Holocaust Memorial Bill

Debate between Baroness Harding of Winscombe and Lord Inglewood

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly endorse some of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, about building costs. He has much more experience in the world of construction than I do, but it is a matter that is both of interest to people and very important more generally.

We all know that since Covid there has been huge cost inflation in the building industry, partly because of the difficulty in assessing specialist forms of construction. This project falls into a category where generalised prediction is really not very helpful, for all the kinds of reasons that the noble Lord mentioned about the site and the nature of the processes involved in developing it.

When we think about this—it is a relevant consideration to us all—it is worth our while thinking about some well-known parliamentary projects. I think it was the case that the Scottish Parliament overshot 11 times its original budget. This—I am glad to be able to say—was worse than Portcullis House, which in 2000 was estimated to be £80 million over its original budget. That was only roughly half the overshot per square metre of the Scottish Parliament. We need to be very cognisant of the problems that are faced in the financial aspect of all this.

The Government assure us that they have been advised by experts, although, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said, we have not seen any detail about all this, as the Government say that they cannot disclose commercially sensitive information into the public domain. Well, fair enough, but no doubt the Government were advised by similar—if not the same—experts on those other two projects, which seem to have been rather inaccurately valued at the outset.

Frankly, as far as costs go, I can see no reason to have any confidence in the amounts that we hear for this scheme, which, after all—as I think has been mentioned already—have gone up from £50 million in 2015 to £137 million now. Like the noble Lord, Lord King, the only thing that I am confident about is that if this project were to go ahead, that will turn out to be an underestimate.

The reality is that with projects of this kind, it is invariably a matter of “build now, pay up later”. It is not a fiscal rule; it is a rule of experience.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, as I have been for nearly a decade, and a resident of Westminster who walks my dog in the park.

I remind us all that this is Report, not Second Reading, and I will attempt to resist the huge temptation to remind noble Lords that the foundation considered more than 50 sites and that there is huge value in collocating the memorial with the learning centre—I could go on. Instead, I would just like to focus on this actual amendment.

We all know that putting the costs in nominal pounds in the Bill is a bad idea. It does not matter what the building is or what we are trying to do: putting costs in a Bill makes for bad legislation. Each of the speeches we have heard today has been a Second Reading speech, because this is really an amendment designed to wreck the memorial. I think we should be honest about that.

We should not put costs in the Bill. It is not surprising that the costs have escalated over the last decade—we have been living through a period of very high inflation. We have not put a spade in the ground precisely because of the planning process that has taken so long. This is not unique to the Holocaust memorial; sadly, it is a fact of life for every major building project in this country, which is a subject for a much broader debate.

It is not surprising that fundraising has not been started, because it cannot be until there is planning permission to build something. So I am afraid that the arguments being used in favour of this amendment are actually arguments against a Second Reading of the Bill, and therefore we should dismiss them.