Restoration and Renewal

Baroness Andrews Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate, and I am surprised to hear myself saying that. What pleasure there is comes from having more transparency in the past hour about what has been going on and what is likely to happen than we have had in any document or debate to date. It has been exceptionally helpful to hear the devastating speech from the noble Lord, Lord Best, and to hear from my noble friend Lord Carter and the noble Lord, Lord Colgrain. There are so many questions being lined up for the Leader of the House. I am sorry she will have such a limited time to reply, and so we look forward to her letter.

In deciding on the future of this building, we will be judged to have been derelict in our duty. What we have heard this afternoon is that vested interests seem to mean that we are incapable of acknowledging the consistent evidence that it is more expensive, more dangerous and will take far longer if we insist on staying in this building, for whatever period, than if we faced up to the realities of a full decant. That is what the evidence has been telling us for four years. That is what we voted on in 2019. That is what the work of the sponsor board, as we have heard, was geared to when collecting evidence as an expert, independent body. That is what we thought we would stick to. We thought we had a plan, but we have had a handbrake turn instead. Far from planning for certainty, we seem to have created even greater, indefinite uncertainty.

As the noble Lord, Lord Best, and others have said, in February this year the sponsor board came forward with figures. Those figures were unacceptable and took the commission by surprise: parameters of £7 billion and £13 billion, and a decant period of 12 to 20 years. The sponsor board also produced two other scenarios. First, that the Commons stay put in the building—probably in this part of the building, while we would be evicted indefinitely—at a cost of between £9 billion and £18 billion. Secondly, that we all stay put in the building site, at a cost of £11 billion to £22 billion, and facing the ludicrous prospect of work taking 76 years. That would be daunting to even the youngest of the hereditary Peers. There would be significant parliamentary disruption, with longer recesses and no parliamentary recall.

In response to this unwelcome evidence, the commission shot the messenger—what else could it do?—losing all the skills and the knowledge that had been accumulated. Now we have a situation where politicians and parliamentarians will be firmly in charge, but at least, as has been said, the commissions of both Houses will work together. That is a definite improvement. This is a scenario that Barry and Pugin recognised in extraordinary detail immediately in having to deal with what Bagehot called the interference of politicians—it came close to killing one and really did kill the other. They were trying to design the Palace; we are trying to concentrate on saving the Palace, and the future and functions of Parliament.

The current—although possibly very temporary—Leader of the House of Commons seems to think that the answer lies in some sort of Shavian superhero; what he calls a star architect, who will be brought in to reconcile the irreconcilable. Parliamentarians would work in a dangerous building site for decades, rather than budge.

The building is dangerous: we have had 13 instances of falling masonry in recent years—the most recent being the north face of Westminster Hall. We all know that it is dangerous, and not least because it suspends the Commons. Yesterday, with masterly timing, a leak suspended the Commons. Removing asbestos has already proved to be dangerous to our staff. Experts outside this House tell me it would take at least two years just to remove the asbestos. Does the Leader of the House agree with the trade unions that

“the ongoing viability of the Palace of Westminster as a safe workplace is at stake and … anything less than the full decant envisaged under the Act would put that at risk”?

I would appreciate a clear answer to that at the end of the debate.

The temporary sprinklers in the basement may hold the worst fires at bay but they cannot prevent them all, and they will cause further damage. They have cost £140 million to install and will be ripped out when something permanent is put in. That is only one of the eye-watering examples of waste revealed by the PAC report a few weeks ago—the latest in a long line of devastating audits on lack of transparency, failure of accountability and waste.

I will put some specific questions to the Leader of the House; the noble Lords, Lord Best and Lord Carter, have answered many of them, but I still think I ought to put them to her. Why precisely did the commission propose dissolving the sponsor board? What did not work? Does she accept the sponsor board’s evidence that not decanting the House fully will be more expensive and dangerous and take longer? Are the two alternative scenarios set out and costed by the sponsor board still on the table? Does she agree with the noble Lord, Lord Best, that what is proposed now will not work? Can she explain why she thinks it will? Can she expand on the Leader of the House of Commons saying yesterday that, notwithstanding the need for an agreed end view, there should be “opportunities for periodic review” to

“allow the programme to adapt to changing fiscal, societal and political contexts”?—[Official Report, Commons, 12/7/22; col. 275.]

Does that not mean a licence for political interference?

Put that together with the evidence that the House administration has a poor track record of project management and I have little confidence that we know what we are doing. However, I believe we have to support this, for the reasons that have been explained, because there is no alternative and we can see some improvement.

The commission now has the great challenge of showing real leadership and reconciling what is desirable with what is necessary. If we are going to be stuck in this limbo indefinitely, we face the risks of catastrophic failure, as people always do when custodians of heritage buildings fail to act in time. We will be accountable to not just this country but the world. UNESCO is looking at us extremely closely; it wants a plan to secure the building and protect its heritage, on a realistic timetable. At the moment it does not have that; if it does not get one, we will face the shame of being blacklisted as a world heritage site.