the building.
This scope was agreed by the R&R client board because it would deliver significant improvements to the Palace for those who work in and visit it, while representing best value for money for taxpayers. These three options are being developed in detail over the coming months by the R&R delivery authority and Strategic Estates. Once this work is complete, all three options will be assessed by the programme and client board. These options will be costed and presented by the end of this year to enable, as I said, informed decisions by the Houses and a genuine choice on the preferred way forward.
Turning to the contents of the 2024 annual progress report, I will first note the expenditure. The annual report sets out the financial performance and expenditure of the R&R programme. In the 2023-24 financial year, the delivery authority expenditure amounted to £75 million, with a further £5 million of expenditure by Parliament’s R&R client team.
In addition to supporting the development and assessment of options considered by the programme board, which I have outlined, activities last year included continued work on complex surveys to the Palace, which are helping to shape the detailed plans for design and construction work. This is enabling the Houses to develop the most accurate building information record of the Palace’s condition that has ever existed and will support maintenance of the Palace.
In 2023-24, 24,500 hours of intrusive survey work was completed, which included eight bore-holes, bringing the total to more than 63,000 hours of intrusive surveys being completed. The deepest of the bore-holes completed last year was 84 metres—275 feet in old money. To put that in another context, the Elizabeth Tower is 96 metres tall. That bore-hole was the deepest to date conducted by the R&R programme and will allow surveyors for the delivery authority to understand further the ground conditions, archaeology and other useful design parameters ahead of the future works.
Archaeological discoveries have included sections of the ancient river walls and piles from the Charles Barry construction. The delivery authority, working with Parliament’s heritage and collections team, also completed its audit of the approximately 13,000 collections objects—paintings, sculptures, furniture, decorative arts and other unique and important objects—to consider how these can best be managed during the R&R programme.
The concept designs for the recommended outcome level for the Palace restoration works and the outline design for House of Lords temporary accommodation also progressed in the last year.
Engagement and communications activity supported the development of the strategic case and informed decision-making by the R&R political boards with the parliamentary community and external experts, and engagement with industry and professional sectors across the UK.
Tours of the Palace basements and the historic Cloister Court continue to be made available to Members and staff. More than 80 Peers have taken this tour since April 2022. I suspect all noble Lords present have undertaken the tour, but I recommend it wholeheartedly. It captures and makes one understand the challenges, and indeed the opportunities, of restoration. Noble Lords can sign up by contacting the R&R client team. One-to-one briefings can also be arranged with R&R officials to discuss the programme in more detail.
Engagement about the programme has not been confined to Westminster. As set out in the annual report, more than 250 representatives of supply chains and small businesses, and local officials in all four nations of the UK, have been met with to highlight future opportunities that the R&R programme may provide to businesses across the UK. It is perhaps a good reminder that this programme can have benefits all across the United Kingdom. Over 50% of the value of contracts awarded by the delivery authority has been to companies based outside London and the south-east.
I hope that what I have sought to outline demonstrates that there has been tangible progress—politically, with the agreement of the strategic case and the three options taken forward for development, and at the technical level to assess in much greater detail the condition of the Palace and develop approaches for how the building could be restored and renewed.
Noble Lords will want assurances that the expenditure spent on the programme has been necessary. Expenditure for the client team and delivery authority is scrutinised in various ways. The client team, as a joint parliamentary department funded by both Houses, is subject to the scrutiny processes faced by the budgets of both Houses’ administrations, such as the Finance Committees of each House. The annual estimate for the independent delivery authority is scrutinised by the client team, the programme board—including its sub-board, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, and previously the noble Lord, Lord Morse, both of whom I am pleased to see participating in today’s debate—and the client board, of which the noble Lord, Lord Morse, and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, are also members. Finally, there is the Parliamentary Works Estimates Commission, of which I am a member, receiving advice from the Treasury before it is laid in the House of Commons. The programme also continues to draw on outside, independent expertise to provide assurance on plans. This will help to ensure that costed proposals brought forward are robust, providing confidence to both Houses in the information presented.
While we prepare to take a decision on R&R, work on the Palace is not standing still. Parliamentary teams continue to move forward with projects to ensure the safety of the Palace, and all who work within it, before the R&R works commence. This includes plans to repair the Lords Chamber roof; the Victoria Tower programme, which will commence this year alongside wider stonework conservation repairs; and mechanical, electrical, public health and fire safety replacement of life-expired services to ensure the continued operation of the Palace until the start of R&R.
This explains the direction of the programme and the work undertaken over the last year. I continue to emphasise the responsibility that we all have, as custodians of this historic Palace, for the decisions we will need to make on the way forward. The ongoing work that I have outlined will enable the Houses to make the significant decision on the way forward for the programme based on evidence, and—I emphasise this—to make progress. I look forward to hearing the contributions of all noble Lords today. It is a subject on which all of us in this Room and well beyond have our concerns, we are putting in place now what will, I hope, provide us with some lasting solutions. I beg to move.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the Senior Deputy Speaker. I put on record my thanks to him and all those on the two commissions, the programme board for its work and the client team. I apologise to the Committee because I will be saying nothing that I have not said before, and therefore nothing original, but there is nothing new about that in our House. I recommend again that people read Mr Barry’s War, because it is instrumental in understanding the nightmare of getting any kind of renovation of this place and what happened in 1834 and beyond. I fear that we are on the same trajectory today, although perhaps not of 160 years or whatever it is.
I would like to say two things this afternoon. First, I appreciate the email that went out two days ago to request comments and engagement from Members of both Houses; reinforcing that has been very helpful. Secondly, the reason we are here now is the way in which we have had stop/start and not just hiccups but complete reversals. I was very interested in what the Senior Deputy Speaker had to say about the bore-hole. “Bore” is a very good word in these circumstances because we appear now to be doing things that have been done previously. We appear to be covering ground that I thought had been covered by the sponsor body in the early days following the 2019 Act. I thought we went over quite a lot of the ground in the original joint scrutiny committee of 2018, on which I had the genuine pleasure of serving. I thought it was going to be the most unhappy period of my life in politics, but it turned out to be fascinating.
Then, of course, we had the debate on the 2019 Act. I just want to reinforce that we have an Act of Parliament. When I have talked to those working on this programme, past and present, it has struck me that the Act of Parliament is the last thing people turn to. If we are to change elements of that Act, we should bring forward legislation to do so rather than presume that we can override it; I will come back to that in a moment. It is not easy. I do not underestimate for a minute the difficulty that people have gone through. The decision was taken back in February 2022 to change the formula and therefore to change the personnel, many of whom had lived with the programme for quite a long time and had become experts in the challenges. Those recruited to the client team and the new programme board were therefore people coming into it new.
Of course, at the moment we are faced with more than half the House of Commons being new Members from July last year and, as a consequence, coming at this issue fresh. That brings a wholly new challenge. One of the benefits of the House of Lords, of which there are many, is some degree of continuity. We in this House are in the position of having voted on more than one occasion on the options—because the options really have not changed over this past eight and a half years, have they? The options that have been spelt out this afternoon are full decant, which is by far the most economic and practical option; partial decant, which means that, whatever happens, the House of Lords decants; or a muddle over something like 48 years in trying to do this piecemeal. We have been doing piecemeal for several decades.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, for indicating the costs and expenditure that are necessary to keep the building and Parliament functioning but lack transparency. He mentioned the word “transparency”, for which I am grateful, but, like others, the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, has been doing his best to try to get into some of the detail on how decisions are made and who actually makes them in the end. I know that, theoretically, the commissions do, but the Peers’ Entrance fiasco—it has been a fiasco, with the kind of money we have spent on it—is an example of the way in which minds have been changed over the years.
If we can, we must make some progress in 2025 on either reaffirming or changing the decision—but determining it with a manageable timetable, with commitment from both Houses and without interference by single individuals who do not like a particular programme, timetable or outcome and have, over the past three years, grossly interfered with making progress. Let us speak a language that we all understand in saying that that has happened, and try to address the future.
The political consequences of the decisions made are never talked about. Particularly in this House, we need to understand the decisions that will be made by Members about whether they stay on as active Peers and work through the consequences that will have for planning the decant and the office, administrative and support systems that will be required, the political consequences for the balance of groups in our House, and the nature of how we plan for that in a way that we have not done so far. Reducing the numbers in this House, which I am totally in favour of, requires us to take account of personal decisions that will be made once people know what the true timetable will be, even if they believe it is likely to slip.
My final point is, as ever, about access. I welcome very strongly in the introduction this afternoon the commitment to reach 70% access into and within the Palace of Westminster. That is a substantial improvement on previous commitments. It is not what was expected in the 2019 Act, when we envisaged between 80% and 90% access, but it is progress.
I want to reinforce that with new members of the client team and new people brought into the delivery authority, it is really important that they understand that it is about not just restoration but renewal. That was spelled out in the Act after considerable negotiations across groups and with Ministers at the time, who were extremely helpful in understanding that we are thinking of 50, 100 or 200 years ahead, not just the immediate future.
My final final point is: why do we keep on rolling up the total cost in a way that frightens everyone to death? It frightens parliamentarians, it frightens the public and it is a gift to the media. Why do we not talk about the annualised expenditure over the period of time we are talking about? If we had that, people would understand the nature of the investment and the possibilities of managing it within very tight budgets —and whatever the future might hold, they will continue to be very tight—and they might understand that we will then have the kind of ambition that occurred when Notre-Dame, or at least a substantial part of the interior, burned down. The ambition of the French was to make sure that they did a thorough and tremendous job of both restoration and renewal, and they did it in a timescale at which we can only be amazed. We have a history in this country of failing to be able to deliver major projects. This one should be an exemplar. It should be one where we get the costings right to begin with and get the timetable realistic. With artificial intelligence and the use of new technology, we can do things now that we could not even have envisaged back in 2016. It is time to move on from the sterile debates that we have had and to look to the future.
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)
My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, with whom I have had many encounters over the years. I thank the Senior Deputy Speaker for a characteristically thorough, rigorous, courteous and careful report, but decisions have to be made. It is now just on 10 years, and we cannot faff about any longer. We cannot kick it into the long grass, hope an election will come along, conceal or deceive. It is not going to work. We have to make decisions, and we have to make brave decisions.
I was reflecting on those infrastructure projects that many of us have been involved in. Very few people who come into politics know anything about project management or infrastructure. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, does because he was leader of Sheffield City Council and knew a lot about this. My friend, the noble Lord, Lord Morse, knows a great deal about this area, but many of us came as innocents to the subject.
We have all been bruised and burned in the bonfire of public opinion and hostility, and we have all had to make impossible decisions. I suppose my first one was after there had been 29 reports into why London had too many hospitals, all not very good. It needed to have fewer, better hospitals—it needed critical mass—and they needed to integrate with the universities. I just knew that I had to make this decision. Sir Bernard Tomlinson came along and helped on it. He could not believe the hostility and viciousness of people in the public sector. My former boss, the noble Lord, Lord Clarke, used to say that the charm of a board is often in inverse proportion to the virtue of its project. The BAT board was charming, but the Great Ormond Street board was often very difficult indeed. As many in health will know, people can get very emotional. But I made the decisions, and I was not going to back off them.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
I commend the noble Baroness on what she is saying. Perhaps she will recall that on this issue—perhaps not on others—I backed her to the hilt as the shadow Health Secretary, and nearly lost my place on the shadow Cabinet as a consequence but was praised enormously by Tony Blair. I thank her for that.
Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)
That has made my day.
People do notice. Various vice-chancellors kept writing and saying, “We’ve got a new project or development, and we wouldn’t have had that without the decision”. This is not supposed to be a vain speech in any way; I am just trying to gird us up to make the decisions. No more paralysis by analysis—it is time for action, not options. We know the options; we do not want to know them.
I will touch on one or two other examples. There were terrible rows about the British Library—which is now an iconic, world-famous library—with rage that it had overspent, overrun and so on. Gloriously, at the Millennium Commission I was charged with all sorts of projects. For example, there was rage about the Portsmouth millennium tower, which was going to cost £32 million but actually cost nearly £40 million. It opened five years after the millennium; what a disgrace. I was getting a fierce kicking by the media on this one, and I needed to go and look at my sources. So I thought, “Well, the Battle of Trafalgar was in 1805, and Nelson’s Column wasn’t unveiled until 1843—and the price had doubled”. So I felt I was not alone. These matters are almost inevitable.
But what is best practice? We cannot talk just about all these problems. Who has done this spectacularly well? I must declare all my interests from my professional life. The 2012 Olympics were an excellent example of project delivery and management. I say this to the politicians: appreciate that, of all those who campaigned for the Olympics, none of them was on the implementation team. This is one of the dilemmas of government. You campaign in opposition, but in government you have to implement, and they are totally different skills. Most people, when they come into government, think that a press notice is an implementation plan. You have a 10-year programme, as a Minister, to work out that this is not actually the same activity at all.
I decided that the Olympics were a very good example. What was their advantage? They had a deadline: a decision had to be made. Otherwise, we would be humiliated in public. Of course, this was Notre-Dame’s great advantage, in a sense: a crisis mobilises people, so action had to be taken and taken fast. It is difficult for us to create that sort of timescale.
Money is always tight: there is never enough money. What the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said was interesting. You must not be entirely duplicitous, because that just generates the rage and cynicism of the public. You can modify scope. Some of the ideas for the redevelopment or refurbishment of Parliament are thrilling. Somebody who helps me was talking about the US congressional visitor centre—a wonderful, state-of-the-art centre. We should take the opportunity to make this a great centre of education, tourism and so forth.
Personally, I am for the decant and am very in favour of Portcullis House for the Commons, but I am not an expert, I am not on any of the committees, and I hope I will not be serving on any of them. I remember going around with Michael Hopkins when he first finished the design—I was a Heritage Minister—and it is a thrilling location. But I am sure we have to move—we cannot do it in half-measures.
The real issue is to have a good client. A former Permanent Secretary used to do a lot of the funding of the renovation of some of the royal palaces, and it was quite difficult at that stage to get not only the lead members of the Royal Family but some of the junior members to realise that if you have a contract, every time you modify it, tinker with it or change it, that is money down the drain. You have to make your decision, stick with it and get on with it, and that of course is what we have to do.
I so admire the committee. Michael, the chairman, is a really excellent man, as we know, and his team are excellent. But poor them, having to deal with parliamentarians, because parliamentarians cannot help but think in five-year terms, and they are particularly vulnerable to getting a kicking from public opinion and so on. I am very sympathetic, and I greatly admire all those who have taken on this huge responsibility. I have looked at their backgrounds. They are obviously extremely competent, capable people, and let us hope they can stay the course and not be driven to frustration by all of us. In short, I admire all those who have put so much into this already, but it cannot go on; we now have to make decisions at the earliest opportunity.
I have a small point that I know noble Lords will appreciate. As I understand it, the renewal and restoration of Parliament requires quite a large working area, and I think Victoria Tower Gardens is the area they will be looking for. That is surely the final nail in the coffin of the ridiculous Holocaust memorial museum, which is an utter waste of public money. It should shoot off to the Imperial War Museum or somewhere else. This is another excellent argument in that department.
I will leave noble Lords with the comments of that Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke—words that I often used to refer to:
“Those who carry on great public schemes must be proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults, and, worst of all, the presumptuous judgements of the ignorant upon their designs”.
In my humble opinion, courage, tenacity and decision-making are required.
Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)
My Lords, we are at last now reaching the critical decision-making phase in relation to the restoration and renewal of this building. I should say up front that although I am currently a member and deputy chair of the R&R programme board, and chair of its sub-board, I am speaking today on my own behalf, not on behalf of any of those bodies. I think we all share the frustration that this seems to be taking a very long time, but I want to try to strike a slightly more optimistic note, at least looking forward.
Although many noble Lords have the impression that not much has been happening over the last few years since the delivery authority was established, that is not correct. This is a very significant project, and an awful lot of work has been done to ensure that we are able to make the right decision later this year. I have been critical, and remain critical to an extent, of the amount that the delivery authority has spent or is spending—and perhaps slightly of how it has been spent. To refer to the point from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, about whether we are duplicating bore-holes and things, I do not think we are, but for various reasons they have happened slightly later in the process than would have been good. They seem to be getting there now, which is good.
There is no doubt at all that a lot of extremely valuable work has been carried out. Importantly, huge expertise and a lot of very deep knowledge about the building have been created. I think we all know all too well that starting a project of this nature without that detailed and deep knowledge is a recipe for disaster.
In addition, over the last few years the governance of the project has changed and is—in my view, anyway—working rather better. The two Houses are working much more closely together and are better, if not perfectly, aligned. In particular, our in-house Strategic Estates team, which knows the building well over the history, is much more involved, which is positive. The delivery authority and Strategic Estates are now working really quite closely together and we seem to have reduced the “them and us” mentality that I think quite seriously dogged the project in its earlier days.
We will make the decision as to how we renew the Palace later this year, with the two Houses making the final decision after it has been recommended by the client board, which is the two commissions working together. It is the process to make that decision that I want to speak about a little. As we heard, three possible options are now being worked on. These are the original “full decant” option, the variation of that option where the Commons would retain a continued presence in the Palace and the Lords would decant, and the newer and slightly less mature option that has become known as “enhanced maintenance and improvement” or EMI, where the project would be phased over a longer period. But let us be brutally honest: all three options will take many years. None of them is quick. I suspect that none of us in this Room is likely, even on the shortest decant process, to come back into this building in our time.
Historically, there has been a bit of a tendency for people to support one or other option, in effect to prejudge the outcome before the output from all the work carried out by the experts over the last few years has been presented. I have argued before that the debate had become rather Brexity, with decanters in one camp and non-decanters in another, so I urge noble Lords to be open-minded. We have not yet seen the findings of all the work that has been carried out, including the expected timeframes, costs, impact of safety and security or levels of disruption.
What is important is that we make the right decision—the one that will stick. The decision should be taken only once we have seen those findings and plans. Anything else would be based not on evidence but on just our own gut feel. The other criticism of politicians, as referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, is that we are all slightly guilty of becoming armchair experts on things. We need to trust the experts who have been working so hard in recent years, so I hope noble Lords will be open-minded and park any judgment until they have seen the evidence and what is actually proposed.
I also want to comment briefly on the third option, the so-called, and perhaps badly named, “enhanced maintenance and improvement” option. It is sometimes described by some Members—I think we have heard it already today—as kicking the can down the road or the “do nothing” option. Someone suggested to me a few days ago that it just means muddling along as we have been to date. I hope I can assure noble Lords that that really is not the case. All three options are being scoped as far as possible to achieve the same levels of outcome as far as safety, accessibility and so on are concerned.
On accessibility, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, that the accessibility and inclusion aspects of this are absolutely front and centre of the appraisal process that we are going through for all three. The difference between them is only how the work would be carried out and over what timeframe.
Noble Lords may remember that we were told in the past that because the building’s services are a single set of services, serving the whole building, it would be possible to do this work only in a single stage and therefore the “full decant” option was the only realistic way forward. But following the work that has been done, it is clear that that is not necessarily the case. There appear to be ways of breaking this up and phasing the work over a longer period, which would potentially reduce the requirement for expensive and disruptive decants.
That is not to prejudge the outcome. I have no idea at this stage which will be the better option: “full decant” may well be the right way to go, or it may not. I want to reassure noble Lords that all three options will be appraised fully and that all three aim to attain the same level of outcome. All will be appraised against the same criteria, which include, among other things, fire protection, health and safety and security, accessibility and inclusion, as I have just mentioned, business continuity and disruption during the process, value for money—very important—timescale, the impact on the heritage of the building and the environmental and social value elements.
We are at a critical point. We must make a decision this year. We must make the right decision that will stick and will save this iconic building for the future. As the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, just mentioned, noble Lords will have received an email recently from the chair of the programme board, Judith Cummins, and from me, encouraging them to engage with the process during this critical next few months. I want to use this opportunity to encourage noble Lords who have not yet done so to take up the opportunity for the tours and the one-to-one sessions with the R&R team. Most importantly, I again urge noble Lords not to prejudge the outcome before the evidence has been provided, to be open-minded and to have trust in the experts who are doing the work. That should make it more likely that we make the right decision for the building and for Parliament.
Baroness Donaghy (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, for his very clear annunciation of the report. It is tempting to look backwards, to dwell on the sorry story of complete failure of political will and the shocking neglect of our heritage. To an extent, it is inevitable that this debate will feel a bit like Groundhog Day. However, I will concentrate on the political sell, on health and safety, and on the risk to our working relationships in this building as it continues to deteriorate.
This morning, a friend and neighbour in Peckham asked me what I was working on. I said, “Well, Parliament’s falling down and it’s going to cost gazillions”. She said, “Well, there’s only two buildings that matter—the Tower of London and Parliament. Tell them to get on with it, or I’ll come down and sort them”. I thought that was quite a good reaction from somebody who had not thought very much about the issue.
This reflects what the report says about public support. The same public have little or no confidence in politicians. The symbolism is important. Although I take what was said by the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and will try to be as open-minded as I can, not being an expert, a total decant would be a signal that we embrace that symbolism. I make a plea to the client board that the narrower issues of finance, architecture and complexity should not swamp that message that we are protecting our heritage. One of the reasons why people are very often disenchanted with politicians is the short-termism and the feeling that they are managing decline rather than protecting our heritage. This is a very good opportunity to try to turn that around.
Of course there will be grumbles about money; frankly, that will happen whatever we do. I have to say that my heart sank when I read that the client board had asked for work on the third option. I hope that, as the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, said, this work will prove me wrong. However, what happens if there is a disaster in the meantime? I assume that there are contingency plans, but it will mean us being forced to take drastic action rather than controlling events. I still believe that this could happen in this building, which is so fraught with difficulties—not just leaks and security issues and all the stuff going on in the basement. This really could happen. Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, can reassure us that there are contingency plans. I am not asking what they are.
When I chaired the former Information Committee 10 years ago, I visited the archives in the Victoria Tower. I could not believe that we were storing our national assets in such an inappropriate building. This has been going on for so much longer than the 10 years that was referred to. Last year, I fell in the Committee Corridor on the first floor because there was a hole under the carpet. It turned out that the metal covers for computer wiring had worked loose and had moved, and repairs had to be done all along that corridor. Members will have noticed the different strips of carpet that have appeared there. Although I went down like a sack of potatoes, fortunately I am well padded and suffered no harm, except perhaps for a dent in the dignity area. However, what might have happened if someone with a stick was walking along, or someone suffering from osteoporosis? It could have been a life-changing experience.
I believe that when work starts on the basement area, it will be a horror story—I fully expect to find Peter Cushing and Vincent Price down there. Bear in mind that the “pipes and wires” referred to on page 24 of the report stretch from Westminster Bridge to Victoria Gardens and will be a continuous process. That is where I find it difficult to find a patchwork approach, or option three, but I am still striving to keep an open mind.
Fifteen years ago, I prepared a report for the then Government on fatalities in the construction industry. Noble Lords might ask what on earth is the relevance of that here. I spent a lot of time on building sites and refurbishment areas, and refurbishment is the area where most accidents take place. It does not take a lot of intelligence to know that you do not leave the family in the house when you are fixing the foundations. Health and safety and access, as has already been said, are vitally important issues, and that includes the workers on site both now and in the future. I believe that it is unfair on our maintenance staff that we expect them to make do and mend in increasingly challenging conditions, and construction workers should be enabled to get on with their job in a controlled environment, not with hundreds of busy people milling around.
My final point is on a more domestic issue, perhaps a sensitive one. It is vitally important and harder to describe. It is the relationship between us as politicians and the administration. As the building throws up more and more problems, the administration does its best to keep the show on the road, and Members, and possibly the leadership, become more and more stressed, anxious and grumpy about the developments or the lack of developments. I believe that there are real dangers here with regard to the working relationship that we have and the understanding, not least because we have this not very well defined area of who is responsible for running what and where the power lies. No matter how much it is written down as joint responsibility, joint boards, joint programmes, this, that and the other, it is not the clearest possible management system that any chief executive officer would welcome if they were taking over an organisation. The longer we allow this to continue—someone actually mentioned 74 years to me as one of the possible options—the less effective we will be as an institution and the more difficult it will be to change the culture of our organisation.
Lord Morse (CB)
My Lords, I realise that as a chartered accountant, my remarks will be quite different to those of some of the other speakers, and I apologise for that in advance. Noble Lords have already had a very clear exposition of the project from the Senior Deputy Speaker and my noble friend Lord Vaux. We have three options to look at, and I am planning to focus primarily on one of them. The others have been covered very well, but I will just say a bit more about the EMI—enhanced maintenance and improvement—option. I have no preference about which option is selected, but I think that it is the one that is possibly the most difficult to understand at this stage, and it needs to be understood. I will make a few remarks only on that subject. All the projects will take a significant time—we have heard that—but it is generally expected that this enhanced maintenance and improvement project will take much longer. That is the first point.
From this, there are more possibilities, or probabilities, for changes in scope to occur during the project because, if you are talking about a project going on for decades and decades, what is wanted will change. People have to understand that. Therefore, we are not talking about a certain prediction of what will in fact be in scope of the project. That will change, or is highly likely to change, perhaps because of inflation, which is higher than we provided for—of course, we are providing for it—and because of changes in information and technology that are almost certain to happen, given the rate of change, as well as because of changes in standards on safety and accessibility. We take those into account, but they are highly likely to change.
From my experience of being involved in major projects, I can say that one of the features of these types of changes is that they all involve additional costs. I have never yet heard somebody running a project run into my room and say, “Look, good news: we’ve changed the scope of the project and we’re cutting a quarter off the cost”. That is just never going to happen. The cost will go only one way: upwards, and quite substantially so. There is already a substantial existing repairs and renewals programme running in the Palace, estimated at £1,045,000 a year—no, a week; I wish it were a year. That is a very substantial sum of money.
It is important to realise that it will be difficult to distinguish this new expenditure on enhanced maintenance and improvement from the existing activity, and I am concerned about that. As we go forward, in future, will we really be able to keep these streams of activity, happening on the same site, clearly separated? I do not doubt that we have plans to do that, but it will be challenging, I suspect. We need to think about that very carefully and make sure that we do not find costs sliding from one category to another because it is managerially convenient at that moment in time. This is not something I am making up, by the way. There are current experiences where you can see that sort of thing happening. So, if we are going to go for this approach, we will need to go very strongly indeed in terms of financial control at a level that we do not always accomplish at the present time, frankly.
The reason we are considering EMI alongside the other options, which were there much earlier, is that a significant number of Members were not attracted to decanting. They made their views clearly known. Therefore, we found ourselves with Members who told us that they were prepared to accept inconvenience and delay as a price for staying in the Palace. But, having contracted to pay that price, will they continue to want to pay it once we get into the project? I am sorry but there is such a thing as renegotiation of a contract, and there are plenty of Members who are perfectly capable of renegotiating this one. I just remark to noble Lords that, if this approach were to be agreed, we may find that there is more negotiation and more change in the project.
Finally, there is a risk that this approach may be regarded as kicking the can down the road, as regards substantial expenditure at a time when the public finances are under extraordinary pressure. It is not just ordinary pressure right now; it is extraordinary pressure. Therefore, we must recognise that, although there may be no kicking the can down the road, the temptation when we actually come to vote may be quite strong. It is worth watching out for that.
My conclusion is that, if we select EMI, those initials may come to mean “enhanced money invested” instead of “enhanced maintenance and improvement”—that is quite possible. That is my little bit of poetry for today. We need to exercise vigilance if we go down this route. I am not saying that we cannot do it, but—I am repeating myself—it will require a quality of vigilance and control that we do not always exhibit. Therefore, we need to do better on that.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Morse, who set out the scene wisely on how we manage a future that will undoubtedly change.
I thank the committee, the staff and the contractors for their work on this marathon of marathons. I also thank ParliAble for advocating for disabled staff and parliamentarians. I am particularly grateful for the meeting that I and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, had with an architect and some of the staff to discuss disability access in the proposed committee rooms and Lords Chamber. I will return to disability access as my principal point in a minute.
First, though, I was for a decade senior bursar of first one and then a second Cambridge college, both of which had listed buildings. Partial decants or, worse, the “muddling through” option, are financially irresponsible and utterly impractical—I have tried them. We are finding the current works difficult, but that is nothing to these two options. So, frankly, for both the public purse and the smooth running of both Houses of Parliament, option 1, the full decant, is the only sensible option.
The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, was right to say that costs should be annualised. Cambridge college bursars discussed this matter regularly in my day. The older colleges thought that 100 years minimum was probably quite a wise move. Indeed, when we were discussing chapel repairs, the kinsman of the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, George Reid, senior bursar of St John’s, turned to the bursar of Emmanuel, founded merely in the 17th century, and said, “You modern post-Reformation colleges”. This period of time that we are considering is absolutely vital for us. We are not building for the next 50 years—indeed, if we go for the “muddling through” option, it will not be done in 50 years—but perhaps we are following Barry and doing it for the next 200 years.
Turning to accessibility, I want to start with the bullet point on accessibility on page 13, which the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, referred to. It mentions
“an average enhancement from the current 12% step free access to circa 60% across the Palace and greater coverage in public areas”.
The improvements to the visitor routes are really helpful, because the public have found it very difficult. But I am concerned that only 60% step-free access—the detail of what that means is unspecified—will still mean that parts of the Palace will be no-go areas or that there will be equally bad alternative routes. I use these daily, as do my other colleagues in wheelchairs, and they are long, slow and sometimes reliant on other people’s intervention. For example, when I wish to go into one of the W committee rooms off Westminster Hall, I have to go to the stair lift and find a member of staff, who has to ring the member of staff with the key, who then has to come back, unlock the stair lift and turn it on for me. I have to repeat the same when the meeting I am attending has finished. On one occasion, it took half an hour to find someone, so effectively I missed the meeting. I know that in theory that should not happen, but it does.
The ministerial corridors immediately behind the Speaker’s end of the House of Commons are also inaccessible because the lift is behind a stone arch and you cannot get a wheelchair through it. If you go the long way around, because of the way the stairs work, you have to leave your wheelchair on a landing from the wheelchair-accessible lift and go upstairs, which is fine for those who can do it. I understand from the 60% figure that some of these things will not be dealt with, and that concerns me.
As I have already mentioned, we hope that the fully restored Palace will last 200 years, and it is absolutely vital that the vast majority of the Palace is accessible—fully accessible, including step-free. I have already mentioned the tourist route being more accessible, but why, oh why, are the two lifts by the Commons cafeteria linked when one of them is too small for wheelchairs? By the way, the same is true in Portcullis House: the only way to get to the lower ground if you are coming from the top floor is to get into the next lift, go down to the ground floor, get out and then call the lift to go to the lower ground floor. That sort of practicality is something that gets lost in mechanical design because it is convenient to have two lifts side by side that operate together. The problem is that, when I am going from Portcullis House back into this building to vote, I can miss the vote. So, I am really grateful that the House still allows me to vote remotely, because otherwise it would be hit and miss. I cannot use the escalator; I get completely stuck. I am making this point, and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, would make similar, or perhaps different, points about wheelchair users. We cannot use the building as it stands now in the same way as everybody else, and most people are not aware of those issues, which is completely understandable.
Security now means that heavy doors are shut when tourists are going through. Normally, in any other building, you would hold them back with electric magnets, or you would have a pass reader and they would open automatically. I am told that that will not happen, partly for heritage reasons and partly for security reasons. Because of my condition, I cannot open the heavy doors. I have had to ask permission to have the doors just outside here from Peers’ Lobby into this corridor held open for 10 minutes after the House rises because otherwise I literally cannot get out without somebody opening those doors. I really hope that the committee will look at the disability issues in the day-to-day life of different people. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, would have many points about how he and his guide dog have to navigate the building.
I move to committee rooms and the Chambers, including this Moses Room, in the future. This space and the space opposite are the only places that wheelchairs can fit in this Room. We cannot get into the back row, we cannot get down to the top end, so if we were Ministers or shadow Ministers, we could not participate, we cannot get out at the back and once we are in place, we block everybody because they cannot get past the wheelchairs. I know that work on the Moses Room is planned, and I am really grateful, but it is the mindset for the design of the future that I am most concerned about.
I am particularly concerned about the Lords Chamber. I thank the Lord Speaker, the Deputy Speaker and Black Rod for listening to my concerns and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. I am really grateful; it was much appreciated. Politicians want to sit with their groups. Even Cross-Benchers would describe themselves as politicians, although they are not in a political party. It is good that, unlike the Commons, our House has what my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester describes as the “mobility Bench”—the nobility on the mobility Bench.
However, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, said in the Chamber the other day that she found it very difficult sitting beside me when I was being a Front-Bencher because people immediately assumed that she was in the same party as me. The noble Lord, Lord Clarke, and I sit beside each other the whole time, and we quite often have to sit beside each other and argue completely different points. That changes the dynamic of how the politics work. It is not like the European Parliament or other modern ones where you may even be seated alphabetically. In our House, it really matters.
I was very disappointed that when the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and I met the people to look at the plans no disabled politicians had been talked to before they were drawn up. In the plans that we saw, we could not get our wheelchairs around the new committee rooms planned on the main committee room corridor. There is no facility for a Minister or shadow Minister from the main opposition party to speak at the Dispatch Box because you cannot get a wheelchair in there. There will be some tip-up seats, which is good, but that will still mean that some people who are not in the main parties will not be able to sit with their colleagues. I do not believe that this matter is yet being addressed.
As the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, said, we are now reaching the key decision-making point. Nearly 200 years ago, Peers and MPs would have been carried upstairs, in or out of their bath chairs, to get into the Chamber. Today, many disabled Peers and staff still find the Palace seriously problematic to navigate and participate in, including not being able to fulfil their roles politically. To put it at its simplest, do we really want a disabled parliamentarian in 150 years’ time to face not being able to speak from the Dispatch Box? I hope these issues can be readdressed.
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. With her customary clarity and passion, she raised a number of interesting issues that I hope very much are paid attention to as these three options are worked up. We had two interesting speeches from my noble friends Lord Vaux and Lord Morse. Apart from saying that I agree with what they said, I hope that everyone in the Room understands how much we owe these two, who have been using their skills to bear down on the costs. The costs that they have identified and saved run into the millions, and we owe them an enormous amount of gratitude for putting in a lot of work. They have recently swapped jobs: my noble friend Lord Vaux was the chair of the Finance Committee and went off to be chair of the sub-group. They swapped jobs to be able to have continuity and to continue this vital phase.
The four of us are sitting here because the other person to whom we owe a lot is the noble Lord, Lord Best, who we will hear from shortly. He was on the sponsor body in some of the very tough years early on and particularly over Covid, when he was still turning up to all the meetings there. We owe him a lot. I wanted to record that first.
I refer to my register of interests, particularly my shareholding in Hiscox Group, which is if not the largest, one of the largest insurers of heritage buildings and assets in Europe. This was an area of my responsibility for many years. I will return in a moment to some comments about risk in the project, but I want to be yet another person underlining the critical importance of arriving, this year, at a decision between the three remaining options and starting the process of implementing that decision.
As we have already heard from the Senior Deputy Speaker and others, and as is summarised in the report that we are discussing, the annual cost of the delivery authority, the budgeted bit, is more than £80 million. That is an enormous amount of money. It is a tap that is wide open and pouring public money away. If we do not reach a decision, the tap will not be shut off. It is extremely important, therefore, that we move from the choosing part of this project to the implementation phase. I am coming on to the large number of moving parts that are going on.
Coming back to risk, apart from turning off the tap there is a risk problem in the building. There are two types of risk with a building such as this. There is the catastrophic risk—a major fire wiping out one-third of the building or something like that—and there is the attritional risk. These are the small things. In her wonderful speech, the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, referred to an attritional risk going on inside this building. In recent years, the catastrophic risk has been patrolled by a series of people who we probably do not know, although I do now know them. The noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and I had a very interesting meeting with them. They have been doing very clever things in the roof of this building and all around the building to patrol the catastrophic risk. I fully accept that the catastrophic risk is much less now than it was five or 10 years ago. That is a great achievement.
However, the attritional risks have been rising, just as they do in an old motor car. We heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, about her attritional risk. We experienced the attritional risk of the heating problems this week. We have experienced the attritional risk of the electrical problems this week. There are many other attritional risks. There have been numerous plumbing attritional risks, with big chunks of the building no longer there. This attritional risk continues to rise. The noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and I were looking at some figures when we were discussing this. They indicated that there is a relentless rise in the level of attritional risk. Eventually, you can get a concatenation of attritional risks which mean that you would have a serious interruption in the ability to use this building. That is a second reason, apart from the money tap, for making sure that we achieve a resolution on which of the three options. I am pretty even-handed among the options and happy to go with whatever looks sensible when things come out, but we must have a choice.
Moving on to some practical issues that have come up, the struggle has been to get all three options to the same level of development so that all Members of our House and the other place can look at things in a comparable way, a bit like when you are buying an Amazon product, and say that having looked at them all comparably, “The best one is this one”. It is a mixture of all sorts of things. What the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, was talking about is one of the things that is terribly important as we begin look at them. Money is obviously another thing.
The third option—the EMI option—is being worked up by Strategic Estates, whereas the first two options are being worked up by the delivery authority. As we have already heard, Strategic Estates started that particular race several hundred yards behind the other runners, so there has been considerable concern, I would say, among the commission and the programme board that this option will not be worked up well enough. There has been an awful lot of pencil in the back for the poor old Clerk of the Parliaments. In fact, in December, he was asked yet again at the commission meeting; he has given us very good assurance that that option will be worked up on time so that we can compare all three options together. That was an important thing to say.
There is one inelegance going on at the moment of which we all need to be aware: for two of the options, and possibly even for the third option, we will need the Queen Elizabeth II building. To be able to assess that in the way the options are worked up—in fact, for the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, as well—we need to have our people go into that building and conduct a series of investigations. At the moment, it has not been possible for us to do that. It is a roadblock. I can tell the Committee that the House of Lords team—I shall come on to what that might mean as my last point—is very focused on trying to unblock this inelegance because it is, I suppose, one thing that could prevent all these options arriving on time. We need to do that because we need to know that we will be able to occupy the building and that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will be able to be with us next door as well.
I come to the team. The team in the House of Lords is pretty good in that, obviously, there is the commission and our chair, the Lord Speaker, and the management board and its chair, the Clerk of the Parliaments. In fact, there was a meeting between those two bodies only yesterday. I can say that we work well together. We might disagree on some things—indeed, we do—but that is healthy. If I reported that we did not, noble Lords would be suspicious, but we are a focused and cohesive team, particularly on this issue. That has not necessarily always been the case but it is something that all the people who are part of that team are very focused on maintaining because, in our bit of this very complicated thing, it is an important feature.
The poor old House of Commons team has a whole lot of brand-new Members, of course, but it is well aware of the necessity of behaving like a team. I know from talking to one of the members of that team that they are working hard at trying to make sure that they, too, are a good team. However, it will be vital for these two teams, at the end of the process, to work together respectfully and agree on one of the options so that that option can be put as the preferred option to both Houses. It will then be important that those Houses are led to the same place because it would be very difficult if the Houses came to different views; in fact, it would be back to square one. This is something where there are an awful lot of moving parts, but no one should underestimate the determination of the House of Lords team to make sure that we get there in the end.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, I am delighted to follow the Convenor of the Cross Benches—the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull—who does such a great job for all of us Cross-Benchers. As he mentioned, I was a member of the board of the R&R sponsor body for its full existence, and, three years ago, I acted as the Lords spokesperson in presenting a similar report to the one introduced by the Senior Deputy Speaker today. Back then, I reported substantial progress toward bringing forward costed alternatives for restoring and renewing the Palace and noted that a decision by both Houses would be needed in the not-too-distant future. That all sounds rather familiar today.
At that time, the choices before us were between only the first two of the three options now being scrutinised by the delivery authority on behalf of all of us. In essence, our choices were between a “full decant” option for both Houses and a “continued presence” option for the House of Commons. Now, the Strategic Estates team is adding the third option of “enhanced maintenance and improvement”—I must get used to using “EMI” for this. The view back then, in November 2021, was that the second option—the continued presence of the Commons in the Palace throughout the works, first in one Chamber and then in the other—would be a very unwise proposition. It would greatly extend the period of building works, during which the public would not be able to visit the Palace—Parliament sees 1.25 million visitors a year—and would mean the Commons having to operate in the midst of probably the largest restoration project in the world, facing all the hazards of extra security risks, fire risks, asbestos, noise, dust and vibration. Further, since the underground plumbing and power would be out of action, temporary systems and generators would need to run in the courtyards, occupying space also needed by the contractors.
I suspect that these concerns about the Commons occupying the Palace throughout the restoration programme remain valid, but I look forward to hearing how this “continued presence” option has been developed. I will try to keep an open mind on this one, as requested by the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, but I want to raise one fundamental issue surrounding the third option: “enhanced maintenance and improvement”. Our sponsor body board was informed that a
“rolling, sequenced programme of works”,
requiring only minimal relocation, was not viable because a “make do and mend” programme could not tackle the half-mile of continuous jumbled pipes, cables, sewage systems and other horrors that lie beneath us. Many of your Lordships will have visited this scary scene and will understand that replacing all this outdated and hazardous chaos will be a huge undertaking; that echoes the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy. My question, therefore, is: what has changed to overcome this fundamental blockage to any continuous, ongoing repairs and improvement programme? How can this absolute prohibition on both Houses continuing to operate within the Palace, while the basement has been transformed, now be resolved?
In conclusion, I express complete sympathy with those grappling with the same issues that haunted us back in the early 2020s. The noble Lord, Lord Morse, estimated that such maintenance and improvements, which take decades, mean that extra costs will arise. He expressed concerns from a financial perspective. We were convinced by the much more straightforward argument that it was simply impossible to undertake that extensive improvement of the basement without decanting all, or at least half, of us for a time. I would be delighted by any words of reassurance—I am encouraged by the words of the noble Lord, Lord Vaux—that the seemingly insuperable problems in choosing a programme of ongoing maintenance works only can be overcome. I look forward to any response that the Senior Deputy Speaker can bring us.
Lord Colgrain (Con)
My Lords, before I address the report, will noble Lords allow me to digress a little? My interest in this building and, subsequently, R&R came about when I was a member of your Lordships’ Finance Committee. There were two incidents while I was a member that made me realise: there are some fundamental issues that we are all going to have to overcome. The first was when we were looking at Big Ben and the very significant overrun on the budget. I forget the exact figures; I think that the original budget was £24 million and that we finished up at about £80 million.
One of the questions we asked was: why are there such overruns on things such as the stonework? We thought that these were relatively straightforward matters to be investigated. Why had they not been using things such as cherry-pickers to look behind the stone to see whether water had ingressed and there was decay? We were told that cherry-pickers could not be used because of the peregrines nesting on the tower. When it was pointed out that peregrines nest for only three months of the year—so, what was wrong with the other nine months?—we did not get an answer. We realised that perhaps a little more work could be done in that regard.
The second incident was to do with Westminster Hall. I was up on the roof talking to the workmen there. Noble Lords may recall that the cupola was damaged by a bomb during the Second World War. They were trying to extract it or work on it, and it became a much more complex issue than they had appreciated. They had to take gas bottles up on to the roof but, in order to comply with health and safety regulations, they had to take the gas bottles down off the roof at the end of every working day. This meant that, for a variety of reasons, the gas bottles were being used for only two hours during the eight-hour day. When we asked whether it was possible to have an exemption so that they could be kept up there, the answer was no. Again, I found myself thinking, “We’re going to need a certain amount of change in our working practice in the whole Palace”.
This goes back to the point from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, about Notre-Dame. I went there about 18 months ago, and was there at 10 pm. Behind the hoardings I could hear the noise of all the workmen, who were working 24 hours a day. When R&R came about, the suggestion was made by the Finance Committee that it might be possible to see whether we could have workmen on site here 24 hours a day, but that was pooh-poohed. It was out of the question; it was not going to happen. I wonder why. There is something generally wrong with our approach.
Let me come back to Notre-Dame for a second. A senior military man was given that role because it was seen as a major logistical exercise. Again, there is probably a lesson there for us—I will come back to that in a second on the actual report. It is also heartening to know that the senior carpenter, who was using medieval tools to do the axe work on the central part of the spire, was an Englishman. That is rather gratifying. I am sorry for digressing too much.
Lord Blunkett (Lab)
I am really enjoying this. Forgive me but I have to conclude, after only 10 years—well, nine and a half years—in your Lordships’ House and 28 years down the Corridor, that the default position in the Palace of Westminster is always to say no.
Lord Colgrain (Con)
I extend my thanks to the Senior Deputy Speaker and his office for the time they spent with me following my Question for Written Answer on this subject; I worded my Question loosely but they were most helpful in ensuring that I was provided with all the information I sought.
I congratulate all concerned on the annual progress report before us today. It is clearly presented and provides most of the details likely to be asked about by Members of both Houses, including a layman such as me. There are three particular questions that I would like to ask. The first relates to funds expended, which have been mentioned many times already this afternoon. I hugely appreciate and applaud the work undertaken over many years by the four Peers sitting in front of me.
The subject of R&R has been discussed in one guise or another since 2016, when substantial costs started being incurred. When I submitted a Written Question in July 2022, I was told that the costs paid for by the Lords since 2014 were then £58 million, made up of staff costs of £7 million and contractors’ costs of £51 million. I was also told that the then Parliamentary Works Sponsor Body and the then restoration and renewal delivery authority had run up costs of £212 million for the two years between 2020 and 2022, which included £33 million in salary costs and £151 million in contractors’ costs. I have now been told, in a Written Answer dated 8 January, that the investment to date in the R&R programme totals £377 million, with a further £91 million authorised for the current financial year. To date, therefore, Parliament—or, rather, the taxpayer—has incurred actual forecast costs of approximately £450 million, a sum of money that is almost impossible to comprehend.
What do we have to show for this? Under “Key Milestones” on page 28 of the report, we are told that R&R surveys are ongoing, as are early and enabling works design and decant plans. All these were in train when your Lordships previously voted for and agreed to a full decant. We are also told that the strategic plan is published again, and the budget is approved again. Since the Palace design options are ongoing and neither costed proposals nor an invitation to tender for the works has been initiated, does it not seem that the budget is optimistic, it being so located in the report without a very heavy qualification?
Unless the Executive in the Commons commit to initiating the plan, we are going around in circles, albeit ever-deceasing ones. Given the current Government’s self-imposed budget restraints, is there a realistic possibility of this initiation happening? I and many others had hoped that the fire at Notre-Dame in Paris would have prompted the then Government into action, since we know that this building is a fire hazard and that if it was any other building in the country, it would be closed as being unsafe. If authority for R&R is agreed, does the current composition of the management team and its structure lend itself to a senior industrialist at its head? That is what would be needed for there to be any chance of R&R being executed on time or on budget, unless we follow the French example.
Would, for example, Sir Alastair Morton, favoured by Margaret Thatcher on Eurotunnel and later John Prescott on Railtrack, consider that he could work with the delivery board’s expenditure, scrutinised by R&R client teams, House finance teams, the delivery authority board, the R&R programme board, the R&R client board and the Parliamentary Works Estimates Commission? Can the Senior Deputy Speaker indicate how this structure can be made sufficiently commercial such that the plan can be enacted when a positive vote for full R&R comes about?
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, I hesitate to follow such a display of expertise and service to the House as has been displayed in the debate this afternoon. My only experience in construction was, as head of my Oxford college, bringing in a building that then cost £12 million on time and within budget. It was a five-year programme. The only serious problem we faced was that towards the end of the five years, with 100 builders working on site every day, one girl student complained to me that one builder had wolf-whistled at her.
In a similar debate in 2022, I expressed alarm at the delays that this project has suffered and called for an urgent start. If a full decant is needed, that is what we should accept. We need to earn the gratitude of future generations rather than their dismay that we let things degenerate to the level that is apparent now. This project has undergone change after change in governance, without penalties for failure and delay, and with some ambiguity in who is to take responsibility. The decision about decant that should have been taken years ago is still not taken. This is all well known. I add that if we are looking for a pain-free way to reduce the numbers in your Lordships’ House, a full decant to the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre is the best possible way one can think of. I am very surprised that the Leader of the House has not taken this up.
My main message today is quite different. I wish to bring up the question of the elephant in the room, or rather the scaffolding in the gardens—a difficult issue that R&R has so far shied away from. That is the impact of building a Holocaust memorial and underground learning centre in Victoria Tower Gardens, which will either render R&R impossible or make it more difficult and expensive. If the memorial and underground centre are built—and, of course, I hope that they will not be, as planned—and are built before R&R, they will get in the way. If they are built afterwards or during, it is impossible to imagine a memorial to 6 million deaths taking shape and being visited when it will be surrounded —right up to its boundaries—by all the paraphernalia that will accompany R&R. Instead of reverence and contemplation, there will be masonry, concrete mixers, builders, scaffolding, materials and a jetty, with trucks roaring by and unloading around Millbank.
There will be three projects ongoing, including the memorial, that conflict with each other—all of them centred on Victoria Tower Gardens. One is the repair of Victoria Tower itself, delayed, I read, by some error in the procurement process, but now expected to start imminently and run for at least five years. It is not strictly an R&R project, but I raise it because its repair will need some occupation of Victoria Tower Gardens. All the proposals for restoration and renewal will involve the use of a chunk of Victoria Tower Gardens as the main area for keeping all the equipment, access to the Palace and so on. Two of the proposals for repair involve tunnels under the Palace going into Victoria Tower Gardens, with great upheaval—remembering also that the so-called learning centre attached to the memorial will also be underground. It brings to mind the Channel Tunnel excitement, when the team starting in France and the team starting here eventually met exactly in the middle. The restoration and renewal works will reach nearly as far as the Buxton memorial, and the Holocaust memorial will reach up to the Buxton memorial from the other end.
The current plan—I express my gratitude to the thoughtful presentation given by my noble friend Lord Vaux to the Select Committee on the Holocaust Memorial Bill—indicates that almost half the area of Victoria Tower Gardens will be needed for the full duration of the works programme, which could last for 30 years or more. Work is unlikely to start until 2029, and the Holocaust memorial may or may not be under construction then. The planning permission needed for R&R will be more difficult to obtain if a memorial is built or planned to be built. Nothing of the gardens will remain open once all these works are under way, contrary to the London County Council (Improvements) Act 1900, which prohibited building in Victoria Tower Gardens—the very Act that the Government now propose to remove to make room for a Holocaust memorial. If a memorial is built, there will still be an obligation under that 1900 Act to keep the rest of Victoria Tower Gardens open for the public, and it is impossible to see how that can be achieved. I would welcome the Senior Deputy Speaker’s view on that.
If the memorial is built, it will damage the ability to get planning permission and may cause a need for further amendment of the 1900 Act. It will restrict the ability of the restoration and renewal to use the gardens as it might wish to, including early work to build a jetty and the tunnels that I mentioned. If both projects are undertaken, there will be no gardens left, and the atmosphere that might be conducive to a memorial will be destroyed. There will also be an impact on Millbank traffic, with buses of visitors to the memorial potentially conflicting with lorries of building works, even before R&R gets properly under way.
There is a simple solution. R&R is of course of great importance to the nation, to the work of government, to the dignity of Parliament and to the needs of future generations. It must, sooner rather than later, be allowed to go ahead as efficiently as possible. So the memorial, and in particular the underground learning centre, must either be moved to a more peaceful location or delayed until R&R is completed. The stubbornness behind the memorial project is hard to understand. It can now be seen to be adverse to the national interest, in addition to all its other flaws. We must get on with R&R and bring to an end the costly indecision and fire risks, et cetera, that we face now.
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness; I agree with every word she said. I worked on the Channel Tunnel as an engineer for 15 years under Sir Alastair Morton, and I have to tell her that we did meet in the middle. We had a nice party, but we did meet in the middle, which was just as well.
I thank the Senior Deputy Speaker for this report. It is very useful, but some of the comments from other noble Lords have put it into context. I will say just a few words about the issues of fire and evacuation, which again I have been following for some time. I have to challenge the report, where it says on page 6:
“Our most important responsibility is making sure that the Parliamentary estate continues to be a safe place for the thousands of people who work in it”.
I would challenge “continues”, and I shall come back to that.
I have worked on fire issues in tunnels—the Channel Tunnel and Swiss tunnels—and I try to follow some of the awful fires that we have had since then in the UK and elsewhere. The noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, mentioned Notre-Dame, and I also remember putting down a Question about how the Government or the chairs of the committees, or whoever, will stop the same thing happening here. I got a very long Answer that said, “It won’t happen here because we’ve sorted out the risks and the evacuation”.
I believe that one of the problems in this building is evacuation. One of the answers I got a few years ago was deeply worrying. Some of us were thinking, “If there’s a fire on the committee floor, somewhere in the centre between the Lords bit and the Commons bit, and it involved the people in the committee rooms at the Lords end of it being evacuated but they could not use the main staircase because that was blocked, how would they evacuate?” The answer was that there are two staircases on the Lords side, as we all know, where one person goes down at a time. I could not even help people in wheelchairs—they would not answer that question. But there could be 500 people in those rooms, and how would they get down these stairs, with or without guidance?
I wonder how many noble Lords who are lucky enough to have offices in this building have thought about what would happen if their main staircase were blocked by fire or something else. That is quite a worry too because there is no other way out. They would probably find that a fire engine could not get to the outside and, if it did, the ladder would not be long enough, and all that. So we have some serious risks.
What really worries me about the evacuation, particularly on the first floor, was that I was told that somebody in the House of Commons, probably the Speaker, said that they could not have a proper evacuation with real people who might be going to committee rooms because that would delay the business of the House. In other words, they did it with staff. Most staff here are pretty agile—they probably have to be to get around this place—but they did it with them a few years ago because they could not do it with real members of the public. That is a really serious issue. If we get 50 people in a committee room and there is a fire, it is not going to look good. So I hope something can be done about that in the short term.
My suggestion in one of my several meetings with the Senior Deputy Speaker was that they should install more sprinklers—or mists. Mists is the latest way of putting out fires. I was basically told—of course, he did not do it, but he got his specialists in—that you cannot really do that until you have finished all the building work, then you install all the mists or the sprinklers when the building is nearly finished. The obvious question is: what happens if the building does not get finished because it burns down before you have even put them in? Why do not you put them in first? My question today to the Senior Deputy Speaker is, if there is work being done on the roof of the Chamber, what about having some mist in there, or anywhere else? That is just one idea. The idea that we leave it all until the end confirms to me that we do not have a particularly safe place to work.
Looking at the alternatives, I favour the total decant. I am sure that we have to. Several noble Lords have talked about the problem of cost overruns on HS2 and other major projects. I can name Hinkley Point, Crossrail and a few other ones. The one thing that these projects and many others have in common is that they seem to provide very large and expensive palaces for their temporary workers. They might be four or five storeys high, and they will be fully air conditioned, obviously, probably with lifts and everything else. They last for however long the project lasts and they are taken down. I wonder whether we would not actually be better off starting from a clean, flat piece of land that does not include Victoria Tower Gardens—because that is a that is a garden, as the noble Baroness said—and build a temporary building in there, or several temporary buildings. One thing that I do not think many noble Lords have spoken about is the importance of the House of Lords and the House of Commons operations being close. I personally go in there quite often, and I am sure a lot of other noble Lords do too. I think of going from QEII and crossing several roads to the Department of Health building, which I think is proposed at the moment. It has the advantage that it is also listed, so it is a “We can adapt that listed building, but we are not going to destroy this one” kind of thing. It is still listed.
A flat area for a temporary building could look extremely nice somewhere. I would favour Horse Guards Parade. I think we could probably do without marching the Army once a year for a few years, but other noble Lords may have different views about that. A new temporary building for the two Houses close to each other would be worth looking at. It is much easier, as contractors will tell you, to build a new building, a temporary one on a flat site with the services close by, than trying to adapt something, even if it is QEII or another building. By the time we have gone into it and decided how much adaption needs doing for our perfection, I think we should be better off looking at another site which is close to here but, at the moment, free from other interference.
I think I have probably covered enough ground now to explain why I would like to challenge, if you like, the report saying that it continues to be a safe place. I think that in addition to taking it forward, and I hope we do take it forward as far as possible, we should see some proper evidence that the precautions that can be done at the moment are being done and are not being delayed due to further complaints from the Speaker of the House of Commons, or whoever.
The Earl of Devon (CB)
My Lords, it is a privilege to end this debate and to follow the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. Indeed, it does feel like Groundhog Day. We have all, I think, been here before. In September 2016 when the Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster published a report setting out the options for R&R and in January 2018, a full decant, I think, was agreed. In 2019, we passed the Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill, and a somewhat less grey-bearded Earl of Devon gave his second speech on the Floor of the House in the Second Reading debate, enthusiastically embracing the full decant. I suggested that your Lordships might choose to go on a progress around the nations during our forced absence from Westminster.
A full decant was recommended again in 2021, then it seems that politics got involved. Confidence in the strategic governance evaporated, the House of Commons Commission insisted on replacing the sponsor body, and progress has stalled, as we all know, leaving the long-term status of this precious and much-beloved Palace perilously unresolved. Some important essential stabilisation works have progressed, and further studies have been commissioned, but it is now January 2025 and we have noticeably regressed from the bold and positive tones of those early years. As a hereditary Member of your Lordships’ House, I am shortly to leave Parliament for good, and a project that I warmly embraced on arrival here has got absolutely nowhere. This is disappointing.
The annual progress report we are now debating lauds the publication of the R&R strategic case and the fact that further work will now be undertaken to develop the three options outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner—the full decant, continuous presence or enhanced maintenance—to that ensure that Members of both Houses are provided with the detail they need to support informed decisions. Those informed decisions were taken years ago and the full decant was agreed, but Parliament has been twiddling its governance thumbs as this world heritage site crumbles around our ears.
I was prompted to speak today by a question that I posed on the Floor of the House earlier this week, regarding Historic England’s Heritage at Risk Register. I did not get a clear answer from the DCMS Minister about whether there was any danger that the Palace of Westminster will be added to that register in the near future—and I wonder whether anyone knows. When we were debating R&R back in 2019, there was a very clear message that time was of the essence, that the Palace was in imminent danger of catastrophic failure and collapse, and that we were being asked to work in conditions that posed a very real threat to the health and safety of ourselves, our guests and our staff. Is that still the case, or were we crying wolf back then? By overstating that imminent danger, has the force of the argument been lost, or are we simply to be grateful for the heroic efforts of our maintenance and fire protection staff that a disaster has not yet struck? It is important that we know.
I do not mean to criticise those tireless individuals who have dedicated themselves to R&R over the years. I admire the fortitude of the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Vaux, whom I know personally, in taking on the challenges inherent in this leviathan of a project, as I admire all those involved. However, the final implications of our dithering are eye-watering: £280.1 million in the last three years alone is a stratospheric and vulgar amount of money to spend on making no progress. Can anyone identify the total cost of Parliament’s lack of decision-making? The noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, put it at £450 million, so I thank him for that. That is the actual expenditure on R&R, but what about the increased cost of completing the works, given the passage of time and inflation? Are we really getting value for money and setting a good example as a decision-making body? Are we really appropriate stewards of our nation’s most important heritage? At a time when every Treasury Minister at the Dispatch Box bemoans the £22 billion black hole, are we right to be pouring yet more resources into this disastrous project?
By way of comparison, Historic Houses, of which I am a member, represents 1,450 privately held historic properties. Many of those, including my own home, face similar problems to the Palace of Westminster, with creaking Victorian infrastructure in well-loved and oft-used listed heritage structures at the heart of their communities. No private owner would be permitted to dither as we have. Indeed, these debates make me feel much better about the state of my home. Those 1,450 properties collectively have a repairs backlog of some £2 billion, which has often seemed like a vast sum, until you realise that Parliament has spent a quarter of that sum in considering R&R and making no progress. That is a quarter of the sum of 1,400 historic properties around our country that we have spent on this one building, making no decision.
One of the repeated refrains in the annual progress report is the effort being made to inform, educate and engage. Of course, the irony is that, given the passage of time, many of the Members of Parliament engaged over recent years are no longer here, given the huge turnover at the last election. A lot of that education money is therefore wasted. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, identifies that nearly half of those in the other place are new to Westminster. Given that it was the House of Commons Commission that derailed our previously settled intention to resolve by decant, what particular efforts are being made to inform Parliament’s new Members of the R&R programme, and are they really engaged? It may be that so many new Members will give us some fresh insights.
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, for highlighting the importance of archaeology. I very much identified in the Second Reading debate the essential opportunity that we have, in conducting R&R, to understand a little better the history of this Palace and our Parliament. I was upset to learn, in my early investigations, that the archaeological part of R&R was to be minimised; I hope that that can be turned around.
Finally, given my pending departure from this Palace as a hereditary, I offer once again a plea to those considering the accessibility of the restored and renewed Palace. As I stated back in 2019, accessibility is not just physical accessibility, although the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, made clear the importance of physical accessibility. Can we please also consider the accessibility of the stories that we tell in the imagery that we display? We are removing hereditaries from the House because the hereditary principle is not thought to reflect the values of modern Britain. Accordingly, row on row of Christian white men’s heraldic devices, as we see all around us in this House, are surely not accessible to the diverse population that we aspire to serve. I remember being told back in 2019 that one of the triumphs of R&R will be that, when your Lordships return to the House, be it in 10, 15, 20 or 25 years, Members will not notice any difference. That is a horrifying thought. The Palace not only needs an upgrade in its utilities and infrastructure—it desperately needs an upgrade in its aesthetic and iconography. I hope that your Lordships will be brave enough to embrace that when us hereditaries are ultimately gone and this programme finally gets under way. I wish you all luck.
Lord Fuller (Con)
I am grateful to the Senior Deputy Speaker for allowing me to slip into the gap. I was not planning to speak, but I do so after the challenge from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who wondered what the new Members—and, dare I say, some of the younger Members—felt. Being one of the new and one of the younger Members, I will just say that I have taken the opportunity to participate in the R&R tour of the dungeon, and I am glad that I did, because it was a real eye-opener. But I am surprised and disappointed that only 80 Members out of the 800 in our cohort have done so. There is a challenge there—how are we going to get that number up? Unless we get more than 10% going into the basement, we will never be able to have the evidence-based approach.
I have been very impressed by the work that has been done to repair the roof and other things too, but in business your first loss is often your best loss, and there is a nettle to be grasped here. When you go down to the basement, it is obvious that you cannot have half a steam pipe. It is like being pregnant. You cannot be half pregnant; you are either pregnant or you are not—not that I would know, but my wife tells me. Furthermore, the Cloister Court is clearly a wasted opportunity; it is something that we should be celebrating.
I take the point made by the noble Earl, Lord Devon, that going forward the building should not just be as it is today. In the summer I went to the US Capitol and Congress. When you go into the committee rooms, there is positive air pressure; air is filtered and secured. They have places to sit and work in IT—and, guess what, it is warm in the winter. We should learn from that; it should not be just as it is today—we should be looking to improve matters. We cannot wish away some of the practical constraints, such as the raft foundation. If we are going to drill a tunnel to have better facilities and better steam, you cannot have half a tunnel—you have to do it all.
In essence, I am very attracted to the idea of a full decant. When you examine the evidence, you can see that it is unarguable that it is the best way—quicker, cheaper and more certain, and the faster we start, the quicker we will get back. As one of the younger Members, I am quite interested in coming back when it is done, in my lifetime, rather than it taking a very long period of time that will see us all out.
The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord Gardiner of Kimble)
My Lords, the phrase I used when I began about sharing frustration has been articulated in one way or another by all noble Lords. At the root of this is responsibility but also our profound concern about a building that symbolises so much of which we should be so proud in our country. I underline that I acknowledge the force of your Lordships’ contributions. It underscores the significance of what we are all about in seeking to preserve, restore and renew this iconic symbol of our democracy.
I was reminded of the noble Earl, Lord Devon, and the dilemmas of Powderham when I got the stats about the size and complexity of the Palace: 34 acres, 1,100 rooms, 65 different floor levels, 100-plus staircases and the whole building sharing the same water, power, heating and sewage systems, many of which are more than 50 years old and have, as we know from experience, reached the end of their lifespan.
The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and the noble Lord, Lord Best, referred to the pipes. We have hundreds of miles of pipes and cables needing replacement and interconnecting voids and ventilation shafts adding to the complexity of removing services and managing asbestos. I was intrigued that we have not referred to this as much as we should. I am very mindful that, particularly following the bomb in the House of Commons, in the House of Commons area of the Palace there is a far greater preponderance of asbestos because it was part of the building material of the time. Therefore, different parts of the Palace will have different complexities.
The other thing that we have all acknowledged is with all the options that I have articulated and that noble Lords have rightly expressed, as I say to the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, that it is inevitable that everyone already has their own preference. A lot of it is rooted in us having been round this before. However, if we use this year for good will, all the options will represent a multi-billion-pound, multi-year investment. We know that these options will amount to significant costs. I hope that those monitoring our dialogue today will note that I did like a concept from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. I have often thought about the discussion that we have to have with the nation regarding the cost of this work. I like the concept of annualising the expenditure. These are eye-watering sums, but if we annualised them over that period, we could contrast them better with some of the investments that we undertake on behalf of the nation.
I should also say that my understanding is that in the polling that has been undertaken the vast majority of people in this country wish to see this building restored and renewed. One of the words used by the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, was “courage”. I also agree with “tenacity”, “action” and “decision-making”, but we should have the courage as the responsible people of our generation to make the right decision.
From the outset, I acknowledge the work that has been done. We have noble Lords who, on our behalf, have been in these meetings over the years. They are assembled on the front row: the noble Lords, Lord Best, Lord Vaux and Lord Morse, and the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. All have made a profound difference in their analysis of doing things better.
I was very struck by the opening remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. Mr Barry’s War must be a compulsory read. For anyone who has not read it, this comes alive. People went mad at that time, so let us not get into that territory, but it shows how we should be cautious of parliamentarians in how we embark upon our dialogue on what is a major building work.
A number of points were raised about surveys. I am not aware of any survey being duplicatory but I understand that we now have had 880 locations surveyed to date, including 353 House of Lords internal spaces and 80 House of Lords external spaces. I also thought, particularly with regard to the remarks of the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Vaux of Harrowden, about the survey information now being mapped out digitally to create a 3-D digital model. That now replaces thousands of individual drawings and files. That picks up on how we use the changing technology.
The noble Lord, Lord Fuller, mentioned air quality. Looking at my notes, one of the surveys and the emerging findings include analysis of air quality to understand levels and concentrations of air pollutants for different areas of the Palace to inform future ventilation designs.
I also was struck by some of the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley, raised about, in effect, benchmarking and the London Olympics. In fact, the programme has benchmarked programme costs across other major UK construction projects such as the London Olympics, Manchester Town Hall, the King’s Cross regeneration, Crossrail et cetera. Delivery costs when looked at per square metre are broadly comparable, for instance, to the redevelopment of the Canadian Parliament.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Bottomley and Lady Deech, raised the question of the Holocaust Memorial Bill. It is not my place or in my ability to express an opinion on the Bill itself today, but I can acknowledge that all three R&R delivery options require use of part of Victoria Tower Gardens. The precise use differs slightly over the three options. Parliamentary authorities are in contact with government, given the proximity to the Parliamentary Estate of the Holocaust memorial, on how this can be managed. However, I am very mindful of what many noble Lords have said about the matter.
I turn to the issue of health and safety. Again, this is a very substantial area. I was particularly struck by some of the points made on health and safety and the points on fire raised by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. The Clerk of the Parliaments as corporate officer for the House of Lords is responsible for the safety of those within the House. The corporate officer must be assured that the Palace is safe to ensure the obligations and duty of safety to staff and visitors are met. I know that the Clerk takes his responsibilities very seriously and works closely with colleagues across Parliament with the Clerk of the House of Commons, who also has that responsibility to review and monitor health and safety. Their view is that the House is safe. The Clerks issued a joint safety pledge in May last year, and Parliament published a new health and safety strategy in December.
The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, raised safety concerns about EMI. Both Houses and corporate officers are committed to ensuring the absolute safety of all, whatever the option. When we come to look at these decisions, with the partiality that I understand we all will have, so far as this year’s work goes, we need to have a thorough, detailed analysis of the three options. For whatever reason they have been decided on, we have to go back in a bit of history, which I do not think is valuable today. The rigour with which these three options will have to be considered by the Houses is obviously supremely important, including things such as accessibility during construction, how that might ever be performed, and how we can be safely accommodated in that option. All those are going to have to be, and will be, considered.
However, the absolute priority in any of the options that require a continuance is the safety of those who work and visit here. That is where the House’s administrations continue to focus on improving the safety culture and processes to ensure that all are safe at all times. Because it is timely, I also want to refer to fire, which was raised by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley. It is a very important feature. Any noble Lord here who has not undertaken the annual fire training should do so; I must say, the figures are not great in many of the groups. It is our responsibility to organise ourselves to undertake that training.
The fire safety improvement works were a major programme that ran from 2012 to 2021. Interestingly, picking up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, the installation of a high-pressure water mist system throughout the basement was part of that. The mist system controls and prevents fire spreading from the basement. Recent upgrades have also improved the life safety aspect. Part of that work has been the compartmentation of the Palace so that we can ensure that we get people out. There is also the installation of a wet riser in the Victoria Tower and a dry riser and sprinklers in the Elizabeth Tower. So the authorities are looking at all aspects of innovation. I will take the point back about the roof and any other areas. As we are undertaking this work, fire safety is of supreme importance. A lot of that work was done prior to R&R, keeping people safe. However, part of R&R is also keeping the building safe, which is where we have continuing challenges.
Accessibility was rightly raised quite strongly in this debate. The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, outlined some of the situations where we simply must address how we can do things better for people who are part of the parliamentary community and visitors across the Parliamentary Estate. It is very important, not only in the statute but in terms of the work that is going on, to ensure that we have step-free access improved from the current 12% to about 70% across the Palace, with much higher coverage in key and public spaces. This is an area where work is needed both now and in the design of the temporary accommodation because, whatever option is decided on at varying points, temporary accommodation will be needed. I am sending a message to everyone involved in the design and consideration. There have been some one-to-one meetings with Members but, if any noble Lord has not had an opportunity to discuss this matter with officials here, I would warmly welcome such a meeting.
Baroness Brinton (LD)
My Lords, although I am very grateful for the meeting that I and the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, had, my point was that it came after the design process rather than us being talked to beforehand. Accessibility and disability will not be the only specialist areas. People do not know what they do not know. It is not clear. I make again the point about the political nature of some of our work meaning us operating in different ways. Outsiders just do not understand it.
The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord Gardiner of Kimble)
The noble Baroness has outlined where we have been at fault in the past and now. We should be doing far more preliminary consideration before we get to a point where we can start. There have been a number of recent examples where I have expressed my own view, asking: why on earth was this not considered from that accessibility point of view at the very beginning? Rather than saying we have done rather well, we could have done even better. So I understand that and I agree.
The noble Lord, Lord Morse, was very open about costs. Obviously he brings enormous experience to these matters, and how fortunate we are. I was very struck by one of the areas that may, I hope, be more helpful to the noble Lord, Lord Colgrain. The National Audit Office examines, certifies and reports on the delivery authority’s annual statement of accounts. The NAO also undertaken two value-for-money audits of the R&R programme, to date feeding into the Public Accounts Committee inquiries. The noble Lord referred to the additional £91 million which has been approved for the delivery authority and the R&R client team. For the sake of completeness, one should also include the £6 million forecast to be spent this financial year by Strategic Estates to develop the EMI option. I thought it was important that there was a complete picture of where we are at with those costs.
The noble Lord, Lord Best, also spoke about EMI. I reiterate that all the options will be measured against the same criteria. Health and safety, and building fabric conservation—which involves the critical work needed to the basement—are areas where there is a complete understanding that both Houses need this with as much of a comparator as possible.
The noble Earl, Lord Devon, made an important point. Much of the work of the client team is with the considerable new membership in the other place. This is a major exercise in familiarising Members of Parliament who have come afresh with the challenges of this Palace and how we restore and renew it in the appropriate way.
The noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, referred to commercial expertise—I am somewhat looking at the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, here, and perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Morse, from before. That is precisely why the four external members of the programme board, with their own experience of major programmes and commercial prowess of making value for money, which is of the top order, are with the parliamentary team. Commercial expertise is much better entrenched now.
The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, raised access to and involvement in the QEII design plans. Again, this is an area we need to be looking at. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said we should have a new site or whatever. I am nervous of this—I am going off-script as it were—but I know that a lot of work went into considering a range of sites and locations. After many millions of pounds were spent on consideration of alternative and temporary accommodation, the QEII, for a variety of reasons, was considered to be the optimum site for us to remove ourselves to. However, I take the point, and all of what has been said today will be considered.
The noble Earl referred to the QEII Centre. It is obviously important that, with the delivery authority leading on the design work for QEII, we re-engage on any future design—particularly, from my point of view as Chairman of Committees and Senior Deputy Speaker, on having the best technology that we can for our committee rooms, for instance, and ensuring that accessibility is absolutely entrenched in the design. All of these are areas that I personally think we should look at very strongly.
I will conclude, given the time, by thanking all noble Lords for their contributions. I will look at Hansard because there may be some areas of detail that I can respond to. I have tried to cover some of the guts of what we are all about. All I can say is that this year will be very busy. I hope it will be a productive year because I am prepared to say that, if we do not make the right decision, we will all be responsible.