Earl of Kinnoull
Main Page: Earl of Kinnoull (Crossbench - Excepted Hereditary)
The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton. With her customary clarity and passion, she raised a number of interesting issues that I hope very much are paid attention to as these three options are worked up. We had two interesting speeches from my noble friends Lord Vaux and Lord Morse. Apart from saying that I agree with what they said, I hope that everyone in the Room understands how much we owe these two, who have been using their skills to bear down on the costs. The costs that they have identified and saved run into the millions, and we owe them an enormous amount of gratitude for putting in a lot of work. They have recently swapped jobs: my noble friend Lord Vaux was the chair of the Finance Committee and went off to be chair of the sub-group. They swapped jobs to be able to have continuity and to continue this vital phase.
The four of us are sitting here because the other person to whom we owe a lot is the noble Lord, Lord Best, who we will hear from shortly. He was on the sponsor body in some of the very tough years early on and particularly over Covid, when he was still turning up to all the meetings there. We owe him a lot. I wanted to record that first.
I refer to my register of interests, particularly my shareholding in Hiscox Group, which is if not the largest, one of the largest insurers of heritage buildings and assets in Europe. This was an area of my responsibility for many years. I will return in a moment to some comments about risk in the project, but I want to be yet another person underlining the critical importance of arriving, this year, at a decision between the three remaining options and starting the process of implementing that decision.
As we have already heard from the Senior Deputy Speaker and others, and as is summarised in the report that we are discussing, the annual cost of the delivery authority, the budgeted bit, is more than £80 million. That is an enormous amount of money. It is a tap that is wide open and pouring public money away. If we do not reach a decision, the tap will not be shut off. It is extremely important, therefore, that we move from the choosing part of this project to the implementation phase. I am coming on to the large number of moving parts that are going on.
Coming back to risk, apart from turning off the tap there is a risk problem in the building. There are two types of risk with a building such as this. There is the catastrophic risk—a major fire wiping out one-third of the building or something like that—and there is the attritional risk. These are the small things. In her wonderful speech, the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, referred to an attritional risk going on inside this building. In recent years, the catastrophic risk has been patrolled by a series of people who we probably do not know, although I do now know them. The noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and I had a very interesting meeting with them. They have been doing very clever things in the roof of this building and all around the building to patrol the catastrophic risk. I fully accept that the catastrophic risk is much less now than it was five or 10 years ago. That is a great achievement.
However, the attritional risks have been rising, just as they do in an old motor car. We heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, about her attritional risk. We experienced the attritional risk of the heating problems this week. We have experienced the attritional risk of the electrical problems this week. There are many other attritional risks. There have been numerous plumbing attritional risks, with big chunks of the building no longer there. This attritional risk continues to rise. The noble Lord, Lord Vaux, and I were looking at some figures when we were discussing this. They indicated that there is a relentless rise in the level of attritional risk. Eventually, you can get a concatenation of attritional risks which mean that you would have a serious interruption in the ability to use this building. That is a second reason, apart from the money tap, for making sure that we achieve a resolution on which of the three options. I am pretty even-handed among the options and happy to go with whatever looks sensible when things come out, but we must have a choice.
Moving on to some practical issues that have come up, the struggle has been to get all three options to the same level of development so that all Members of our House and the other place can look at things in a comparable way, a bit like when you are buying an Amazon product, and say that having looked at them all comparably, “The best one is this one”. It is a mixture of all sorts of things. What the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, was talking about is one of the things that is terribly important as we begin look at them. Money is obviously another thing.
The third option—the EMI option—is being worked up by Strategic Estates, whereas the first two options are being worked up by the delivery authority. As we have already heard, Strategic Estates started that particular race several hundred yards behind the other runners, so there has been considerable concern, I would say, among the commission and the programme board that this option will not be worked up well enough. There has been an awful lot of pencil in the back for the poor old Clerk of the Parliaments. In fact, in December, he was asked yet again at the commission meeting; he has given us very good assurance that that option will be worked up on time so that we can compare all three options together. That was an important thing to say.
There is one inelegance going on at the moment of which we all need to be aware: for two of the options, and possibly even for the third option, we will need the Queen Elizabeth II building. To be able to assess that in the way the options are worked up—in fact, for the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, as well—we need to have our people go into that building and conduct a series of investigations. At the moment, it has not been possible for us to do that. It is a roadblock. I can tell the Committee that the House of Lords team—I shall come on to what that might mean as my last point—is very focused on trying to unblock this inelegance because it is, I suppose, one thing that could prevent all these options arriving on time. We need to do that because we need to know that we will be able to occupy the building and that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, will be able to be with us next door as well.
I come to the team. The team in the House of Lords is pretty good in that, obviously, there is the commission and our chair, the Lord Speaker, and the management board and its chair, the Clerk of the Parliaments. In fact, there was a meeting between those two bodies only yesterday. I can say that we work well together. We might disagree on some things—indeed, we do—but that is healthy. If I reported that we did not, noble Lords would be suspicious, but we are a focused and cohesive team, particularly on this issue. That has not necessarily always been the case but it is something that all the people who are part of that team are very focused on maintaining because, in our bit of this very complicated thing, it is an important feature.
The poor old House of Commons team has a whole lot of brand-new Members, of course, but it is well aware of the necessity of behaving like a team. I know from talking to one of the members of that team that they are working hard at trying to make sure that they, too, are a good team. However, it will be vital for these two teams, at the end of the process, to work together respectfully and agree on one of the options so that that option can be put as the preferred option to both Houses. It will then be important that those Houses are led to the same place because it would be very difficult if the Houses came to different views; in fact, it would be back to square one. This is something where there are an awful lot of moving parts, but no one should underestimate the determination of the House of Lords team to make sure that we get there in the end.