Palace of Westminster: Restoration and Renewal

Lord Deighton Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deighton (Con)]

My Lords, I must admit that I had feared that this project was being very skilfully directed into the long grass, so I was delighted that the other place selected the most urgent of the options at its disposal—what I would call the “For heaven’s sake, let’s get on with it” choice. I am delighted and a little bit surprised, in that way when you think, “Yes, that was a bold decision and it was the right thing to do”. I am delighted to support the Motion. I very much appreciate my noble friend Lord Naseby’s amendment, because each time we look at an alternative it helps us to sharpen the case and to work out what we have to accomplish if we are to get the most urgent option right.

I was privileged to be a member of the Joint Committee. I start by paying a significant tribute to its co-chair, my noble friend Lady Stowell. This was not an easy group to corral. There were many rabbit holes that we sniffed around and nearly went down. To bring the group back to what we were trying to accomplish, to make sure that we had the evidence to support our recommendations and then to produce a report that went only so far as the recommendations allowed but set a path forward that could be actionable, was no mean feat. The feedback we have received from noble Lords today reflects the quality of the work that went into it. I also thank the staff, who were able to derive a coherent narrative from what were often very interesting debates on the various choices.

My other observation that I bring to noble Lords’ attention is on how the Joint Committee worked. Everybody on it started out with a very healthy scepticism about whether we really needed to spend all this money and whether we really needed to turf everybody out. So we really did test all the assumptions that were being made and all the evidence that was presented until, frankly, we went on this journey that took us to a unanimous point of view that the Motion that we are debating today was and is the only practical way forward. Like all good exercises in science, we essentially disproved all the other theories and were left with this one.

The other thing I want to discuss is what I have learned from other big projects about what works and what does not. Generally, when I have been involved in these things I have found that it is incredibly important—this may sound slightly simplistic—to really understand why you are doing something and to test what I call the “why” so that you can make the case very clearly and get your objectives very clear. That enables you to prioritise, which always becomes very important because you know what matters most, and it also forms the basis of the narrative you use to bring everybody else with you. You have to get that right first, get agreement on it, and then you can move on to the “how”. I have spent a lot of my life in that transition between the why and the how, stopping people constantly revisiting the why and saying, “Can we please just take all that energy and devote it to getting the thing done in a really brilliant way?”. So I am delighted that we are at that transition point here.

I will give some examples, starting with London 2012. It is quite hard to think about why you want to stage an Olympics. You spend seven years getting ready for something that lasts a few weeks in the summer, so creating a narrative about why we were doing it, what it would mean for regenerating parts of the East End, what it could mean for volunteering, what we could do with the Paralympics to change people’s attitudes to disability, what we could do to show the rest of the world that we were not just a quaint country with an interesting history but that we might have something to offer for the future, too—all that stuff became part of why we were doing it.

HS2 is another interesting example. We started out thinking, “Wouldn’t it be nice to get to Birmingham quickly, or for people in Birmingham to get to London more quickly?”. We were not so sure about that, so we thought that maybe it was important to have more capacity. Then eventually we engineered our way into a regional economic policy, with the northern powerhouse, because you have to make it all fit together before you can really justify spending that much money on a railway line.

I am now involved in trying to build an extra runway at Heathrow. We had to get the Airports Commission to persuade us of the economic benefits and that we could deal with the environmental costs in a way that enabled a sensible trade-off. Brexit is the biggest project we are currently facing. Noble Lords might contend that the problems we are having with the “how” is because it is really difficult to understand the “why”. For me, it is really important to bottom out that why.

I think that this is a good project because most of the why is really powerful: the overwhelming need to avoid catastrophic failure seems to me a pretty good why. What you tend to get when you are pulling a bit of fabric is that you know it is going to break at some point; you are not quite sure exactly when or exactly where but it is going to be a mess when it does. You generally want to repair it before you get to that point.

I come to a couple of things that I think are really important once you have got the why out of the way and you are focused on the how. The other parts of the why, by the way, are to do with the fact that we now have the opportunity to design a building for the 21st century rather than the 19th century, so you can accommodate technology and you can make sure that it is giving access, both from a physical and a democratic point of view. You may, again, want to make it a showcase for the things that this country can do well. We need to be careful about the decant. I think that decant is a wonderful word—it sounds like a luxury thing to happen to you, to be decanted, so I love the description—but we need to be flexible about what we expect from our decant options or we will get lost and never be quite happy with what we are offered.

As many noble Lords have said, we have to get the client side right. The structure we have come up with—the Olympic structure, the Crossrail structure—is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Projects generally have a problem because of political interference and the client here is a bunch of politicians, so that, for me, is by far the biggest danger. If we can organise ourselves to empower the committees to get this done, it will be a great achievement.

Finally, when you have the chance to do a project such as this, it is really important to get the whole country involved. Whether it is getting everybody behind the fact that this is a building we all love and care about, that it stands for things that really matter and that it is a nationwide thing, or whether it is the way we go about building it and developing skills and how we distribute the contracts around the country, this has to be a project for the whole country, not just for London.