Restoration and Renewal

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, clearly, I know next to nothing about construction, albeit that I oversaw from a distance the construction of two new buildings at my college. So to prepare myself for today, I sought advice from a national expert on megaprojects. I feel compelled to speak because of my alarm at the paralysis we find ourselves in and because of my respect for this building and all that it represents. The urgent start needed is held up by Members of Parliament who know that it will not be completed while they hold their seats. To them, I have to say that if you love it, you have to leave it.

I call on your Lordships and the Minister to declare today our willingness to decant for the sake of doing the job in the most efficient way possible, thereby earning the gratitude of future generations rather than their disbelief that things have been allowed to degenerate to such a level. It is not hyperbole to describe this moment as our Notre Dame. In recent years, there have been about 25 minor fires and a major asbestos leak. Dithering over the role of the sponsor body has cost at least £100 million. Some £70 million was written off when the Commons decided against moving to Richmond House, and there is no plan B. Incidentally, Richmond House, standing vacant with its forecourt by the Cenotaph, would make a far better location for the planned Holocaust memorial than Victoria Tower Gardens, where it is literally bogged down by water, stubbornness, and the usual underestimate of costs and overestimate of benefits.

This project seems fit to join the list examined by the political scientist Sir Ivor Crewe in his study, The Blunders of our Governments. From the poll tax, child support and super casinos to the Millennium Dome, projects fail because they are commissioned by Ministers and designed by civil servants, both of whom move on to other jobs. Policy is separated from reality and from implementation, while in the end there is no penalty for failure, and no one takes the accountability. Meanwhile, in this Motion, we are being sent backwards. Resignations have cost us much needed experience and the whole project has gone back to the drawing board. We need one small outside body to drive it forward; we need to confirm our decant; we want no plethora of options, because people will always favour the cheapest; and we need to hear directly from the professionals.

There are lessons to be learned from history and from the study of megaprojects. Nine out of 10 such projects have cost overruns. The Scottish Parliament cost overrun was 1,600% and the Channel Tunnel 80%. For many of the world’s most iconic projects, it could have been said that if people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. We should brace ourselves now for the disapproval that may come from transparency over expenditure, and we should keep our eyes focused on the future working parliamentary democracy of this country. By way of illustration, does anyone regret the Channel Tunnel or the Sydney Opera House, or indeed our current Palace of Westminster, which itself took decades to construct and ran into the same problems of governance, cost and political disarray that we are facing now, more than a century later?

Instead of learning from the past story of indecision, unwillingness to move and lack of leadership, there is this decision before us today to terminate the sponsor body, apparently because it told the truth about the budget—up to £13 billion—and the need to decant completely for 12 or more years. Decisions of both Houses have been reversed, with no reasoning given for this new model of governance. As the Public Accounts Committee said, this Motion before us will cause further risk and delay; there is no one person or body to be in charge.

Much as we respect them, we know that the clerks do not have construction expertise—indeed, they were never expected to have that as part of their job—nor do the Speakers, not even with a client team and a joint department of both Houses. Why, at the very least, does the Infrastructure and Projects Authority not have oversight of this rather than being excluded? Why was a meeting of interested Lords called the day before the report from the Public Accounts Committee? That report is critical of the fact that there is still no start date and of the new oversight given to the House authorities. We have no evidence as to why the existing governance model was rejected. The sponsor body had already spent £145 million in readiness. Our delay is costing us £60-85 million a year and that is an old estimate.

Every expert has told us that a full decant is called for. Our experience with Zoom during lockdown has shown that Parliament can function in innovative ways, without losing its authority and without changing for ever. We have to accept that we will be a generation who sacrifice our own convenience for the sake of generations of politicians to come. A decision to decant is the kick-start this programme needs. In this House, it has already been approved and we should not resile from it in the face of this Motion. We should not encourage work to minimise the decant or plan for a shorter life expectancy for the completed works, which would mean leaving our successors that recurrent nightmare. The decision should be made now, before the recess. No amount of rejigging of the governance will change the need to decant, not least for the sake of the staff.

We need to move from policy development to project execution. I fear that some of the current debate about governance is really about finding a new organisation that will tell us that the project is cheaper and less risky. The worst-case scenario is that the new organisation will come up with more palatable numbers, and then overoptimistic costs and timelines are approved. The best-case scenario is that the new organisation will go back and redo the work that has already been done, and come up with the same conclusion. The Commons yesterday were also pretty pessimistic about this new governance.

My final thought on governance is that we need to bring together decision-makers, so that stakeholders can debate, align their objectives and find common ground. I tried to piece together an organogram of the new structure, and it ended up looking rather like that tangle of wires and pipes beneath our feet in the basement. I do not really see how it can work efficiently.

A number of individuals are currently putting themselves forward as our next Prime Minister. The one question I would ask of each one is: are you committed to progressing the restoration and renewal of the Palace, and will you convince MPs that they must vacate it as required? I agree with my noble friend Lord Devon that ideally this Motion should be rejected in its entirety, but I envisage that that is not possible.