Restoration and Renewal

Baroness Rawlings Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Rawlings (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to raise three related points: transparency, cost and risk.

At the outset, a long time ago, we were promised a transparent, open process throughout. Alas, it has been the opposite. A recent Answer to a Parliamentary Question revealed that £212 million has already been spent on R&R, almost all of it on consultants, professionals and salaries, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Vaux. Alternative schemes and costings have been prepared for different locations and for substantial pieces of work that we have never seen. They lie largely unpublished and unexhibited. A few groups of Peers have had a peep at folders during a visit or meeting but have never been given anything to study. A pop-up display on screens in the Royal Gallery was diagrammatic but had no plans of the proposals.

We are constantly told, as many speakers have said in today’s debate, that we must push ahead, as with every passing week costs will escalate. Curiously, these postponements have brought us a dividend. We have saved £1.5 billion by abandoning the extravagant rebuilding of Richmond House, a 40 year-old public building built to last as long as its great Georgian and Victorian forbears. I am not sure about the view of the noble Lords, Lord Newby and Lord Fowler, on the QEII conference centre. We have saved close to £1 billion by not knocking it inside out to provide a replica Lords Chamber and rooftop restaurant. As a result, the Government and the taxpayer also regain the considerable revenue from letting the capital’s prime conference centre for events.

I turn now to timing. All are agreed that the really important and urgent task is to shut down and replace the outdated cabling and servicing in the basement, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Best. Yet under the grandiose schemes produced by R&R, this job was left until last. It was not to be done until the two new temporary Chambers had been built. This was under the R&R sponsor team, deemed now too distant and renamed in the report as the client team and programme team. Why? Why not be transparent and call it the Palace of Westminster team, so that people know what it is about?

At present, the planning application to Westminster for the northern estate is stalled and that for the Lords has not even been submitted. This was mentioned in the very good speech of my noble friend Lord Colgrain, and I agree with him. However, during all these delays, a parallel process has been taking place and is now completed on time and on budget. This is the £80 million repair and restoration of the entire roof of the Palace of Westminster, using the architect Sir Charles Barry’s fire-resistant, cast iron trusses and tiles. A sound roof is the most vital element of any building in Parliament, and this Parliament is now good for another century.

The spectre of a Notre Dame-style fire is constantly cited, but Barry was even more conscious of these matters, as he was replacing historic buildings destroyed in the great conflagration of 1834. Many large buildings have had their services wholly replaced, but none of them has ever been told it is an 80-year process. We all know Rome was not built in a day, but 80 years for R&R seems excessive, costing £13 billion or more. This is way above the original £4 billion.

The immediate need is for the costs and timings, not just headline numbers, to be published and brought into the open. I urge the Lord Privy Seal on this. Parliament is otherwise in danger of signing a blank cheque for a job that will continue to run out of control. If the whole roof can be repaired for £80 million, there has to be a better and less ruinous way to do the basement. We should also not forget how much was well-spent in the 1980s on restoration of the Chambers, the Royal Gallery, the Lobbies and the committee rooms.

There are several other more detailed points in the report that give cause for concern, but they will be for another day, as we shall no doubt be debating this further. Meanwhile, I look forward to the Lord Privy Seal’s informed and, I hope, positive reply, as she has been involved with the project for some time.