Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 8th July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate all the noble Lords who have got us this far; it has taken a great deal of work over many years. The noble Baroness the Leader of the House mentioned many names and I expect that there are quite a few others. The debate has persuaded me that we need to look separately at the preservation of this building and at what Parliament does and where. As my noble friend Lord Foulkes said, this place could be turned into a very good museum of democracy.

Some noble Lords will have gone to a meeting in Portcullis House several years ago, at which we were first told about the various plans for getting us out of these places—or not, as the case may be. I remember one long-standing Member of the House of Commons, the first to ask a question, said: “Don’t you realise that if we move out of this building, it will be the end of parliamentary democracy?” It is an interesting question, especially now. Maybe we have reached it, maybe we have not, but we need to look at this separately. This is a wonderful building; it could be a museum, as my noble friend said, or we could come back here.

I will talk briefly about two things. The first is the issue of fire, which several noble Lords have spoken about, and the second is access of location. We had a Starred Question on fire in your Lordships’ Chamber about a month ago, after the Notre Dame fire. Subsequently, I had a meeting with some of the officials who do a wonderful job in dealing with fire protection in this building. We have fire detection and sprinklers in the cellar, which is probably the most difficult place, but there are many more problems associated with the roof, not just of Westminster Hall but of these buildings, too. There are three things to look at: detection, extinguishing and evacuation.

It is clear that they are doing pretty well in getting a new system of detection around, even in the roof. Extinguishing fires there is extremely difficult, but the new system, Water Mist, uses much less water and is extremely effective. I suggest that before any construction work starts on this building, a water mist system should be installed for the whole building on a temporary basis, with temporary pipes or whatever. That would be a great protection against a fire during construction. As many noble Lords have said, the biggest risk of fire is during construction. We are a royal palace, and there have already been two royal palaces that have caught fire in the Queen’s reign. However careful everybody is, it can happen, as many noble Lords have said.

If this place is going to be reconstructed as a Parliament, we need to look at evacuation. Have many noble Lords wondered: if the Committee Corridor were completely full of people, which sometimes happens, where is the way out? There is a fire door by the main entrance, but if that is shut because of a fire on the other side, can 1,000 or 2,000 people at the Lords end get out in half an hour—which is apparently the fire resistance of the doors—down two very narrow staircases? It is something to think about. It could happen tomorrow, but if we are rebuilding, we ought at least to ensure that we have proper evacuation facilities, including for people in wheelchairs or with mobility problems, as many noble Lords have said. That all needs to be sorted out before we start.

My final point concerns moving us to the QEII centre, and the Commons to Richmond House. As some noble Lords including my noble friend Lord Foulkes asked, how are we going to get from one to the other, through the mass of tourists that we see, particularly in the summer months? It is not easy. We will certainly not get back in seven minutes to vote, and communications between the House of Lords and the House of Commons will be extremely difficult. I cannot see why nobody has looked properly at the Foreign Office. We do not have an empire, as we did when it was built. I know that the Foreign Office will be loath to get out of their lovely building—maybe we can promise that it can return in 10 years when it is all finished—but at least it would be a bit closer to Richmond House. Maybe there are other buildings as well. We need to make sure that we do not completely separate the Commons and the Lords, because that would not be a good thing at all.

I believe that we should look again at my noble friend Lord Adonis’s suggestion of moving out completely, because in a new building, wherever it is, we could have the education facilities, the public access and everything else that we do not get here. We are rightly concerned about that and it would certainly help the north/south divide if we made everything less London-centric.

Finally, my noble friend Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe is very keen that we consider the possibility of selling off the second-hand bits and pieces from this building if they are no longer used. I think that he is talking about the floor tiles that have been replaced over many years; he thinks that he has a market for them as a souvenir of the old House of Commons or House of Lords. He has asked me to say that he will put down an amendment in Committee to support this idea. It will not fund the new building, but I suppose that it might help.

G20 Summit

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As I said in a couple of previous EU Statements, we are developing our own system. Galileo was apparently not discussed in the G20 plenary sessions.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I think the noble Baroness said that we were giving £570 million of aid to Yemen, which is obviously wonderful—but of course we are also supplying bombs that have caused the damage in the first place. There is very strong evidence that some of the arms that we export go straight to Yemen and cause the trouble that we are now trying to put right. What really happened at the discussion—the cosy fireside chat—with the Crown Prince about how not to murder people in too public a way and how to cut the arms down? I think that most other countries that were there were probably trying to avoid talking to the Crown Prince because of what has happened there.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

I think we need to engage with people in order to change their opinion and to put our ideas over forcefully. I do not think that avoiding difficult discussions is a particularly good way forward. As I said, the Prime Minister raised the issue of Yemen with the Crown Prince. There is a window of opportunity now, through the talks that we hope will start in the next few days in Stockholm, where we can bring the parties together. We want them to work in good faith in order to cease hostilities. As I said, we have committed £570 million since the conflict began in 2015. We are the fifth-largest donor of humanitarian assistance and we are working with our international partners to try to bring this conflict to an end—but I think that robust conversations are needed in order to make sure that these points are forcefully put across.

Brexit: UK Plans

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 9th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

We are committed to leaving the common fisheries policy and developing arrangements for fishing that can create a more profitable and self-sufficient seafood sector. Taking back control of our waters means that we can decide how we allocate access to our waters and our fisheries. Any decisions about giving access to vessels from the EU and other coastal states will be a matter for negotiation.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, can the Minister explain how this taking back of our fishing policy will work? My understanding is that most of the fishing quotas that we received when the agreement was first made have been sold by the UK fishing fleet to foreign fishing companies. Perhaps she can explain how we are going to get the quotas back from those companies which, presumably, have been enjoying them for the past 20 years.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As I have said, policy in this area will be a matter for negotiation.

Infrastructure Improvements: Funding

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I think the noble Lord is somewhat harsh in his verdict on the PFI. For example, the NAO says of the PFI:

“Most private finance projects are built close to the agreed time, price and specification”.

It further states that PFI contracts provide,

“two key advantages over conventional procurement … transparency of pricing in that the public sector knows in advance how much it will be paying”,

and a,

“consistent approach to maintenance as the SPV”—

the special purchase vehicle—

“is under an obligation to maintain the asset in good condition”.

Of course, some projects have not gone correctly, but this country is a world leader in the development of private finance and we should be proud of what we have achieved.

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords—

Outcome of the European Union Referendum

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, the Lord Privy Seal introduced this debate. I suppose that we should look on her as the Leader in your Lordships’ House of a caretaker Government who are commitment-light apart from on one thing—her statement that the Government have an instruction to implement the referendum. As I think my noble friend Lord Foulkes tried to intervene to say, the referendum is advisory. We now have a situation in which the campaigners are all gone. We are to have new leader of the Tory party who appears to believe that she has a mandate to leave the EU, but has a blank cheque and few views as to how this should be done and what should be done.

My noble friends Lady Smith and Lord Radice both said—and I agree—that parliamentary approval is needed before Article 50 is implemented. Probably this should be later, when we know the details. It is extraordinary that the Government have not given any information about this. Few people seem to have known what the consequences of Brexit would be and people still do not know, although some are learning fast. Some of those voting to leave in the biggest proportions were the silver-haired generation, like me. I do not support leaving. Sometimes I felt that they were almost fighting the last war. We have to get over this. The fear of migrants is very unpleasant.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, and others commented that the younger generation is being committed to an unknown and fearful future. Of course, the Government managed to avoid 16 and 17 year-olds voting on this, which is their future. They are rightly angry—indeed furious—that a small part of the Conservative Party has inflicted this on them without spelling out the consequences.

Europe has brought peace, as many noble Lords have said. In the 1970s, for several years I lived in Romania and saw the effect of the failure and the lack of free movement of people. I do not accept that Romanians, Bulgarians and Polish people should not be allowed to move freely. They are in the European Union, as I hope we are. It is extraordinary that people can want to go back to a time when there were frontiers and you had to get permission to leave and sometimes, in the communist era, it was a great deal worse. Peace is very important and, as many noble Lords have said, it is essential to retain freedom of movement.

The campaigners for Brexit intentionally mixed up the freedom of movement of people within the EU with the problem of migrants. I am chairman of the Rail Freight Group and do a lot of work looking at how we get freight between Calais and Dover with all the migrant problems there.

What people do not seem to realise is that if we leave the European Union, the French Government have already said that they will remove all their controls, camps and everything else to prevent migrants coming here. They will probably start running ferries of migrants across, because as soon as they land in this country they can claim asylum. Heaven help the Home Office if it has to deal with 10 times the number of migrants coming in because we have left Europe. We must keep separate the issue of migrants—how many should come and how that is done, which I know that the Government are taking forward—which does not apply to people within the European Union, where there is free movement, and make sure that everybody understands the difference.

The single market covers much more than the odd truck going across and the odd manufacturer. It covers most of the things that our businesses do in this country. It covers science research—I declare an interest as a trustee of Plymouth Marine Laboratory—manufacturing, finance, which many noble Lords have talked about, agriculture and rail freight, in which I declare an interest as chairman of Rail Freight Group.

The noble Lord, Lord Birt, talked about uncertainties which are bringing massive changes and job losses. Why does the Tory party seem to think that this is a good thing? In the campaign, some of them said that we will keep the single market and stop migration. It is a naive way of approaching negotiations with the European Union to think that we can impose on it what we want and expect it to accept it. I still spend a lot of time in Brussels on rail freight business. We are negotiating between two equal parties, but some of them are heartily sick of the way we have been changing our mind, having a go at them and trying to get little changes here and there over the past two years, so it will not be easy. As my noble friend Lord Radice said, Angela Merkel has said there will be no single market without free movement of people, so we have to sort this out.

It is not right that Parliament needs to implement this on the basis of a very narrow majority in an advisory referendum for the leave campaign, now demonstrated as being based on flawed information, untruths or worse. I fear that the same reason is there now as a year or two ago: the fear in the Tory party of UKIP, which will force even the most pro-Remain Tory Members to vote for Brexit regardless of the damage to their constituents and the UK. I see this as real arrogance and putting party infighting before the needs of the country. It is breathtaking. What is the solution? Perhaps we should be looking for a coalition of right-minded Labour, Lib Dem, SNP and others—even Tories—to stop this disaster in its tracks before it goes even further.

Syria: UK Military Action

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley (Lab)]

My Lords, I have been persuaded to speak by many friends and families who are questioning the need to bomb on its own. I was interested to see a poll in one of the papers this morning saying that the majority of the population was opposed to bombing. I see this as a debate about whether bombing will help the inevitable peace process that will come.

We are, to some extent, moving into a war situation of our own making. This is a religious war between different parts of the Muslim faith. However, we have had that before. We have had religious wars for the past thousand years, including one in Northern Ireland, as the noble Lord, Lord King, mentioned, and the Crusades. They were all highly destructive, as many noble Lords have said. So I question why we want to be in this one. Could we not be more useful being sympathetic bystanders supporting the diplomatic work that is going on? It is not as if one side—if there is one side; there are several sides at the moment—is better than others. We change our favourites rather too often for credibility. ISIL is a horrible organisation, but I am told that there were in fact 102 executions in Saudi Arabia in the first six months of this year while ISIL is recorded as conducting 66. I do not know whether that is right but it puts a balance on these things.

What good does bombing do? It keeps the people who make bombs happy, obviously, and other people may feel good, but what else does it do? It invites retaliation, which we have had and we may get more. The biggest question I have is this: who are we targeting? It is fine to say that we can pinpoint people with drones —we have seen that—but there are an awful lot of other bombs around and an awful lot of other people who are being killed or blown out of their houses. I do not accept the figure of 70,000 people being trained on the ground to support this. Again, I have seen a report which stated that training cost the US Government more than £1 billion but that only seven people actually turned up to fight the war.

I suppose my next question is: what is the effect of bombing? It destroys homes and businesses—something that we have seen everywhere—in a way that is miles out of proportion to the horrible things we have seen in Paris and other places recently. We have seen it in London in times past. People leave for a better life. They are now coming to Europe and to the UK—and why not, if we bomb them out of their homes? If it happened here, where would we go? We would want to go somewhere else. We would be refugees, like everyone else. So I see this as a rather nasty vicious circle. We make the bombs, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states buy them with their oil money, thus keeping alive the industry that makes them, and they pass on the weapons to their friends and neighbours for this war.

I think that there is a much better way of doing this, which is to encourage them to make peace through a massive co-ordinated and effective humanitarian peace mission. The noble Lord, Lord Hague, in his excellent speech talked about imaginative diplomacy. I think that that is what we should be doing now, and I am not persuaded that bombing will add anything to this.

Procedure of the House

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Monday 26th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Erroll]

My Lords, if we start sending more things to Committees off the Floor of the House, we will soon discover that variant of Parkinson’s Law: talk expands to fill the time provided.

I would far prefer us to go back to what we used to do not that many years ago, which was to vote in Committee on the principle of amendments—even if they were defective, we looked at the principle. At Report, we tidied them up, which took much less time. That is why debates on Report are much more focused and we are not allowed to do the to and froing. Third Reading was purely confined to sorting out the typos, the essential little mistakes, not dealing with anything of principle. If we started to go back to that system, with voting in Committee, we would have far more abbreviated proceedings later on. All we are doing is talking it through in Committee and again at Report.

We have to use that as a brake on the deluge of legislation that is coming on us these days. If we give more time for talking, we will just get more to talk about.

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I shall talk just briefly about my amendment on Written Answers during times when the House is not sitting. We have talked about Written Answers long and hard already today. Unfortunately, holding the Government to account does not stop when the House is not sitting. I am not an abuser of the system, and I am sorry that some people are, but I think that it would be a very good idea to be able to table more Questions during the recesses, and to be able to get Answers back rather more frequently than we do at the moment, which I think is once every five weeks in the Summer Recess. I am therefore very grateful to the Chairman of Committees for offering to take it back to the committee, and I hope that we can take it forward on that basis.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, while we are all on this matter, which we very rarely are, may I take the opportunity to point out another reason why we are actually where we are? It is not simply the volume of legislation, or the number of pages going on the statute book. In fact, it is the number of Peers speaking, the length of time that they speak and the number of times that they repeat themselves on the same issue. There are notable offenders, and it is for members of their parties or groups to bring them to task. However, if we were all aware of the fact that once a point has been well made and accepted, there is no need to make it again, and that when 12 people want to make it, it is really only necessary to hear from two of them at the most, we would then save a very great deal of time.

Being a hereditary Peer, perhaps I might just cast noble Lords’ minds back to the time when there were over 1,100 Members of this House—far more than there are now. Far fewer of them attended than attend now, and the only people who came to speak were people who knew a great deal about their subjects and knew that they would be listened to. The result was that the speakers’ lists were about a third of the length that they are now, and that the speeches were about three times as good. If we could exercise a little self-restraint and not talk too often about things that have caught our fancy the previous week—or if, when we did so, we could keep it short and not do it too often—we would get a lot done much quicker than we do now.

Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Lord Berkeley Excerpts

Tuesday 25th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Berkeley]

My Lords, I visited Cornwall for many years. More recently, I became a resident there. Unsurprisingly, I get involved quite a lot in transport issues there. I agree with all noble Lords who said how important it is to keep Cornwall separate. I look on Cornwall as an island. Only six miles of land separate Devon and Cornwall on the north side. The river Tamar is the frontier. Crossing the Tamar on a bridge has always been difficult. There are not many road bridges, and many were fearsome in the past. There is one railway bridge. The roads are so bad that about the only railway in the area apart from the main line that was preserved by Dr Beeching was the interesting line that goes up to Gunnislake—which involved reversing in the middle of nowhere—because the local residents rightly argued that that was the only way in which they could get out in the winter when it was snowy. The line is still running very well.

I therefore compare Cornwall, as a semi-island, with some of the Scottish islands, which, as we have heard, have already been granted what you might call their own constituency status. I see how the Scottish ferries operate extremely effectively and efficiently, subsidised and supported by the Scottish Government, and I compare that with what happens in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. We have two very good ports in Cornwall in the shape of Foy and Falmouth. I am pleased to be a harbour commissioner in the port of Foy.

Penzance, at the end of the railway, is where the ferry goes to the Scillies. As we have heard, about 2,000 people live on the Scillies who maintain a very nice existence—I go there often—but it is very dependent on tourism. The dear old “Scillonian”, which is a passenger and freight ferry, is about 40 years old. It has basically been condemned by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. The service has been given a stay of execution for another year or two, provided that a new ferry is procured. It operates daily in the season with passengers and freight. It needs upgrading because the facilities in the quays are not good. The fear is that one of these days there will be an accident and a piece of cargo will hit a passenger. That could happen at either end, so rightly it has been insisted that the service be improved.

The partnership that is trying, with the aid of European, county council and Department for Transport money, to develop and finance extensions to the quays at both ends—at St Mary's and Penzance—and a new passenger and freight combined ferry, has had the most appalling trouble getting a project together. Alternatives have been produced and everyone is agreed on the best alternative. It has had planning problems because it had to extend the quay slightly at Penzance. Someone objected at the public inquiry that the quay could not be extended because it would go on to sacred ground. When the inspector asked where was the evidence was that the ground was sacred, he wastold, “Come and look at the footprints of Jesus at low tide”.

[Lord Phillips of Sudbury]

I hope the noble Lord will not be upset by my question, but I have completely lost the drift of his argument vis-à-vis Cornwall as a separate entity.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Berkeley]

I was illustrating the difficulty for a small community of 2,000 people of getting a new ferry link out of this Government and the previous Government. It is still not resolved; I gather that the final decision has been delayed, which will be extremely bad for those people next summer. I compare that with what happens in Scotland. There, with the support of the Scottish Government, these things seem to happen much more easily and quickly, because the Government there recognise the importance of the island life. I do not think that the English, or British, Government, recognise that in the same way.

My point is that it is important to have the strongest lobby in Cornwall to support such things. I have no particular view on whether it should be five or six Members of Parliament, but it must be a group of Cornish MPs.

[Lord Tyler]

I am extremely grateful to the noble Lord, for whom I have a lot of affection and with whom I have worked together on Cornish issues, for giving way. Can he confirm that his amendment, which I am sorry he has been unable to move, leaves open the issue of whether the number of Members of Parliament should be five or six? My remarks and those of my noble friend were directed at the possibility that Cornwall might be prepared to accept underrepresentation with five Members if it retained the integrity of the county. By contrast, the problem with the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Myners, is that it is prescriptive. It would have to be six. That is an important difference. Perhaps the noble Lord would develop a step further his point about the difference between five or six Members for the county.

[Lord Berkeley]

I am very grateful to the noble Lord. I am no great expert on sizes of constituencies. Under the number of 600, 650 or somewhere in between that is decided on in the end for the rest of the country, there could be increases or decreases in population in Cornwall—and, for that matter, on the Isle of Wight—which would affect that. I am happy to accept six and equally happy to accept five, but from my discussions with the people of Cornwall, the key thing is that they have a number, be it five or six, that is peculiar to Cornwall and does not go across the Tamar. Members of Parliament lobby for Cornwall in a very good way, and that would be lost.

I live in Polruan, which is in the South East Cornwall constituency. I know the Member of Parliament there, Sheryll Murray, who has written to me in support of the campaign for keeping Cornwall separate. She would be very unhappy to have a bit of Plymouth in her constituency. I agree with her, and all the people I have talked to would be equally unhappy. My main point is that Cornwall must be kept separate. I do not have a strong view on whether there should be five or six constituencies, and I am sure we can come back to that later if my noble friend does not press his amendment tonight.