Palace of Westminster: Restoration and Renewal

Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Horam. I support his idea of reducing traffic around Parliament but am a little less sure about his idea of asking royalty to take over as the client. That would not do at all. I congratulate the noble Baroness the Leader of the House on bringing this debate. To show my gratitude, I am going to say words that I thought I would never say in this Parliament: I fully support the government Motion and will not be voting for the amendment. I was a little bit iffy about paragraph (8), but if we decide we do not want to come back we could probably repeal the law. We could have more debates and sort ourselves out.

I will make some wider points. Parliament has become unstable not just in its physical structure but in the two-party system of Government and Opposition Benches. There are signs of decay all around. Democracy should be a striving for consensus, not the bipartisan festival of point scoring that we have at the moment. Surely we want a mix of voices and a democracy that values having a lot of different views and opinions in our Parliament. I used to be an archaeologist—not a very good one—and my view is that tradition is incredibly important to our society. However, at the same time tradition has to be practical, appropriate and useful. Despite my respect for tradition, since coming to this House I have seen a lot of silly conventions that could be swept away in a refurbishment of your Lordships’ House.

I support some of the radical ideas offered by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra. I hope he will not mind me saying that I was very surprised at the source. It would be good to see new technology and ideas being brought here. Anything like solar panels or battery storage would be a good move. We could sell the renovation of the House as progress and an exemplar for other buildings in the UK.

I would also like to see a proportional voting system, as that would mean people being properly represented across the political spectrum. This is also an opportunity to replace your Lordships’ House with a democratically elected Chamber. That would mean more women. Proportional representation is a feminist issue and, today of all days, we should be thinking about it, considering it and, perhaps, absorbing it as a good idea. Along with modern democratic structures for Parliament we need to modernise voting in the Chamber, so that votes can be done at the press of a button rather than having all MPs and Peers spending days of their lives queuing in corridors. What about changing the times of our debates? Why can we not meet in the mornings and do a normal day’s work and not miss family meals and social events? We could have social lives, which would improve us as parliamentarians. And it is not just noble Lords who bear the burden of lots of late night debates; it is also unfair to all the staff who have to stay as late as we sit.

On the specific issue of whether or not to move out, I have been to the basement and seen the accretions of 150 to 170 years—and, frankly, I feel unsafe here. I now have an office in Millbank, for which I am very grateful because it takes me out of this building. If we moved to QEII it would mean quite a sprint for me up the road, but if we reduced traffic it would be a much safer sprint.

In the basement I noticed a very small box on the wall that looked like a tangled mess of very dirty rice noodles bursting out of a metal frame. I was told that it was part of the phone system and probably still in use. I also took a photograph on my phone of a recently removed rusty pipe that had been gaffer-taped over the years to fix some rusty holes in it. It had finally been taken out of use three weeks before I took the photo because of a very large hole in the pipe. That is probably indicative of an awful lot of the infrastructure in the basement, which is very concerning. Water pipes criss-cross electrical cables, as we have heard, and I was told that we have 27 people on 24-hour fire watch. That frightened me and I hope that it frightens some other noble Lords.

It also occurs to me that we are probably not meeting our health and safety obligations to not only ourselves but our visitors. We should probably have warning signs, “Enter at your own risk”. And it is not just the fire risk: bits of the building are falling off, as happened recently when a car window was smashed.

I understand that others have different options, but I read that one option put forward by a Member of Parliament in the other place was that to fix the mouse and rat problem we should have a cat. I do not know whether that person understands the size of the Palace, but to sort out the problem with cats would mean having an awful lot of cats.

The scale of the problem also raises the question of whether to do the upgrade in a piecemeal manner. The dreaded word “phasing” was used. As an ex-archaeologist I can tell noble Lords that phasing is almost always visible and almost always ugly. So I would definitely advise against doing anything piecemeal. That is exactly the problem in the basement: it was done piecemeal. It is made up of layer upon layer of work that people have done without removing the previous layer.

I do like the idea of moving out of London. It would be fantastic and a real breath of fresh air for us to experience different parts of the country and be lobbied by local people to help them with their issues. However, I accept that that probably will not happen. Parliament is a glorious place for history. We should value that and ensure that this building is properly cared for. We should ensure that it is loved as the home of our democracy—one which is in need of renovation in more ways than one.