Restoration and Renewal

Lord Newby Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, it is not just the effect of the heat that makes the prospect of this debate so dispiriting; it is the fact that we are having to have it at all.

The blunt reason for it is that there were a small number of people in the Commons, led by the former Leader of the House, whose romantic notions of the sanctity of the Commons Chamber made them unwilling to accept the clear and incontestable view that the cheapest and quickest way of making this building fit for the future was to have a full decant. This view has never had any substantive support in your Lordships’ House, and the commission has been clear throughout that a full decant was by far the best option. By requiring the sponsor body to investigate the case for a continuous presence, this minority view caused confusion and delay. When the sponsor body then produced its estimates earlier this year of the cost of going ahead and the time required, the figures looked so ridiculously large, particularly in respect of continuous presence, that their credibility was brought into question. That, in turn, undermined the credibility of the sponsor body itself.

That is why we have the current proposals before us. They are the answer to the question: if not the sponsor body, then what? The principal and obvious concern they raise is the one raised by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and the reason the sponsor body was established in the first place: that the aim was to take the overall management of the programme away from Parliament itself. This was partly because of the experience of the 19th century rebuilding of the Palace, which was beset by parliamentary meddling, extending the process and making it much more expensive. It was also because more recently, Parliament has not shown itself to be overly adept at managing capital projects effectively and efficiently. I have a lot of sympathy with those arguments.

There are, however, at least some reasons to believe that the proposals before us today might work more effectively than what has gone before. First, the two commissions, Commons and Lords, will jointly play a continuing part in the oversight of the project. The key word here is “jointly”. Until three months ago, the two commissions had not had a joint discussion on the issue at all, because the Commons refused to do so. If we had worked together throughout, it is highly unlikely that we would have reached this impasse. Hopefully, a commitment to joint working and a continuous strategic oversight by the commissions working together will ensure the continuing political support for the process that clearly has not been present to this point.

Secondly, there is a broader recognition that more delay is unacceptable and that all the politicians involved in the programme board should be committed to making a success of the project. While Members of your Lordships’ House who served on the sponsor body did indeed do a noble job, there were some whose attitude helped to undermine its effectiveness. This new approach should mean that that does not happen in future. Thirdly, and related to that, as a result of broader political changes, the very few individuals who have caused so much damage to the programme are unlikely to be involved in any significant way in the future.

We have gone a long way backwards in terms of what R&R will look like. It had been agreed that there would be a full decant. It had been agreed where both the Commons and the Lords would go in the meantime, and preparatory activity was under way. Although some valuable work, such as the intrusive surveys, are going ahead this summer, beyond that nothing is now decided.

I have always supported the full decant and the temporary relocation of your Lordships’ House to the QEII conference centre. The original proposals for this were almost certainly too lavish, and the use of new technology over the pandemic has shown how we can make the relocation operate with rather less disruption than originally planned. For example, we could reintroduce electronic voting on the estate so that those with offices in Millbank do not have to spend a huge amount of time moving between their offices and the conference centre.

As to what we do in the Palace itself, I support the proposals from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, very strongly. I hope we will also look at other changes, such as covering some of the internal courtyards to enable facilities for Members and visitors. As the restoration of the Bundestag showed, there are great benefits in being imaginative.

One common argument against doing the project properly now is that it will cost billions at a time when the country simply cannot afford it, given all the other pressures on the public purse. This argument simply must be rebutted. First, failure to act decisively runs the risk of a serious fire or health incident, and the country would hardly look sympathetically at us if our endless dithering allowed such an eventuality to happen. Secondly, even on the quickest timescale this is a multiyear project. Expenditure in any one year will, by definition, be a fraction of the total cost. The highest rate of expenditure that is likely to be incurred, even if all goes well, will not happen for a number of years, by which point I hope the current economic crisis will be well behind us. So at no point will this project have a significant impact on overall public expenditure or the Government’s ability to spend their money where they deem it necessary to do so.

The key challenge now is to identify and appoint the political members of the programme board. They need to be fully committed to the success of the project and be prepared to spend a very significant amount of time and energy ensuring it. We will be asking a lot of them. As the first step in bringing sanity, speed and substance back into this project, we should support the proposals before the House. There is no other viable alternative and we simply must not tolerate further delay.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Fowler (CB)]

My Lords, I agree very much with what the noble Lord has just said about the Government and their role. One of the more misleading statements in the general debate so far—not in this debate this afternoon, but outside—has been that it is all a decision for Parliament. That is patently not the case. If Parliament was to make a decision on financial spending which went over the accepted limits, then it is a pound to a penny that the Government would intervene; there is no doubt about that whatever.

As it is, over the last eight years, government Ministers such as Mr Rees-Mogg have not thought twice about intervening in the debate of Parliament. Even more to the point, Governments can take decisions which limit the action of Parliament. If we take the issue of a decant of Members—I agree very much with what the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said about Members working while it is going on, and I do not want to argue the case because he has done it so well, as have others—the obvious place is the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre.

However, the former Secretary of State, Mr Gove, whose department ran the centre, said bluntly—rather like a 19th century mill owner—that this was not acceptable to him and that the House of Lords should not go to the Queen Elizabeth II Centre but hundreds of miles away. We have a position where a Secretary of State—here yesterday and gone today—appointed by a Prime Minister who is still here today but gone tomorrow has vetoed the most sensible proposal for a decant of this House, if it ever decided to go that way. I hope that the Leader of the House in replying to this debate will say if the veto on the Queen Elizabeth II Centre is still part of the Government’s policy—or was it just Mr Gove’s policy and not the Government’s? It is rather a crucial question. If we cannot go to the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, that limits where a decant could go.

I cannot resist saying in passing that I am puzzled by a process that has a commercial conference centre run by the Government and not the private sector. I see that my old friend the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, is here. We worked together very early on in the Thatcher Government in transport. We found a company called National Freight Corporation, which included a removals company called Pickfords. We came to the conclusion that you did not need a nationalised removals company in this country. I do not think its abolition as such has caused any controversy with any known political party.

In my position as a—what am I?

[Lord Newby (LD)]

Cross-Bencher.

[Lord Fowler (CB)]

In my position as a Cross-Bencher, I think that it is a very odd position for the Conservative Party. I do not believe that it is in our national advantage. I gently say that it might be better for the Government to go down the privatisation route in this area rather than in one or two others that they seem to support.

That brings me to my second point about the joint report. Frankly, I did not find it to be the clearest exposition of the case or the clearest piece of writing. I give one example, from page 6:

“The Panel recommends that the parameters ‘should be augmented by clear evaluation criteria’ which are designed to support option assessment, and key trade-offs which will need to be made to arrive at a progressively shorter list of possible options for the works. These criteria should take account of longer-term perspectives and link to the programme’s end-state vision and intended outcomes.”


I am sure that that is persuading people around the country to be in favour of this report, but I am not altogether sure that it persuades me. There is much in the joint report about generalised vision but precious little about some of the real issues, such as the real cost of eight years of work—carried out prior to what is now called a “new mandate”—that we are turning our backs on.

Thirdly and finally, after the Great Fire of 1834, to which the noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst, referred, various efforts were made to agree a rebuilding plan, and it took 30 or 40 years for it all to be agreed. We should learn from that. I am concerned not just because of the complexity of the task but because of the many interests, including the Government’s and government Ministers’, all intervening at the same time. Unless we are very careful, we are likely to face exactly the same kind of indecision and delay as they did in the Victorian times—we have certainly done that in the first eight years. So far, we lack both leadership in this project and a determination to stay on the plan.

I agreed with the spirit and almost every word of what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said, but I was not encouraged when the Leader of the House said that it would take “decades” to complete this project—I think I quote her right. Is it really going to take decades? If it is, we are in for a certain amount of difficulty. We need to get on with this; we should decide a plan and stick to it, rather than having the kind of debate and discourse that we have had over the last eight years.