Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 27th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I will respond briefly to what has been said on this group of amendments. The Minister will perhaps be grateful to me if I do not repeat all the arguments made in the eloquent speeches we have heard this afternoon. In turn, I will be very grateful to him if he gives a full reply to all the points raised and the questions asked. I particularly want to hear from him what the Government intend to do if the planning application, as I believe the Government intend, leads to a decision to turn down this proposal. I want to know from him whether the Government’s current position—they must have some position on this—is to call it in or to accept what the experts and the politicians on Westminster City Council believe is the right decision. I give my noble friend a little warning that I will get up and ask again if he does not produce an answer to that.

My main reason for speaking is that, like the noble Lord, Lord Parkinson, I was at one time the Minister in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport responsible not just for the arts but for heritage. One of the most shocking things about this project relates to the 1900 Act, which was set up in good faith in perpetuity to protect these gardens for the use of residents and other users. We are seeing a blatant disregard for what legislators decided. Admittedly that was a long time ago, but for many years no Governments have decided to disapply the Act to this important garden. The Minister has to say why he thinks this disapplication is acceptable. It is profoundly wrong on social, environmental and political grounds, and in terms of thinking about the future of this particular part of London.

I want to pick up on what the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said about the heritage issues. It is shocking that UNESCO—an extremely important part of the United Nations’ activities, protecting our culture and our heritage around the world—should be ignored. I just do not think a British Government should do that. We are committed members of the United Nations, and we have been committed to UNESCO. On a number of occasions I, as a Minister, sat with my officials discussing how we would ensure that all the British world heritage sites were properly maintained, sustained and cared for, and how we should carefully select new ones when we had an opportunity to do so. As it happened, when I was the Minister responsible, I selected Kew Gardens, which was not a world heritage site but absolutely deserved to be. We gave it some funding to make sure that it could prepare an application for it.

I really urge the Minister to discuss this further, not only in his own department but in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which has some responsibility for heritage issues and for what UNESCO decides to do. Perhaps he could let the Committee know whether any discussions have taken place with his colleagues in that department, and whether there has been any direct contact with UNESCO about the decision to ignore what UNESCO has been saying for the last five years. It is also important that Historic England, an agency funded by the Government, has also come out totally against using the site for this project.

I rest my case. I will not say any more, but I support what has already been said, not just on this matter but by the other contributors to this debate on the whole area of planning.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, it is a particular pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, who noble Lords will recall suggested at a previous session that I said that people who were against this were antisemitic, which was clearly wrong. Most people would have sought all kinds of ways to find their way around those words, but I am delighted to say that the noble Baroness most graciously apologised to me. I accept that apology and I accept that it was made in good faith, and I have to say that I think it takes a great person to admit when they have made a mistake.

I place on record my gratitude to the Government for the announcement made last night at the Community Security Trust dinner by the Home Secretary that the new memorial will receive the protection of the new offence of damage to a public memorial. That is an important announcement, and we are grateful for it.

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[Lord Robathan (Con)]

We are talking about the planning process now. Some of us do not quite understand why the decision of Westminster City Council was overturned by the Government in 2019.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

That was a perfectly proper and normal process, as established in the planning rules. Of course the Government can do that, through the proper process, and have a public inquiry; that is a normal thing. What the council cannot do is meet as a group to decide on planning permissions. The reason why the law was changed was because of a number of dodgy decisions taken in the 1960s for political and personal financial reasons. That is why it is not possible to discuss planning applications.

These things are taken completely independently. There have been some ingenious arguments put forward, which I have enjoyed, but, essentially, it is the same thing: “We want a different planning system. We don’t want one that applies to the rest of the country. We want a planning application that applies to where we live, and we want to decide it because we’re in the House of Lords”. That is an untenable position and one that is difficult to justify outside. This Bill does not seek to grant planning permission; it does not take it into the planning permission. Nothing in this process relates to town and country planning. It just opens the possibility for town and country planning to be applied to this process.

The Imperial War Museum is a key partner in this. It supports the memorial in the Victoria Tower Gardens. Regarding UNESCO, we should remember that this is not in its area; it is outside it. We are perhaps entitled to get the opinion of Historic England. I am sure that it was just because of a question of time—she was coming to the end of her time—that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, did not give Historic England’s view; of course, it looked at this matter specifically. It said that

“the proposals would not significantly harm the Outstanding Universal Value of the Palace of Westminster and Westminster Abbey including Saint Margaret’s Church World Heritage Site”.

We are grateful for that but, ultimately, something such as this has to be determined by the Minister. The Government, who are responsible for our security, have to make that decision in conjunction with the security forces.

I am going to sit down now, but I do hope that we can conduct this in a slightly more comradely fashion. In 1992, during my first appearance on a committee, I accused George Mudie, who was then a Member of Parliament—and quite a good friend of mine, actually—of issuing weasel words. I was hauled over the coals for that, and I had to make a full and frank apology. But, apparently, your Lordships’ House, which is supposed to be the dignified end of the constitution, can serve words such as these without it even raising an eyebrow.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 21. I have a few straightforward questions for the Minister on the so-called planning process. First, I say to my noble friend Lord Pickles, in the most comradely and indeed cuddly way, that I think he misunderstood what my noble friend Lord Robathan was saying. I do not take my noble friend Lord Robathan’s comments to mean that the Labour and Tory groups met in some secret cabal or caucus to sabotage the planning application. I took them to mean that, when they met in the council properly to determine it, all the Tories and Labour people voted against it, perfectly legitimately—not in some secret caucus.

The questions I have for the Minister are straightforward. First, will he confirm that the designated Minister to decide on the three options that he mentioned last week will be from his own department? Will it be Matthew Pennycook MP, Jim McMahon OBE MP, Rushanara Ali MP, Alex Norris MP or the noble Baroness, Lady Taylor of Stevenage? Secondly, will he state how their independence will be judged?

I must tell the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, that in my opinion there is not the slightest snowflake’s chance in Hades that the Government will again send this to Westminster City Council for a planning application. They will go for the other two internal options. In that regard, will the Minister set out exactly how the round-table proposal will work? Who will be invited, how many round tables will there be and what written evidence will they accept?

Finally, there is a suggestion for written representations as another option. Will he or the designated Minister accept and give full consideration to all written representations received, just like the planning application to Westminster City Council? If the designated Minister rejects them, will his or her justification be set out in full?

For the benefit of any present who may wish to give the Minister any advisory notes from the Box, I repeat: who will be the designated Minister? How will the department determine his or her independence? How will the round tables work? Will written representations permit all the representations that Westminster City Council receives? How will they be assessed? Will the designated Minister set out in full the reasons for rejecting written arguments, if the decision to go ahead is taken?

There you go, my Lords: two and a half minutes, which is a record for me in this Committee.

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In conclusion, there is no justification for adding other genocides and breaking the solemn declaration that we signed in Stockholm in 2000 and again in 2020. If we are to add others, the choice should be a lot better than those weirdly selected ones of Darfur, Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. None of the past countries that have suffered genocide—except perhaps for Burma and China and what Putin is doing in Ukraine—have continuing calls for a new genocide. No one is denying their genocides like we have with Holocaust denial, which is why it is essential that this learning centre concentrates on the Holocaust and the rising tide of antisemitism only—nothing else. I beg to move.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, this gives me an opportunity to remind the Committee of my declaration of interest. I am pleased that my noble friend referred to the Stockholm declaration; I am sure he is delighted that it created the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, of which I am a former chairman. He will also be delighted that we met in February this year, in London, not only to celebrate the last 25 years but to plan the next 25 years. I am pleased that the United Kingdom has played such an important part in ensuring that the Shoah goes on to be remembered. I am not one who thinks there are any lessons from the Holocaust, but there are lots of warnings and it is important that we bear them in mind.

It is important not to conflate the memorial with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. As my noble friend said, I am vice-president of that. I do not occupy an executive role. I took on the role to try to help out when the late Sir Ben Helfgott of blessed memory was perhaps not as ambulant as he had been. I agreed to stay on an extra year and will be standing down in July this year. I am delighted that Sir Sajid Javid is taking over as chair.

My noble friend talked about the importance of the Shoah, but I have to tell him with some reluctance that that is not what this amendment says. This is a very dangerous amendment. It will bring comfort to those who wish to rinse their history and to say, “No, it wasn’t us. It was just them Nazis who caused the genocide”. That is certainly not the case.

There are two great certainties about the Holocaust. The first is that, whether you lived in a village nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees or deep in the forests of Belarus, the Nazis and their machine did not need to tell you about antisemitism; you knew all about it. They might have given messages that reinforced this prejudice, but antisemitism was there.

The second truth is that there were not enough Nazis to produce the Holocaust. The Nazis could not have done it by themselves; they required collaboration. For example, they needed the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia, the Iron Guard in Romania, the Ustaše in Croatia—which went a stage further and actually had its own concentration camp—and the Arrow Cross in Hungary. The Arrow Cross committed atrocities and sadism that in many cases were worse than the Nazis. None of these organisations were Nazis.

Those areas that were occupied—eventually Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia were occupied, along with former allies Bulgaria, France and the Netherlands—used the police and gendarmerie to round up and take their Jewish populations to be murdered, either in ditches or in the gas chambers. I recently visited a number of the Baltic nations—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland—and in all these countries people were brought to their death by local gendarmes. Just a few Fridays ago, I stood in a forest in the snow looking at the heaps of bodies that had been eventually cremated. They were all taken there by local gendarmes—people who were not Nazis.

Places like Jasenovac did not have gas chambers. Their favourite method of killing children was to bash them on the back of the head with a hammer, up close and very personal. “Do you want to meet your mummy?” was the question they would ask prior to slamming the hammer into their head. None of those people were Nazis.

There is a serious attempt to use the Holocaust as a way of rinsing history. The house of faiths in Hungary attempted to show Hungary being a victim of the Nazis, when in fact it was fully co-operative and collaborate. Look at the defamation laws in Poland, where it is a criminal offence to suggest that Poles were involved in the persecution of Jews. All these countries are really in favour of celebrating the blessed among the nations; they will talk for ever about the people who saved Jews, and we should remember them and regard them with honour. But we should understand that those people were great exceptions to the rule. The majority of the population did nothing—they either collaborated or just looked the other way. Austria can no longer call itself the first victim of the Nazis. France has now admitted its culpability. Italy has admitted its culpability in the Holocaust.

I have to say to my noble friend that his amendment as written would give those bodies an enormous fillip. He said, “Well, it’s a long way away and hasn’t affected us”. I ask Members to remind themselves: about two years ago, a very glossy book was sent to every Member of this House from the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, which showed Poland’s involvement in the Second World War. It looked nice, with lots of diagrams and photographs. There were no lies in it but there were an awful lot of omissions. No one talked about the pogroms that happened after the Second World War, when returning Jews were murdered by Polish citizens. There are deliberate attempts to twist the Holocaust.

This question is a serious matter. I take exception to the idea that somehow the memorial is going to deal with anything other than the Shoah. That is quite wrong. There is not going to be a room on Rwanda or anything else. Do not conflate things with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. But what will it deal with? How does it need to look beyond the Shoah? There are two specific reasons. You cannot honour the dead. You cannot understand what happened in the Shoah without understanding those two great legal changes: crimes against humanity and genocide as a crime.

We need to be able to reference them, because we are very happy to bow our heads on 27 January and repeat the great lie “never again”. Of course, I do not believe for one moment that we will ever see a nation that together will decide to murder its population using mechanical means. That is not going to happen, but people dying by being shot and dumped in a ditch almost certainly does and will happen. More people died in a ditch than were gassed in the death factories; we need to understand that.

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[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I added my name in support of Amendment 32 because it responds to a concern that I raised at Second Reading. I am sorry that I could not have been here for previous days in Committee when the scope of the learning centre was discussed, and in particular on day 2, when Amendment 2 was debated, and on day 3, when there was a very animated debate around the learning centre.

I was reassured by what the noble Lord, Lord Austin, said about the focus that historians have decided to put on the centre. None the less, I remain a bit unnerved by the language in the Explanatory Notes to which Lord Blencathra has referred, and by the answer that the Minister gave at Second Reading in response to the concern that I and others such as the noble Lord, Lord Goodman, raised. He said:

“The learning centre will also address subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur”.—[Official Report, 4/9/24; col. 1224.]


It seems to me that a learning centre needs focus. It cannot cover all atrocities, whether genocidal or not. All those situations obviously involved very serious crimes against humanity, war crimes at a minimum, and probably genocide—certainly genocide in the case of Rwanda and Srebrenica. I do not claim to have any particular expertise on any of those situations, but I have some knowledge of the Rwandan genocide because I started my academic career interviewing victims of that genocide. Months into my fieldwork, I had only just begun to understand the complexity of Rwandan society, Rwandan history and identities in Rwanda, which are far more complex than people understand. So I just do not see how something as tragic and as complex as the Rwandan genocide could be meaningfully addressed in a learning centre that is already devoted principally to the Holocaust.

Obviously, I would not have any objection to a board at the end referring to other atrocities that may be similar in nature, which I believe the noble Lord, Lord Austin, mentioned. But there is a difference between that message, which can be conveyed at the end, and the intent to address these other genocides as learning experiences as part of the learning centre.

We also need to realise that, unfortunately, the concept of genocide is going through a process of rather intense instrumentalisation at the international level. At the moment, we have at least four disputes involving the genocide convention before the International Court of Justice. We have disputes between Russia and Ukraine, Gambia and Myanmar, South Africa and Israel, and, as of last week, a case brought by Sudan against the United Arab Emirates. The reason for this proliferation of genocide litigation is that the genocide convention is quite often the only treaty that is available against that state for submitting a dispute to the International Court of Justice.

Be that as it may, in each of these cases there will be groups and campaigns which argue that that particular situation is genocidal in nature and comparable to the Holocaust. Those campaigns and groups would contend that those situations would have to be addressed in a learning centre if that centre has pledged, as it seems that this one has done, to address subsequent genocide. I fear that we can expect a great deal of controversy about what counts as a subsequent genocide that needs to be included in this learning centre. We would be much better off avoiding that controversy by defining the scope of the centre at the outset much more clearly. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, has given us a sense of the kind of arguments that we could get into about all the other situations that have been claimed to be genocidal in nature.

I understand the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, but I do not think the issue is whether the learning centre should address what happened during the Shoah that involved non-Nazis or Nazi sympathisers elsewhere in Europe. That is very much part of the history of the Shoah, and therefore the Ustaše, the Hungarian collaborators and the fascists in Italy would all have to be part of that history. Maybe the language can be clarified to make that absolutely clear, but I understand the amendment to say that the focus of the learning centre must be the Holocaust in its entirety.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

It does not say that.

[Lord Verdirame (Non-Afl)]

The language could be changed to clarify that; the Nazi genocide of the Jews is how I read it. However, what concerns me and the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, is the subsequent genocide and not including the entirety of the Shoah.

I do not see this amendment as disruptive of the Bill, the memorial or the learning centre. Its purpose is to clarify what the centre is about and, as I see it, to ensure that the focus of the learning centre should remain the Holocaust. I would have thought that, understood in those terms, this amendment could attract support from those enthusiastic about the project, those who are less enthusiastic and the sceptics. However, I understand that that may not be the case.

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[Lord Wilson of Sedgefield (Lab)]

I just say to noble Lords that we do not want to be reliving the whole debate, as passionate as it is. We should be winding up now, as the Minister has sat down.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

I can do this in 20 seconds. All I am saying is that the Arrow Cross was murdering Jews in Hungary while Hitler was attempting the Munich putsch. The antisemitic laws were first introduced not at Nuremberg but in Hungary.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

I will happily take that guidance from my noble friend; he may be absolutely right. I say to the Government Whip that we are not reliving the debate; I am trying to wind up the most important debate we have had in this Session over the last few days, and it is important to deal with the very important points raised by my noble friend Lord Pickles.

Okay, I am quite happy to remove the word “Nazi” and to say “Nazi-inspired”. We all agree that if we did not say “Nazi”, the amendment would be perfectly in order, because no one in this Room who supports the amendment is suggesting that we included the word “Nazi” to somehow exonerate Poland or the other countries that did it and are trying to concentrate just on a few hundred misguided people who wore the SS uniform. Of course that is not the case. We want this memorial and learning centre to be about everyone who exterminated Jews, whichever country they were in and whatever nationality they were.

That is the point made, in conclusion, by my noble friend Lord Robathan. He said that the whole point of the memorial is the genocide of the Jews by whoever did it. It has to be the Holocaust only, and none of the other four genocides suggested here has any relevance to the Holocaust. They should be ignored: the Holocaust and antisemitism only. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 20th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I just say a few words in support of my noble friend Lord Strathcarron’s Amendments 8 and 17. Projects such as this are always liable to mission creep. This has already had quite a lot of mission creep attached to it, and I can see many reasons why there might be further mission creep in future. My noble friend has undertaken a valuable role in drawing attention to the areas where this might happen and, therefore, bringing in the agreements and undertakings so far given by the Government and the promoters of the Bill. That relates to Amendment 8, and my noble friend Lord Blencathra has also underlined many of the words and excuses that will be used for wishing to go wider than originally anticipated.

Amendment 17 would help guarantee that this does not become a way for creep in the future. We can stop mission creep as far as this project is concerned, but there may be subsequent creep thereafter. The amendment is therefore very valuable, because this is controversial and all sides are entitled to know exactly what is proposed. I honestly cannot see how the Government and promoters—if they are being honest—can refuse to accept an invitation that lays everything out clearly and precisely so that we know where we are from the beginning.

These two amendments therefore have my support.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I will be brief. I am pleased that the Government have allocated additional days to discuss the Bill, but I am slightly concerned that we are becoming repetitious and are in danger of spending more time on it than we are spending in Committee on reform of the House of Lords.

I have a couple of points. If I am honest, I do not entirely understand Amendment 17. My reading of the Bill is that we are not repealing the 1900 Act, we are just disapplying it. Anyone wishing to build outside the area that has planning permission would have to go through this process again and would require a special Act of Parliament to disapply the 1900 Act.

We should also be clear about Mr WH Smith—a name that looks like it is about to disappear from our high streets. His principal concern was to prevent wharfs being built next to the House because of the risks that would have in terms of industrial activity, and the risk of fire it posed to the House. I am sure that his wishes are not in any way being diminished by the various statues that have gone up in the intervening period.

I am sorry to repeat this, but Parliament has long decided how to deal with matters such as this, and it is through the planning Acts. They have a process whereby objectors can object and ideas are tested. That seems the most appropriate way of doing it, not setting up a separate system where the House of Lords is judge and jury in its own case.

I recognise that people have strong views, but I am disappointed that we are hearing repeats of things that are plainly untrue. There is no suggestion that this will be anything other than something that commemorates the Holocaust—the Shoah. Any references to other genocides are peripheral and probably will occur under two circumstances. One of the outcomes of that terrible event was the creation of crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide. They give the lie to “never again”. It is important that this memorial is not celebratory of British involvement but is “warts and all”, to use Mr Cromwell’s phrase.

The question is: who supports this? It is unseemly to play Top Trumps with Holocaust survivors. I could reel off a whole bunch of Holocaust survivors who have been supportive of this from the very beginning.

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to go with the Minister to Ron Arad’s headquarters up in Chalk Farm, where there is a beautiful model laid out, which I hope the Committee will get an opportunity to look at—certainly, the House should do so—as many of the worries would disappear. Far from this memorial dominating the Buxton memorial, it would lie considerably below the very top of it. Far from it dominating the park, it would enhance it, and it seems very sensible. The Minister and I were fortunate to be joined by the Chief Rabbi, who has taken a great interest in this matter, as did the late Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory. I can remember lots of discussions with Rabbi Sacks on this.

The Chief Rabbi is entirely happy with the design, the purpose and the like. I am not Jewish; I cannot make a judgment, but I think I am entitled to take the views of the Chief Rabbi in preference to those of others in this Committee. I hope, now that we are close to the possibility of coming to a decision on this, we will not drag our feet and repeat points that we made earlier, interesting though they are. Can we just get on with the job?

[Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I was not planning to speak on this group, but I want to respond to some of the points that have been made. I agree completely with what the noble Baroness said about antisemitism and the marches in London—I think she knows that. She, the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, and I were all at a briefing by the historians working on the contents for this, who assured us that it would be specifically and only about the Holocaust, not about genocides generally, and that it would not relativise or compare the Holocaust to other genocides. We have been assured about that repeatedly by the Minister and the people working on the content, and we should accept that assurance.

On the question of the location, the Holocaust Commission recommended a new national memorial in central London

“to attract the largest possible number of visitors and to make a bold statement about the importance Britain places on preserving the memory of the Holocaust”.

Victoria Tower Gardens was chosen as the right setting because it would be a permanent reminder, as we have said before, to people next door in Parliament, to UK citizens and to visitors from all over the world of what can happen when politics is poisoned by racism and extremism.

If you go to Berlin, you will see its Holocaust memorial and learning centre right at the centre of its national life. If you go to Paris, you will struggle to find it, and in Vienna, it is a bizarre concrete block tucked away in a square, miles from anywhere. It would be much better to have this right at the centre of our national life, too.

There are serious voices in the Jewish community who do not support this, not least the noble Baroness, and I respect them, but there is no doubt that the vast majority of Holocaust survivors and refugees, their families and the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community support this project. As we heard a moment ago, the Chief Rabbi is not only happy about this project but described the venue as inspirational—his word—and said,

“it is in a prime place of … prominence and it is at the heart of our democracy”.

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[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend has just said. I very much admire the commission’s report and I think that the way that it is being treated now shows a degree of disrespect that is little short of appalling. The debate that we have just heard from my noble friend Lord Pickles and the noble Lord, Lord Austin, is completely irrelevant to the actuality of what is being proposed and the difference between it and what the commission recommended.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

I am sorry that my noble friend sees this in such personal terms. I do not see people objecting to this at all in a personal way; they are expressing a perfectly reasonable right. I apologise if my intervention earlier rather excited one or two colleagues to some rather verbose interjections.

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[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I did not sign these amendments because I was leaving it to others with kiddies and grandchildren to speak with much more authority, but I am prompted to speak by the Minister saying last week that the main path used by mums, nannies and children will be closed. Also, I have a question for my noble friend Lady Fookes, which we may want to reflect on, on the effect on the water table if a big hole is dug. I am not sure whether a hydrological engineer has commented on this, but my experience with Natural England was that if you want to destroy peatland, you just dig a trench and all the water drains from the rest of the soil and the peat into the trench. There is probably a level water plain in this park. If one digs a ruddy great big hole, does it not act as a sump, so that water from the surrounding area moves into it?

Of course, the bunker will have to be completely waterproof so that there is no water ingress, but it will still act as a sump and there may have to be pumps to pump out the water surrounding the bunker in order to maintain its water integrity. It is a question that I am not sure my noble friend will have the answer to, but there could be a more serious effect on the trees she is concerned about, in that they will suffer a huge moisture lack, more than London often does in summer, if the bunker acts as a sump.

As for the children’s playground, I believe that there are only two ways into it. The level access one is the southern gate, which we all use and which gives access to the Buxton memorial, the playground and the kiosk. The other access, I think, is down the steep set of steps off Lambeth Bridge, which is no good whatever for mums with baby buggies and so on. The playground now assumes a much greater importance because the Government confirmed last week that the main path used by everyone, adjacent to Millbank, will be closed or partially closed. That is where, every morning when I go through the park, I see the nannies with the little kiddies.

Yesterday was a reasonably warm day in London. The park was not full, and I took some wonderful photographs—of the bins overflowing and garbage everywhere. That was just on a nice day in London. Obviously, I would not take photographs of little kiddies with their nannies and so on—one does not want to be arrested on the spot—but I can assure the Committee that I see lot of them going through there every day. They are tiny little things: I do not know what ages they are, but none of them are higher than 18 inches. Sometimes they are on a pole or in a croc, and they are all walking along with their nannies, using that main path. If they have no access to the park, the playground becomes even more important. How will they access it?

From the plans, I assume that the main entrance for the builders and contractors will be the southern gate, and that will block access to the children’s playground and to the main footpath that lots of little kiddies, nannies and mums, as well as other users of the park, use every day. I say to the Government that if they are determined to go ahead with this, they should leave the southern gate alone for mums and dads and everyone else to use, and create some other construction access between the southern gate and Lambeth Bridge where they can get their trucks in. If they are going to remove the kiosk and the children’s playground, and move it elsewhere, that would allow the construction of a new gate. I leave that point for the Minister and his planning process to consider.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on a very ingenious argument. I am always distressed to be on the opposite side from him on these matters, because he is such a persuasive speaker. I thought that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, made an enormous amount of sense and said nothing that I disagree with. It occurs to me that if I had followed his advice and attended more playgrounds and eaten fewer buns, I would be in a better state today than I am.

The noble Lord said that the planning system is not fit for purpose. That is generally said by people who think that we are not passing enough: it is not fit for purpose because we need to build more houses. One thing that I think is fit for purpose is that, as is pretty well established, we are able to look at the regulations, apply those to playgrounds and do some negotiating to get the right alternative through the planning system. That also applies to trees. If there is anything well established, tree preservation orders are at the very centre of the planning system. We know that, should there be a grant of planning permission, each tree will be considered and negotiated between the council and the department, and an enormous amount of work will go into this. If we are to pass this, are we saying that Parliament should decide on the conditions of every playground next to a new development, or every tree preservation order?

With a cursory look at the planning inquiry and the independent inspector’s finding, noble Lords will see that an enormous amount of thought has gone into the preservation of the trees. The current situation is not helpful. As I said a couple of Committee days ago, those paths are, in essence, strangling the roots of the trees because they are not permeable to water. We will put in new paths that ensure that water goes to the roots of the trees.

I recognise and sympathise with the noble Baroness’s dilemma and great passion with regard to abduction, but one of the reasons why that is not likely to happen—in, as she described, a situation where there will be lots of queuing—is that there will not be any queuing. It will be ticket only. People will have to obtain the tickets in advance; they will not be able to obtain a ticket at the memorial site. Only people with tickets will be able to come in, and only within a particular time frame. That was designed specifically—

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

But will there not be people queuing for the kiosk? That is very close to the playground.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes a reasonable point. I very much support the Minister’s point. I think that, once the noble Baroness sees the model, many of her worries and concerns will disappear.

If there is one thing that has become clear to me in these interesting debates, it is that the fiction about the memorial does not last very long under public scrutiny and questioning. Noble Lords will be surprised but, again, we cannot create two planning systems, with one for the rest of the country and another for noble Lords, particularly—I say this in a very gentle way—when those noble Lords have a financial interest close to the site.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, since we have absolutely no guarantee that there will be a proper planning application, we have to set those remarks to one side.

I just want to add that this is not about nimbyism or selfishness. For those of us who have a real, deep family interest in this project, it is of a low quality. It will not do for my grandmothers and all the other members of my family whom I lost. Many others agree with me. Those who are not so affected may not completely understand our deep feelings about the quality and message of this project.

On the playground, I will just say that this is a social justice issue because of the mixed demographic area here, with children from ethnic-minority backgrounds who have low levels of activity apart from in this garden. The poverty, lack of access to safe spaces and poor local natural resources that are inevitable in this area contribute to this inequality. Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says:

“States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child … States Parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in”


those activities

“and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for … recreational … activity”.

We ratified that in 1991.

This Government are committed to upholding international law, as they say repeatedly. Every day we hear from Minister David Lammy and others about its importance. In damaging the playground, not just reducing its size but exposing its users to risk, as the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, so eloquently pointed out, we are in danger of breaching that United Nations convention. If I were a parent or carer of a child, I would not want to take them to a park where there were armed guards, strangers, coaches, protests and so on, and no longer a happy atmosphere.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support this group of amendments, in particular Amendments 15 and 28. I can be very brief because the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has already said everything that I would like to say. I agree with every word he said, as, indeed, did my noble friends Lord Howard and Lord Blencathra.

It is astonishing that this Bill seeks to ignore the security considerations of the project it proposes. It is astonishing that, in 2025, when we know what is going on in the world around us, this Bill seeks to pretend that Westminster is a quiet little place where we can do whatever we like without regard to the real world outside. What has been said today and at other times is not scaremongering. We cannot pretend that the security considerations are minor. They are not minor; they are very serious. When noble Lords have an opportunity to look at and consider some of the reports that have been prepared, but not published, they will agree with me that these security considerations are serious. As others have said, we do not want to be the people who say, “I told you so”, do we?

I say again, as I have said before, that we can do better than this. Everybody wants a memorial. Everybody wants to commemorate the Holocaust. Nobody wants to forget what happened. We all want to say, “Remember, remember, remember, and never let it happen again”. However, in saying it, we are not telling the truth if we ignore the security considerations. It is our duty to tell the truth in order to protect not just parliamentarians but everybody who might have anything to do with this memorial. We must not ignore what the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has said today.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, for the measured way in which he introduced his amendment. Clearly, getting a security assessment is enormously important and should be done, but the question that faces this Committee is: should it be on the face of the Bill? I would suggest that it should not.

If the noble Lord will forgive me, I have a very distinguished lawyer. I hate to correct him by saying this, but there is only one planning system and this Bill does not seek to circumvent it. All it seeks to do is disapply the 1900 Act. A planning permission is something entirely separate. Matters of security and the like should be considered carefully by the Government in coming to their decision.

My noble friend Lord Blencathra gave the impression that this is just a simple binary choice. Should the Minister come to a decision, at that point, the various conditions that are part of a normal planning process will start to be brought into being and we will negotiate, whether that is on trees, the playground or security. Only when officials are happy with that will a decision be made.

I have worked, and happily so, as I suspect we all have, in the No. 1 terrorist target in the United Kingdom for 35 years. This is one of the top 10 terrorist targets in the world, but we come here because of democracy, because we want to be heard and because of the things we believe. I say gently and reasonably to colleagues in this Room, whom I like very much, that the arguments they are pursuing basically say: “This is a dangerous thing. Take it away from here so I can be safe”. I say this as gently as I can—I actually feel much more strongly about this. It is an argument for saying that Hamas and Hezbollah have said that we cannot put up any monument to the Holocaust or be supportive of dealing with antisemitism, because it makes us a target. That, my friends, is a recipe for surrender and defeat.

I apologise that I cannot stay for the end of this session because I too have a commitment. I am speaking to a conference of rabbis.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I suggest that the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has misunderstood the meaning of risk assessment. We accept that it is a security risk. Of course you do not refrain from building because there is a risk, but you have to assess it and plan in detail what you will do to mitigate it. That is what this group of amendments is about. In particular, I support Amendment 35, on which the noble Lord, Lord Howard, spoke so persuasively. It is about planning to meet the risks that will undoubtedly occur. As I have said before, we have no assurance that there will be a proper planning application in which this can be aired. You would expect in general a thorough risk assessment to be available in relation to this controversial and security-imbued Bill and project.

We do not give in to threats, but there must be a thorough evaluation of the consequences. What evaluation has there been of the risks outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile? What traffic measures will be taken and what barriers erected? How will this affect everyone who lives in the area, Parliament Square and the Supreme Court? We need to know about security guards, whether armed or not, and the security measures that will be needed at night if the centre is open for commercial meetings. What are the risks to those who will build it, to visitors who will make use of the park during the construction period, to passersby, to boats passing by on the river and to schoolchildren going to the Parliament Education Centre? Are there risks to Victoria Tower and its refurbishment? What control is there over the escalating costs, which are going up exponentially year after year as building costs rise? What will be done about governance? What if sufficient funds are not forthcoming and the building takes longer than expected? Is there a risk to the parliamentary buildings on Millbank and the surrounding streets? I suspect that the Government do not have the answers to these questions. Amendment 35 will require them to come up with them, accepting of course that some security issues can be dealt with only confidentially.

These issues also apply to Amendment 36 from the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, which would restrict security checks to those entering the learning centre, leaving the rest of the gardens as a freely accessible open space, as it is now, where one can enter just for a few moments on a whim. This is welcome, but what effect would it have on the necessary security arrangements? The gate leading to the Pankhurst sculpture and “The Burghers of Calais” is but a few steps from the edge of the learning centre. How can the learning centre be protected from someone entering by another route, unchecked and carrying a weapon, red paint or worse? This will inevitably lead to the entire gardens being treated as protected property, with security checks at every gate no matter the reason for the visit. Even a harmless gathering of people for a Holocaust memorial event at the end of April is leading to the whole gardens being closed for at least one day.

Moreover, it is easy enough to propel something into the gardens from Lambeth Bridge or from the river in a passing boat. How will those dangers be met? I need hardly explain that the current atmosphere of unpleasant and sometimes violent protest marches in the area is likely to continue, sadly, for a long time. The TV studios of Millbank House overlook the gardens and thus provide a perfect platform for people who want more publicity for a cause. Has the Minister an answer to these questions? Amendment 35 is essential and should be accepted.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 11th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Hope of Craighead (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to the amendment from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans on closure dates. I was a member of the Select Committee, which, as he told us, took the view that it should not table an amendment to the Bill. Select Committees are very reluctant to amend a Bill; if we did so, we would have the Bill amended before it reached discussion in this House. The place for consideration of amendments is in Committee or on Report. Whatever you see in paragraph 104 should not inhibit in any way the freedom of this Committee or the House to discuss whether an amendment is appropriate. We set out in appendix 7 to our report the various inhibitions and restrictions on a Select Committee in making amendments. It is well to bear in mind that, while we said that there should be no amendment, that in no way need operate against the right reverend Prelate’s amendment.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I think there is general agreement that there should be an independent, stand-alone body. I have no doubt that, once this Bill becomes an Act, that is one of the first things the Government will do. I say this very gently and with no criticism intended, because part of the process of planning is that you can object to things and use all force and every possibility to slow things down. However, one reason it has cost so much is the delays, which are caused by people exercising their democratic rights. I do not complain about that whatever.

However, the question is whether these things should be in the Bill. Frankly, I doubt that they should. With due respect to the right reverend Prelate, I am a little queasy about limiting in the Holocaust Bill the number of days in which we commemorate 6 million dead. Why are we not limiting the number of dog shows, open-air cinemas and organised picnics and exercise in the parks? It looks peculiar that we should pick on the Holocaust and Jews in this Bill. I urge the right reverend Prelate to think again about this and whether we can use common sense to find ways to ensure that people can enjoy the park. It looks appallingly bad for the Holocaust to be picked out.

I say in the gentlest way that I do not recognise any of noble Lords’ descriptions of the academic board. It is only right that we ensure that this is a balanced memorial and learning centre, which does not glorify the British Empire but shows what happened during the Holocaust and our reaction to it, warts and all. That seems a reasonable thing. Frankly, all the various plugs have to be pulled, because we cannot spend public money on what goes inside and start to employ a major director until we have authority to build this. That is not just subject to this Bill; it will also be subject to a further planning consideration. We are some way from being able to appoint people to commit public expenditure to do that, so I am very dubious that any of this should be in the Bill. The Government have made a number of commitments on all three of these things, and they should be made to deliver on them.

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

My Lords, I spoke on the first day in Committee to make clear my support for the memorial but my great concern about the learning centre. It seems increasingly clear that there is an extraordinary vagueness about what it will be made of, how it will be run and how long it will take to produce. I pressed the Minister for an indication of any quotations we might have, any companies that might be willing to build it and any idea of what their costs might be. He very kindly replied to say,

“the simple answer is that we will seek tenders for the main construction”.—[Official Report, 4/3/25; col. GC 68.]

That means that the Government have no idea, either, what this might actually cost.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, before the Minister responds, I will briefly come in on something my noble friend Lord Pickles said about 6 million Jews. I am sure many people here have been to Yad Vashem, which is one of the most moving places I have been to. I have been there three times, and it is absolutely heartbreaking every time—as any memorial and learning centre to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust of the mid-20th century under the Nazis should be.

However, my noble friend said that for 6 million Jews we should have about three days of closure a year, but this memorial is about the Holocaust, not about the 6 million Jews—as I think it should be. It is about the Holocaust in general. Are we going to have one for the Armenian holocaust, where a huge number of Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks in the 1920s? Are we going to have one for the Rwandan holocaust? I have been to Rwanda and know that it was equally as awful. It was just as much of a holocaust as the Jewish one, with one million out of eight million people in Rwandan murdered. Are we going to have one for Holodomor, which saw the slaughter of Ukrainians under Stalin in the 1930s? All of these are examples of holocausts. That is why we are talking about three days, to stop there being endless holocaust events.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

I think I was with my noble friend on his last visit to Yad Vashem. Like him, I have been there many times, and I am always moved by the process. However, we need to make it absolutely clear that there is only one Holocaust. A number of genocides have occurred before and after, but there is only one Holocaust: that was the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My noble friend Lord Robathan has made a very good point, and my noble friend Lord Pickles is right that there is only one Holocaust. But the briefing for this centre says that other genocides will also be commemorated there. So there will be things about Holodomor, and possibly Rwanda, and Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao or whoever they may be. Though there is only one really evil Holocaust, the Shoah, other genocides will also be commemorated. In my opinion, that dilutes the purpose of a Holocaust memorial.

--- Later in debate ---

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

I wonder if I could just make a very small point of clarification. As a personal view, I entirely agree that the memorial should be in Victoria Tower Gardens. What I worry about is the attempt to shoehorn in the learning centre as well. If we were able to have a standalone, well-designed, come-and-see memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens, it would get my vote immediately, because I also have in mind a world-class educational initiative, and I cannot see that the building proposed, or any of the preparations that have been made, go anywhere near creating a world educational initiative. In the world educational initiative, it is not only the understanding of what happened but what we think about it now and where we are going in these very difficult days where we have similar problems to face.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I am worried that Members are getting a little agitated. I do not think that they should be concerned, because there has not been a single Holocaust memorial built anywhere in the world where this kind of controversy did not occur. People, by and large, do not like them. They do not want them, but once they are built, they are very proud of them.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I have visited the Berlin memorial more than once. It is widely regarded as inappropriate and ineffective. People picnic on it, they bicycle around it, they dance on top of it. They do not know what it is and, of course, what good has it done in Germany? Where is Germany heading now? Look at the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe. There is no relationship at all between the position of a memorial and the effect that it has.

As for the contents of the learning centre, there will be an amendment later. However, Answers to the many parliamentary Questions I have asked have always said that the memorial will contain references to other genocides. This genocide or that genocide—the Government do not seem to know which ones but have always referred to others. It is only very recently that someone has said, “Oh, but the genocide of the Jews is more important than the others and shouldn’t be compared”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Finkelstein (Con)]

Just to clarify the point on “reasonably modest”, it has been a reasonable subject for discussion and obviously opinions will differ about how big this ought to be. In the Holocaust Commission, we had a debate about the different designs. Some people liked this design and others did not, but my point about “reasonably modest” concerned itself with the difficulty of building this memorial or, indeed, anything, nearby. I was just observing that we manage, as humanity, to cope with quite a lot of building and this is, on the scale of many of the things that we build, “reasonably modest”. Thus, the problems that were raised seem have been overcome on some quite big projects in comparison with this one. That is the point of my argument about reasonable modesty.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I am not sure whether we are supposed to declare our interests at each sitting, but I draw attention to my interests in the register relating to this project. I do not want to bring any discord but I feel I am about to enter into the war of the Buxtons, because my noble friend Lord Leigh, who is not in his place, asked me to pass on a message to the Committee from Jonathan Buxton, who is very happy for me to quote it:

“I would like to think that if Sir Thomas and his fellow abolitionists were around today, they would be 100% in favour of the Holocaust memorial”.


I understand of course that other Buxtons disagree with this, but I felt that the Committee might like to hear it.

I want to say two other things, but first I turn to this question of the kiosk, which I think is very badly formed. My noble friend is right: you can go to Yad Vashem and you do not need to go to the museum to use its facilities. You can get a hot dog outside the memorial in Washington and I do not think that in any way affects the spirituality of the thing.

One of my great delights, for the past 50 years of my association with Lady Pickles, is that we often spend our weekends looking at various cathedrals around the country. It is a passion of mine. I can tell noble Lords that you can get a very nice cappuccino in Lincoln Cathedral and a very nice date and walnut cake in York. In listening to the right reverend Prelate, I thought that perhaps I should go to St Albans Cathedral, and wondered what I might expect there. I am delighted to say that, if I go there, I can go to the Abbot’s Kitchen café, which is open from 10 am until 4 pm, and treat Lady Pickles to a coffee and walnut cake for £4.05. I do not think that that will in any way affect my enjoyment of the spirituality of the cathedral; it certainly has not spoilt it in the many cathedrals that I have had the pleasure to go round, both in this country and in France.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, intervened on me; I should be able to reply to him.

If I had expressed a view about a planning application, I would not have dealt with it; I would not have called it in. We are very strict. I must say that we know what is going on here, with people asking, “Will the Minister give a guarantee?” That would be predetermination. The noble Lord is a distinguished lawyer; he knows that it would be grounds for a judicial review if we predetermined it. We separate carefully, to ensure that the people taking decisions on planning have not expressed a view on it and are not subject to views expressed by either the Secretary of State or the Prime Minister. I assured that in the past five years.

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I want to speak in support of my noble friend Lord Carlile. I am a lawyer; I am also a chartered surveyor in the planning and development division of the RICS. I worked professionally in this area, a long time ago, for a number of years.

The point is that there is a fundamental difference between the covenant and the planning consent. We are not being asked to form any view about the merits of a planning application or anything like that, because were that to be the case, the draft legislation in front of us would make it explicitly clear that we were taking by statute the power to grant planning permission. The two consents run in parallel, and we should view them like that. The criteria that apply in determining each of the two are not the same.

[Lord Blencathra (Con)]

My Lords, I too wish to support what the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, though I may say it less elegantly. The reason we are talking about planning in this Committee is that we simply do not trust the Government—the previous Government or this Government—not to overrule Westminster City Council. If the Government will give a cast-iron commitment that they will abide by whatever Westminster City Council decides—that they will not call it in or get an inspector to reverse it, and that the Minister will not reverse it either—then all my concerns about planning would be removed. If the Government will trust the decision of Westminster City Council, I think no noble Lords in this Committee would be talking about the planning application.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, that would be a predetermination.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend for explaining so well the reasoning behind why we should wait for the planning system. I was going to say something very similar, but now I do not need to because of the timing. However, it would be helpful if the Minister could take the opportunity to give this Committee more detail about the process and the legalities, and about the reasons why we are doing what we are in this Bill, and where it should not then have anything to do with the planning system. That is an important thing to do and I ask that we have it in writing, to clarify this well in time for Report.

I was going to say something about all the other amendments in this group, but I feel that they would be much better discussed within the planning system and not within this Bill.

I will mention something about tea rooms. Interestingly, when I came in today, I was very much in support of not having them, but, having listened to the evidence and thought about it, it is actually not a bad thing to have that in a park that is used by all sorts of people for all sorts of different reasons. I certainly will not be supporting that proposal any longer. As far as I am concerned, all the other amendments should be dealt with in the planning system, so it is not worth my taking up any more of the Committee’s time.

Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 4th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Finkelstein (Con)]

My Lords, I should say at the beginning that I am a patron of the Wiener Holocaust Library—my grandfather’s Holocaust library—that I was a member of David Cameron’s Holocaust Commission and that I take a long-standing interest in this as the son of a Holocaust survivor. Of course, not all Holocaust survivors agree about this memorial, but my mother certainly did, as did Ben Helfgott, who sat on the commission with me. Indeed, he regarded the issue of the location as central.

Although this is an amendment about costs, we have heard a number of what amount to Second Reading speeches, so I hope I can be indulged in responding to some of those points a little. Although the noble Viscount is correct that David Cameron resigned, I do not think that he resigned because he appointed my noble friend Lord Pickles to look after the Holocaust memorial. I would just say that it is possible to make an argument against any kind of construction of anything, anywhere. I think that probably the preponderance of people who have attended today have done so in order to be against it, because we tend to get very annoyed when we see points against something and we want to stop it happening.

Every single point that I have heard was also made against the erection of Nelson’s column. They did not have the money. The public subscriptions had fallen short of how much it would cost. The cost ballooned. It was too high. It had to be made shorter. People were not sure about the design and lots of people were not sure about Nelson either. They were furious that the Tsar had contributed. The economic strain was regarded as too great. These are points that are made about the construction of anything when it is first proposed and are later found to be entirely irrelevant to the impact that it will have.

This Holocaust memorial is a memorial to everything we fought the war for and that the young people who liberated Belsen liberated Belsen for. It is a reminder of why we have a Parliament and why we have a parliamentary democracy and therefore it is relevant that it be right next door to Parliament. There is not a single place you could ever put anything that does not disrupt anyone. If we put it somewhere where no one goes, we would have a committee full of people saying, “We cannot believe you are putting this thing in the middle of nowhere”. We have put it in the middle of somewhere where people might actually visit it, and people are worried that too many people will come to it. If we put it somewhere else, people will worry that no one will come to it. There is an argument against doing anything, ever. If we do not do this, we absolutely after 10 years will not have a Holocaust memorial. It was the dearest wish of Ben Helfgott and my mother also supported it. I am going to robustly support it because of that.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lord, I am most grateful to noble Lords. Again, I would appreciate a degree of latitude. First, coming to the point that was made with regard to the advisory nature, it was always an advisory committee. When Bazalgette resigned to go on to other artistic projects, I was appointed, along with Ed Balls, as a co-chair to demonstrate the political unity of putting this together.

I was disturbed by what my noble friend Lord Blencathra —my dear friend—said. He seemed to be almost on the defensive to suggest that if you are opposed to this, somehow you are opposed to Jewish people or opposed to Israel. Nobody thinks that and no one has a greater, more distinguished record in their support of Jewish people than my noble friend Lord Blencathra. I want to make that absolutely clear.

I admire my noble friend Lord Blencathra. He was an amazing Chief Whip when we were in opposition, as indeed my noble friend opposite was an amazing Whip. He taught me many things, one of which was the kind of amendment to put down to embarrass the Government, to hold them down and to get them to say various things. He did it with great style.

But there is something that we need to be clear about. We saw a newspaper article yesterday. I do not blame the reporter—they are as good as the information they are given. I should be grateful if, when the Minister comes to reply, he can confirm that in all the briefings that he received, none suggested that this memorial would be about the glorification of the British Empire or the trivialisation of the Holocaust, or that the Holocaust would be diluted by references to other genocides.

A lot of the amendments before us might best be described as about planning. There is always a balance in planning. There is no absolute, and that is why we have such an elaborate system of planning to test the damages and balances. We are almost trying to set ourselves up as a planning authority to second-guess. This Committee, distinguished as it is, is not in a good position to do that because supporters and objectors do not have the same rights as they would have in a planning application, committee or appeal.

There is also an element in this of marking our own homework. If this went through a planning committee now—there is no criticism of anybody here—the fact that people who are expressing views live close by would be taken into account. If they were on a planning committee, they would have to recuse themselves. They would not be able to speak or vote. We cannot have a situation in this country where it is one rule for their Lordships and another rule for the rest of the country.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

Can I just finish this point? I am not criticising. It is within the rules. Nobody is doing anything wrong. But it does not look terribly good from the outside.

We do not like the design. We have become almost like Queen Anne. We kick over a stool and say, “Build it like that”. This design won an international competition among top international architects. Frankly, saying it looked like something that somebody in Canada objected to is wrong. That is the style of the architect, Ron Arad. It would be a bit like saying to Picasso, when he was going through his blue period, “That’s enough, Pablo. Too much blue.” That is the nature of Ron Arad’s work.

The trust that had been put together to raise the sums of money cannot start until we have proper planning permission. We cannot gather lots of money, although Sir Gerald Ronson is confident that we can do it. The state of the park is a disgrace. We have allowed it to get into such a situation.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

Just give me one moment and then I will bring you in. This will improve the park. It will improve the park’s access for the disabled, for young people and for four month-old puppies.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

If we are talking about planning permission, the whole point about this design was it was turned down flat by Westminster City Council—by both Labour and Conservative councillors.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

That is why we have a planning system. When I was a Planning Minister, we often had situations where gaming was played.

[Lord Howard of Rising (Con)]

My Lords—

[Noble Lords]

Order!

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

Allow me to allow me to develop the point. We always have an independent inspector to look at these things. If the Secretary of State disagrees with the independent inspector, then there is generally a row. But we accepted the report.

[Lord Howard of Rising (Con)]

I appreciate that my noble friend had a lot to do with planning when he was a Minister. The point is that this is not planning. This is to try and overturn a legal dedication of this park to being a park. That is what it is about.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

With the greatest respect, my noble friend needs to look more carefully at what is being asked here. It is second-guessing the planning.

In terms of the size, it is the size of the Berlin Holocaust underground site. It is the size of the one in Jasenovac. It is the size of the large temporary exhibition in America. It is not particularly small art; it is adequate for its size. It will not have any exhibits. It will all be digital. That does seem reasonable. On the location, more than 50 different sites were looked at.

I apologise for going on for so long; I hope that I will have an opportunity to speak in further debates.

[Lord Lisvane (CB)]

My Lords, I cannot contribute with the degree of fluency and authority of those noble Lords who have spoken so far, but I have a question for the Minister and an observation.

The question stems from the Explanatory Notes. Years ago, I had the function in another place of looking at Explanatory Notes in draft—not taking responsibility for their contents but ensuring that they were not used by the Government of the day for the purposes of advocacy. I looked at these Explanatory Notes, and they were pretty much typical of the breed: they are certainly notes but they are by no means explanatory. Where I hoped that I would have their assistance was on Clause 1(3) of the Bill, which states:

“For the purposes of subsection (1)(a), ‘construction’ includes erection, extension, alteration and re-erection”.


I would dearly like to see the instructions that counsel was given before it drafted that particular provision. It sounds as though the memorial is going to be mobile, which I am sure is not the intention.

If I can move on to the observation, at the north end of the Victoria Tower Gardens is the education centre; I have a particular reason for remembering this because, as a corporate officer, I was the applicant for the planning permission when it was originally given in 2015. As noble Lords will know, the planning consent ran out on 22 August last year; it was renewed or extended to 2030. When that runs out—or in anticipation of it running out—there will be substantial works, but I have not seen any reference to those in any of the supporting papers that the Committee has before it today. There will be traffic of substantial character, such as heavy lorries moving kit to and fro. If that is going to happen, as is possible, as the memorial and learning centre is in the later stages of construction, whatever difficulties of security, access and safety that that is going to pose will be exacerbated by doing all this to the education centre at the same time.

I am not sure whether my observation should find a home in our discussion of security or in our discussion of planning, but it seems to me that the Clause 1 stand part debate is a pretty good place to put it to begin with. I would be very grateful for the Minister’s reaction to that simultaneity of works and to the additional element of complication and cost that is no doubt to be introduced.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I did not declare my interests. I also reference that I am a trustee of the fundraising committee. Given the enthusiasm, I shall certainly be coming round with my tin for a collection fairly soon.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise in support of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, not because I have any involvement—I have no Jewish blood in me—but because we are looking at the project through rose-tinted spectacles, as the noble Lord, Lord King, has just said. I have in the last two or three years been personally involved in two significant big construction projects. The rate of inflation in the building industry has been going through the roof. The thing that he touched on will undoubtedly make this even more difficult to budget and then to carry through on budget.

On top of that, whatever it will ultimately cost depends upon the detailed design. It is clearly a difficult site, as the noble Lord, Lord Robathan, said. That is why the contingencies are on the high side, and what are we faced with from the Government? We do not have any realistic figures giving any worthwhile indication of the order of magnitude of the bill that we are likely to be paying at the end of this process. It is not a matter of arguing about the detail of the morality, ethics or desirability of the project. Anyone embarking on a big project of this kind, which will incur very substantial expenditure, particularly public expenditure, ought to have a proper budget in front of them so that they can then take an informed decision on where they want to go. We do not have it. It is as simple as that. It is irresponsible to talk in grandiose terms about all kinds of things when the boring, prosaic aspects of cost and delivery have not properly been considered.

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not an accountant.

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[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

Yes; all the costs associated with the operation of the memorial learning centre reflect the estimation I have just detailed, but further details of costs will be developed.

On the point from the noble Lord, Lord Lisvane, on the Explanatory Notes and re-erection, the purpose is to avoid having to come back to Parliament to change legislation in the event of damage and related issues. We have regular discussions with the Palace of Westminster on the issue of other works, including the restoration of Victoria Tower. These will continue to take place and we expect to manage logistics, deliveries, and so on, through sensible planning. The estimated cost of the UK Holocaust memorial and learning centre has been produced in line with the Treasury Green Book guidance. Taking all that into account, the last accounting officer assessment from June 2023 concludes that the project represents value for money. The ordinary mechanisms by which Parliament allocates public funding and holds Ministers to account can apply to this programme, just as with any other programme.

The further Amendment 27, proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, would introduce an additional step in the process of seeking planning consent for the proposed Holocaust memorial and learning centre. While the noble Lord is to be commended for his focus on cost control and value for money, the additional step he proposes is not necessary and would simply add still further delay to the decision-making process. Costs are regularly reviewed, and updated figures will be published in due course, in line with the Government’s major projects portfolio reporting process.

A range of options are being considered for operating the memorial and learning centre. As a significant public investment, responsibility for managing the centre will need to rest with a body that is ultimately accountable to Parliament. The Government will continue to be transparent about the costs and future arrangements for the Holocaust memorial and learning centre. This should, however, not delay the separate planning determination process.

The Holocaust memorial and learning centre will be a source of pride and an inspiration to the whole of society across boundaries of religion, class, geography or political party. I have only to quote the words of 94 year-old Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich, MBE, to underline why this is so vital:

“As the Holocaust moves further into history and we survivors become less able to share our testimonies this Memorial and Learning Centre will be a lasting legacy so that future generations will understand why it is important for people to remember the Holocaust, to learn from the past and stand up against injustice”.


I just want to echo—

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

I was going to echo the noble Lord’s points.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

I am sorry; I agree very much with the tenor of what the Minister is saying. He may recall that earlier I asked him to address a specific question. During his briefing, has he seen anything to suggest that the memorial centre will be about white- washing our history and praising the British Empire, and not about telling the whole truth, warts and all?

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, I was literally going to come on to that particular point. There will be nothing at all like that. If I can further add to the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, the memorial and learning centre will draw on the history of the Holocaust, and particularly the decisions made by the British Parliament, to stress the importance of tackling intolerance and hatred at all levels in our society. It will deliver this message for all the people across the UK and the rest of the world, regardless of faith and background.

I just want to remind noble Lords what we are debating. The Holocaust Memorial Bill includes measures essential for the Government to deliver the long- standing commitment to build the planned Holocaust memorial and learning centre. The Bill authorises expenditure on the construction, maintenance, operation and improvement of the Holocaust memorial and learning centre. Finally, the Bill also disapplies the relevant sections of the London County Council (Improvements) Act 1900, ensuring that this legislation does not block the building of a memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens.

I hope that I have been able to provide further clarity and assurance as to the purpose of this Bill to enable the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, to withdraw his amendment. I also hope that my explanation of Clause 1 will enable noble Lords, including the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, to agree that Clause 1 stand part of the Bill.

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[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by correcting the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook. I think she suggested that I had my name down on the first group; I did not. I may have misheard her but I was not alone in hearing that. If she did not, that is fine.

I have a couple of other opening remarks. I really hope that the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, who is not in his place at the moment, and the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, will respect the views of those who are opposed to the Bill and not in any sense intimate or suggest that we are not in favour of a Holocaust memorial or indeed a learning centre. That is not the case as far as I am concerned and I do not believe that it is the case among any other members of the Committee who are speaking against the Bill.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

Can the noble Baroness point to a single sentence I have uttered over, say, the last 10 years where I have suggested that?

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

I am not alone, because I have talked to one or two people in the intervening time, when we were taking part in the Division, who believed that that was what was intimated from what the noble Lord said.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

So is the answer to that no?

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

I will reread what the noble Lord said and come back to him if in fact if what I understood does not seem to be held up in the Hansard report of what he said.

I also want to say that I think I am one of the few Labour members of this Committee who are speaking against the Bill. I know many Labour Members who are not taking part but who are very concerned, and I expressed my worries about this to the Minister. I do not like opposing the Government on any issue and I am not known to be serially disloyal. However, there are two particular things in my past that make me worried about the Bill.

The first is that I am a former Minister responsible for heritage, including heritage parks, and I think it is a great and grave mistake to change the 1900 Act that was set up to protect heritage parks in a way that will lead to great damage done to this park. I agree with the noble Lords, Lord Sterling and Lord Hamilton, that this is a beautiful, much used but small park which will not have the same role as it had in the past because of putting this very large—from the point of view of the size of the park—memorial and learning centre in it.

The second reason I am worried about this Bill as it is currently proposed is my interest in education. I do not think that the learning centre as currently proposed is fit for purpose. I do not want to make a Second Reading speech now but want to go straight in to my amendments in this group. I will speak to Amendments 2, 3, 4, 6 and 13, all of which concern the learning centre, which is at present an intrinsic part of the design of the Holocaust memorial as proposed by the sponsors.

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[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

I absolutely agree and I will try to finish within the 10 minutes, and I believe that there is going to be a vote in a moment anyway. I believe that if the Minister were to listen to the witnesses available in your Lordships’ House, we would have a different conclusion. I promise the Minister, not because I know it but because I know it in my bones, that if we were allowed to build a Holocaust learning centre elsewhere, with the subvention that is already promised by the Government, we would have no difficulty in raising the money for an establishment that would rival the great POLIN museum that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, mentioned.

I finish by saying that if the noble Baroness will allow me to say so, and she knows that I love her dearly, I thought she was a little unkind to some members of the Committee. I do not believe that anybody is ill motivated about this in any way. I believe that, unfortunately, they are just wrong and should recognise it.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, that is my cue. I was going to take the noble Lord up. He quoted me earlier as saying something I had not said, but I realised that it is the kind of thing I would have said, so I did not object to being misquoted.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

I did not quote the noble Lord.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

Oh, it was you.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

On the improvements to the park, the grass is not of very high quality, but it will be returfed. The paths will be redone. Those paths are important because, as they stand right now, they are strangling the roots of the trees and causing long-term problems. It will be possible to get water to the existing trees, there will be access to the Embankment for wheelchairs for the very first time and there will be extensive tree planting.

Some very interesting points were made about fire, flood, transport and, of course, planning matters. We will discuss any new planning application. I just want to address the questions of whether it is too small and what new things have been found. In terms of its size, it is by no means unusual among Holocaust museums. I talked about the Berlin museum, which is subterranean and roughly that size. Jasenovac is roughly that size. If we talk about museums in Warsaw, a short walk from the POLIN museum is a museum dedicated to the uprising, which is roughly the same size.

As for new things, we have discovered, hidden for 80 years, some tapes by Patrick Gordon Walker, who many here will remember. He went in the week after Dimbleby did his famous interviews and interviewed inmates of the camp as well as perpetrators. We also have the first recording of the singing of Hatikvah after liberation. As the Government took the decision to release all the documents relating to the Holocaust, we have lots of new material that has simply not been seen. It will certainly address what we knew and when we knew it.

In terms of getting an idea of what it would look like, if Members have visited Hut 27 at Auschwitz, which is an audio-visual experience of the book burning and the effect that it had on Jewish life and young people, they will know that that gives you an idea. You cannot say, “We need to embrace new technologies”, then criticise us for doing precisely that. It is not as though we are in a position where we are waiting for this to happen; the United Kingdom has already created a portal of evidence. Everyone here can now see the testimonies of Holocaust survivors going down the years, no matter where they were given. It is a big leap forward. Other countries are following suit because, to ensure that our stuff is worth while, it must be accessible.

My noble friend is right about TikTok and other social media, which is why we produced—it was just a tentative idea—80 Objects/80 Lives in which Holocaust survivors describe a particular object that kept them going through the Holocaust. That was repeated in 35 countries. It is not an answer in itself, but it is a fact that we are trying to lean out and to make a difference.

There will be natural light. There is going to be light; it is going to be used extraordinarily well with regard to a staircase.

I am very pleased that Members have gone to see the Imperial War Museum. It is a magnificent new exhibition, particularly about the use of the V-2 rocket, because it manages to bring the whole of the Second World War galleries together and demonstrates—better than the previous exhibition, I think—that the Second World War was a war of annihilation. I am pleased to say that that the past chairman of the Imperial War Museum is on the foundation’s board and that the Imperial War Museum is a key partner. I am also pleased to say that the former director of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which is apparently well disposed to here, is also on the board. In order to ensure that we never lose sight of the Jewish nature of the Holocaust, our director of the exhibition is a former deputy director of Yad Vashem. We work regularly with Yad Vashem on this, and there is a lot of interest.

I want to say something about numbers. I was quoted by the noble Baroness, Lady Deech. If she is going to quote me, let it be right. I do not take credit for that; it was from the widow of the great historian Martin Gilbert, who, in talking to her before his death, said that it should be about coming out of a building and recognising that democracy is there as a bastion against tyranny. It is not about the Jews to say that; it is a bastion against tyranny. However, it is also for the people in this building to look the other way and understand what happens when a compliant legislature passes various things.

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[Baroness Deech (CB)]

Can I just ask the noble Lord why he thinks that being a tourist attraction that attracts millions is compatible with commemoration, grief, prayer, remembrance and all the other things that the commission called for and that are normally associated with a Holocaust memorial? There is a little plaque to one of my grandmothers in Manchester; that brings me more solace than any number of millions of people tramping through the gardens then heading off to have an ice cream.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

It is important not to conflate the solemn nature of the memorial with the learning centre; they are two distinct but integrated matters. The Committee will always go to museums and Holocaust sites. What we want are the uncommitted: we want people who go to the learning centre and come away having learned something. They will use it as a doorway to wider knowledge. It will not be in isolation. We are going to work closely with our American friends, our friends at Auschwitz and our friends in Yad Vashem because the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and distortion do not recognise national boundaries. We have a common purpose, and part of that common purpose will be to spread it out in different languages.

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, as someone who is not Jewish, as I mentioned earlier, I have been very moved by the debate I have just heard about the learning centre. I subscribe to the perspective of the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. As I was sitting there, I thought to myself, “Actually, there’s something that has not been mentioned”. It is—speaking as a non-Jew—the fact that Victoria Tower Gardens is a remarkable park as it stands now; that is a relevant consideration in our consideration in this place of what the future should be.

I am reminded of a story that I was told about the time when T Dan Smith redeveloped Eldon Square in Newcastle. He called in, as one of his expert advisers, Arne Jacobsen, the famous Danish architect. After the competition for the redesign of Eldon Square had been completed, he turned to Jacobsen and said, “If you had been putting in for this competition, what would you have done?” Jacobsen replied, “I would have left it just as it was before”.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I draw the attention of the House to my registered interests, particularly those relating to Holocaust remembrance. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Katz, on a wonderful speech. He reminded me very much of how I felt when I first arrived here. I can remember being given an office on the third floor, above Royal Court, and then spending the next two weeks trying to find it again. He gave an informed maiden speech. It is clear that his contribution will make a very big difference to this House. I welcome him here; he comes with a magnificent reputation, and I personally look forward to hearing him speak again.

A couple of weeks ago, I stood close to the railway arch at Auschwitz-Birkenau, close to where, over 80 years ago, my friend Ivor Perl last talked to his mother. On the separation ramp, he jumped lines to join her and his little sister, saying, “I want to be with you, mum”. She replied calmly, “No, Ivor, go and be in the other line with your brother”. He obeyed. They would never see each other again. By the time he was allotted a hut, both mother and daughter were dead and cremated, their ashes cooling. Ivor remembered that it was a beautiful warm spring day.

Noble Lords may recall that Ivor inspired the strap-line of the UK’s presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “In Plain Sight”, meaning that the Holocaust did not happen in dark corners but in bright sunshine, with the whole world watching.

The UK holds the presidency on the cusp of significant change. Within a few short years, Holocaust survivors will move from contemporary memory into history books. How we deal with the loss of witnesses has been vigorously debated for the last few decades. When I took up the role of special envoy 10 years ago, the feeling among some was that empathy was the key, and that everything would fall into place naturally. I had my doubts. Unsupported empathy is fragile and fickle. If there is any doubt about that, consider the indifference the world has shown to the Israeli hostages. Consider the reaction by humanitarian agencies to the three emaciated men who were released—one of whom was hoping to be reunited with a family long dead. Not a single word of comfort came from any of the self-described humanitarian agencies.

For its strategy this year, the UK presidency has adopted a triple-track approach to support empathy around three headings: landscape; archives, including testimony; and objects. On landscape, the IHRA has adopted the safeguarding sites charter, which sets out guidelines for the preservation of murder and detention sites. The UK played a pivotal role in drafting the charter. Across the killing grounds of the Holocaust, sites are deteriorating with the passage of time, neglect and wilful destruction. The charter lays down a set of advice aimed at preserving the sites with dignity.

Complementary to the charter are reminders through people, buildings and places. Our presidency is keen to engage young people, and we did this through the remarkably successful “My Hometown” project. The project invited schools across IHRA member countries to look at what happened in their hometown during the Holocaust. Schools in former occupied countries and those receiving victims of Nazis and their collaborators produced original and moving projects. Participants were from as far afield as Argentina to Greece, and the United States to Poland, and from member countries in between, including the United Kingdom. Most projects attracted favourable media attention, linking familiar buildings and places with the Holocaust locally.

On archives, the presidency has worked with the Association of Jewish Refugees on our legacy project, the Holocaust Testimony portal, which pulls together for the first time testimony from UK Holocaust survivors and refugees who made their home here. This includes testimony from the AJR’s Refugee Voices initiative, the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, the Shoah Foundation and many more archives. We hope that more archives, particularly the smaller and more specialised ones, will join in the coming months. The portal allows the testimonies of individual survivors across the decades to be seen in one place. The IHRA formally established the archive forum, which will encourage the flow of information between archives.

I am a past chair of the Arolsen Archives—the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of the Nazis and their collaborators. The collection has information on more than 17.5 million people and belongs to UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme. In recent years, Arolsen has improved public access to the archive.

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, the IHRA broadcast over social media “80 Objects/80 Lives”, a digital project of one-minute clips which features 80 objects from filmed testimony of British Holocaust survivors and refugees. The objects represent the personal histories and experiences of Jewish Holocaust survivors, during and at the end of the Second World War. Such objects as teddy bears, a doll, a watch or a spoon take on special meaning. A passport with the letter “J”, a yellow star and a bowl from Bergen-Belsen are bittersweet reminders of a lost world. I thank the Association of Jewish Refugees for its creative help with the 80 objects.

The UK is lucky to have such widespread support for Holocaust organisations, and we used the London plenary to showcase the variety and vivacity of these institutions in the UK. Even in these challenging times, the UK continues to have an excellent reputation in the field of Holocaust remembrance, education and tackling anti-Semitism. The former Attorney-General of Canada, Irwin Cotler, known to many in this Room, described our policy as the gold standard for others to follow.

The UK presidency addressed two pressing problems. We have had special conferences that have dealt with the problems of artificial intelligence and bringing people together across differences, and we organised a conference to deal with the teaching of the Holocaust because there was a lack of confidence after 7 October. We will continue to tackle Holocaust denial and distortion, and will continue to the end to look at the Stockholm Declaration. Next week, we will meet again to look at the next 25 years.

We have moved now. That moment that we saw a couple of weeks ago was poignant on all levels. We will never see the like again. Ten years from now, at the 90th anniversary, there will be no Holocaust survivors to speak. As the Minister said, we are now the custodians of their memory. We have a duty to remember and to tell the truth.

Building Homes

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Tuesday 30th July 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Best, not just for his question but for his long-term championing of housing in this Chamber. I look forward to working with him, particularly on the provision of some of the specialist housing which I know is of great interest to him.

In terms of restocking—or should it be restaffing?—planning departments, there are plans to allow full cost recovery on residential applications, which is one part in the detail of the Statement today and is really encouraging. We have plans to increase the number of planners. I know that planners take a long time to train and are experts in what they do, so it is not an overnight job, but we are determined to strengthen planning departments, which are responsible for the whole of this process.

On development corporations, further announcements are coming forward tomorrow on the issue of new towns, but I take the noble Lord’s point on the wider aspects of development corporations. With his permission, I will take that back, give it some further consideration and respond to him in writing. But I think he will be interested to hear the announcements on new towns tomorrow.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, there is a lot in this Statement to welcome. I agree with the noble Baroness on the need to look at the green belt and at grey areas in particular. I attempted to do this 14 years ago but was stopped by the tsunami to save our green belt. We need a proper understanding of the green belt, recognising that there are plenty of brownfield sites within the green belt and greenfield sites in the brown belt, so this kind of rationalisation is necessary. I also very much welcome the commitment to council housing. It must be of some embarrassment to Labour that the Blair-Brown years never reached the number of council houses that Baroness Thatcher built or, indeed, the level built during the Cameron to Sunak years.

I make two suggestions about where we could speed up the process. I am pleased that the Minister wants to speed up planning applications, but the delay is actually at the other end in implementing the conditions. She should look very hard at that. My second suggestion is that, given that it will take some time to get this in place, the Government should look at ways of encouraging, either fiscally or through planning policy, off-site construction. That is the best way to get more houses that are better, more environmentally friendly and more secure in terms of power. Doing that requires a fair amount of investment from developers, but it would be able to give the numbers that the noble Baroness is looking for.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, for his comments and suggestions, which were helpful as ever, and I look forward to working with him as we go through this programme. I am passionate about council housing, having grown up in a council house—it was actually a development corporation house, to be clear—and I want to see that programme develop. I thank the noble Lord for his suggestions and look forward to moving the whole programme forward.

I will just make a correction on the affordable homes programme. Let me clarify that the Government have committed today to bring forward details of future government investment in social and affordable housing at the spending review, enabling providers to plan for the future as they help to deliver the biggest increase in affordable housing in a generation. I might have muddled my wording slightly on that, so that is just for clarification.

Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Friday 2nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my entries in the register of interest, particularly those relating to Holocaust remembrance. That is a particularly fine speech to follow. I have to say that all the speeches have been really good today. The noble Lord, Lord Dubs, talked about the exhibition at the Bundestag. Perhaps I could give notice that it is his intention to bring that exhibition to these Parliaments. By joining the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, in that regard, I hope that I can make up for the appalling reference that I made to him the other day, when I described him as the very epitome of a dapper English gentleman.

I thank the usual channels for arranging this debate, which I hope will be a regular feature of Holocaust memorial week, like the long-established one in the other place. I also thank the Lord Speaker for organising, in conjunction with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, a thoughtful discussion on the nature of genocide last week. I join in thanks to Karen Pollock for her excellent work with the Holocaust Educational Trust and to Olivia Marks-Woldman of the HMDT for organising so much in a very difficult year: 5,000 different organisations putting together local events, 3,000 buildings lit up, including the Blackpool Tower and the London Eye; thousands of candles in peoples’ windows and 6 million digital candles on billboards across the United Kingdom.

I am also grateful for the commitment given by the Government, the Leader of the Opposition, the Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party to the building of a memorial to the Holocaust and a learning centre next to Parliament in Victoria Tower Gardens. We will soon have an opportunity to debate this long overdue measure, and I look forward to debating it with some vigour—though I am mindful of the very wise words of Sir Peter Bottomley, the Father of the House of Commons, when he said that perhaps this debate was not an appropriate place to spend much time on that, and that we should concentrate on the Holocaust.

I took over the post of the Holocaust envoy in 2015. In that time, I have visited many death camps in Europe, had the opportunity of listening to very distinguished historians and met many survivors. But there is one thing I have never entirely understood—something I have never been able to get my mind around. Why did we not do something about Hitler, when it was there and it was plain? The nature of what was happening in Nazi Germany and the death camps was known to the authorities in the United Kingdom many years before the liberation—and even at the time when we decided to announce that they were occurring, we underestimated the number of people who had been killed at that point by 1 million.

However, by midday on 7 October, I knew exactly why we did nothing. Before Israel had an opportunity to get much of a defence and before Israel did anything in Gaza, people were dancing in the streets throughout the world—and, to our eternal shame, in the United Kingdom—celebrating the murder of children. I came to the conclusion that the world is very happy to bow its head once a year in remembrance of long dead Jews, but it is indifferent to the fate of living Jews and hostile to the thought that Jews might defend themselves.

Even when they saw the full extent of the horrors that Hamas committed—many Members will have seen the film and heard testimony this week—many of the #MeToo campaigners and the campaigners against female genital mutilation turned a blind eye to Israeli suffering. We were asked to consider these mutilations “in context”. Have we really become a country in which parents are advised not to send their children to Jewish schools in school uniform; where Jewish students are reluctant to wear a kippah on campus; where travellers are advised not to wear a Star of David on the Tube; where Hebrew-speaking tourists are assaulted on London streets; or where a decent, hard-working MP is hounded out of office for standing up for his Jewish constituents? The very nature of liberal democracy is at risk.

So I hope we will not hear any statements in future from university vice-chancellors, from police commissioners or politicians, about having a zero tolerance approach to anti-Semitism, because it is clearly not the case. It is a lie. Casual anti-Semitism is widespread in modern Britain: you need only to look, every Saturday, to see those useful idiots marching alongside Jew-hating anti-Semites, giving them credibility and credence and inadvertently encouraging them on to even greater depravity.

Before Israel had a chance to defend itself, even while the crowds in major cities were dancing with glee at the murder of children, the twin pillars of denial and distortion were working to form an alternate reality, a distorted truth. The term “genocide” is habitually misused and distorted. My noble friend the Minister read out the definition, so I will not repeat it—but from their mouths Hamas are condemned. United States President Joe Biden summed it up well when he said that Hamas’s goal had always been to annihilate Israel and to murder Jews. The South African attempt to subvert the meaning of genocide at the ICJ and to use it against Israel is a distortion of the truth. For the victims to be guilty of the crimes committed by the perpetrators is a perversion of reality. The Foreign Secretary is correct when he says:

“I take the view that Israel is acting in self-defence after the appalling attack of 7 October”,


and that the argument that Israel has

“the intent to commit genocide, I think … is nonsense”.

Denial is the first stage of genocide. That process was truncated in the October pogrom. I participated in an interview on LBC with an imam from east London who laughingly told me and the listeners, a few days after the massacre, that no children had been murdered by Hamas. Queen’s College Muslim Association went one step further, saying that there was a great deal of video evidence that Hamas deliberately avoided targeting women and children. Denial and distortion are formidable obstacles to the truth when there are plenty of witnesses about; consider their potency when the number of survivors who witnessed the Holocaust is diminishing. That is why the presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which the UK begins this month, will strengthen the coalition that rebuts denial and distortion. One of the first events will be a gathering of experts to examine the possibility and pitfalls of artificial intelligence on the digital records of the Holocaust.

The last 15 years have focused on gathering testimony from survivors, including from many people who experienced the Holocaust as children. A great effort has gone into digitising records. The amount and the depth of the material is impressive. The worry is that the very strength of this evidence might be our Achilles heel. We live in an era of seeing is not believing. Images and testimony are vulnerable. History is up for grabs.

The consequences of cheap, widespread fakery are already with us. Holocaust survivors were recent recently distressed by a photograph of the then Home Secretary laughing at the gates of Auschwitz. It was a photoshop. It was not a very good fake, but it was good enough to cause hurt. Misleading words might be put into the mouths of survivors, mimicking their voices and trivialising the Holocaust. “The food might have been a bit bland, but there was plenty of it”. “On Sundays, we used to play football with our SS guards”. “Tuesday night was bridge night”. The fake recording of Sir Keir Starmer shouting at staff is a harbinger of what is to come on the road to a zero-trust society. AI will enable Jew haters to identify and target anti-Semites with a precision previously not thought possible—an echo chamber of bigotry that encourages deeper hatred.

Our presidential year will bring perpetrators of violence and the conditions that caused the Holocaust more into focus. Our theme this year is “In Plain Sight”. It comes from something profound that my friend and Holocaust survivor Ivor Perl said to me on a visit to Auschwitz. We first met on the March of the Living, an annual event taking place in Poland. People attend from all over the world and they are of all ages and backgrounds. There are plenty of enthusiastic youngsters about, which makes it a more uplifting experience than I would have expected. Gradually working our way through Poland, we arrived at the end of the march at Auschwitz.

I am on the international committee supervising the preservation of the Nazi concentration camp and consequently I am a regular visitor. While Ivor had visited the camp since he was a prisoner there, it had been some time. We stood as a group on the separation ramp, where families were torn apart. Ivor movingly describes this moment in his memoir Chicken Soup Under the Tree. For the first and only time that week, Ivor looked vulnerable, and I went up to him and said possibly the world’s most stupid thing, which was, “Are you all right, Ivor?” He firmly gripped my wrist and said, “Listen, Eric, don’t believe all that crap about ‘The birds never sing in Auschwitz’. It was a day like this when we first came here, a warm, sunny day, blue skies with cotton-wool clouds, birds were singing and butterflies were fluttering between the lines. The Holocaust did not happen in dark corners, hidden away; the Holocaust happened in broad daylight, in plain sight, with the whole world watching”.

We will anchor historic memory with a schools project across member countries addressing what happened in the Second World War in their home towns. The best projects will be presented to a special youth conference in London later this year. The 80th anniversary of the camps’ liberation will be explored in short clips on social media in 80 objects. Countering anti-Semitism in sport will be launched in Scotland in the summer. Our legacy project will be a data portal that unites and combines testimony and digital records from around the world. It will be easier to find out the truth of the Holocaust.

In conclusion, today the words “Never again” ring hollow and false. We have work to do. Let people of good will work together to make the UK a beacon of hope and tolerance. We will have succeeded only when we can say “Never again” in our hearts as well as our mouths. I hope that better times will come.

Recall Petitions: Voter ID

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Monday 10th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that the Electoral Commission report clearly demonstrates that all the fuss about the effect of voter ID has proved to be an exaggeration? We are talking about less than a percentage point. Does my noble friend further agree that, given that it is part of our voting system, it would now make some sense to re-examine the qualifications for voter ID, particularly among the young? Will she keep those categories constantly under review?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My noble friend is right. We are very encouraged by the first interim report from the Electoral Commission, but there is a lot more work to be done. It was only an interim analysis; the final analysis will be published in the autumn. The Government are looking both qualitatively and quantitatively at the May elections, and the report will be out by the end of November. When we get those reviews, we need to see if any changes need to be made, including on voter ID and young people.

Holocaust Memorial

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Thursday 22nd June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords—

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords—

[The Earl of Courtown (Con)]

My Lords, could we hear from the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and then the noble Lord, Lord Pickles?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I know how strongly the noble Baroness feels about this issue, and I respect everything she has to say. We have had meetings and we are willing to have more; she only has to get in touch with me. However, the planning inquiry in October 2022 enabled all interested parties to express their views on the proposed Holocaust memorial and learning centre, and a full list of witnesses is available in the planning inspector’s report on GOV.UK. Officials regularly meet organisations representing survivors of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution and those representing the survivors of subsequent genocides to discuss the latest developments, and we will continue to do so.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my register of interests, particularly those relating to Holocaust remembrance. I join my noble friend in her tribute to Sir Ben Helfgott. He was, beside other things, a leading light in Holocaust remembrance and a strong advocate of the site in Victoria Tower Gardens. In fact, the last conversation I had with Ben was about his concerns that the Government and Opposition might not fulfil their promise. Does my noble friend agree with me that the announcement made by the Leader of the House in another place that there will be a Second Reading next Wednesday is very welcome? The time for talking is over; it is time for action.

International Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Pickles]

That this House takes note of International Holocaust Memorial Day.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, it is with respect and sombre reflection that I move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the register of interests, particularly those concerned with Holocaust remembrance and tackling anti-Semitism.

I start the debate in some sadness as, yesterday morning, a friend of many of us in this Chamber, Zigi Shipper, passed away, on his 93rd birthday. He survived the ghetto, concentration camps and the death march. He devoted the latter part of this life to telling his story. His Majesty the King had his portrait commissioned and hung in Buckingham Palace. Zigi guided the present Prince and Princess of Wales around Stutthof concentration camp. Whether he was greeting royalty or giving his testimony in the classroom, he was always the same old Zigi. He will be very much on my mind when I light my candle on Holocaust Memorial Day. I will particularly remember his motto: “Do not hate”. May his memory be a blessing.

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “Ordinary People”. I think all of us in this Chamber could imagine ourselves being victims of the Holocaust, but few of us could imagine ourselves being perpetrators of the Holocaust. Unless we understand that both victims and perpetrators were ordinary people who led ordinary lives, we run the risk ourselves of Holocaust distortion. The Holocaust turned ordinary people into monsters.

The Nazis had a powerful propaganda machine, which was deadly effective, but curiously, from small villages nestling in the Pyrenees to the impenetrable forests of Belarus, the Nazis never needed to explain to anyone what Jew hatred was. Nor would it have been possible to murder 6 million Jews, hundreds of thousands of Roma, people with a disability, homosexuals or political and religious dissidents without the active collaboration of others. Thankfully, there were of course many ordinary men and women willing to stand up to this hatred. Ordinary people often showed extraordinary bravery to save victims of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides. But we delude ourselves if we think this is the norm.

Across Europe today, we see collaborators rehabilitated as national resistance leaders. History is being rinsed, and countries are recasting themselves as Nazi victims. As this decade progresses, the last survivors who witnessed the Holocaust as children will move from contemporary memory to the pages of history. We owe it to them and to ourselves to keep their memory, and that of their parents and grandparents, alive.

The destruction wrought by the Nazis and their collaborators was so great that, for hundreds of thousands of victims, the only reminder of their existence in this world is a very ordinary item of clothing: a shoe. Many of us are familiar with the piles of shoes at Auschwitz-Birkenau or at Holocaust museums worldwide. They are stark reminders of the fragile nature of life during the Holocaust. Shoes were described by the Polish poet, Moshe Szulsztein, as “the last witnesses”.

As a Minister, I presented to Auschwitz a cheque on behalf of the UK Government to restore some of these shoes. I witnessed the process. When you looked at the shoes carefully, you saw that they were not so different from the footwear that might be worn by Members in the Chamber today. These shoes were not bought to board cattle-trucks to travel to death camps; they were bought as expressions of optimism and of the future: maybe they were bought for a wedding, a promotion, the first day at school or a summer picnic. Within the shoes were often hidden objects: money, love letters and photographs of children and spouses.

The hardest thing to look at are the children’s shoes. I remember a small pair of shoes, where a carefully folded piece of paper was found in the heel. It was a maths test. Can you imagine how precious this piece of paper was to a child? It symbolised, despite the conditions, that there was still hope and the prospect of survival and a future. The tiny shoes of the youngsters of Auschwitz are a special symbol of the crimes perpetrated there. They are a reminder that, in many cases, they were the only witnesses to the murder of 232,000 children at that death camp.

The memories contained in shoes and other footwear remains important in remembering other genocides. In Rwanda, in the absence of DNA and dental records, shoes and clothing were used to identify the dead found in mass graves following the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. In Cambodia, piles of sandals are a reminder of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge. In 2010, 16,000 pairs of shoes were put on display to mark the 15th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, each pair representing a victim of Europe’s worst genocide since the Second World War. The memorial of shoes was a

“warning for all future U.N. employees never again just to stand by when genocide unfolds”—

an allusion to the failure of UN peacekeepers to protect the Srebrenica victims during the Bosnian war. Shoes worn by ordinary people; the final witness.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion. Today, we still see people who actively deny the historical reality of the Holocaust and seek to minimise the extent of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people by the Nazis and their collaborators. They cast doubt on the existence of the gas chambers and the mass shootings, and on deliberate working to death and starvation being used as a tool of government policy. The simple goal of Holocaust denial is to recast history to erase the legacy and reality of the mass murder of Jewish people.

Holocaust distortion is more mainstream and just as pernicious. It casts doubts. It assigns different descriptions to places, with death camps redesignated as transit camps. Contemporary events are compared to the Holocaust. Collaborators of the Nazis are wiped out of national memory. Holocaust distortion can be found at all levels of society and is far from a fringe phenomenon—from facts being twisted on the internet to opportunistic statements by politicians, misleading exhibitions at museums and, most recently, comparing measures to combat Covid-19 or climate change to the Holocaust.

A few years ago, I visited Treblinka, a death camp not unlike Auschwitz. People were murdered there within a couple of hours of arriving. I recall putting on social media, as you do, how moving it was. Within minutes, I was swamped by people saying, “Nobody died at Treblinka; it was a transit camp. Maybe the odd person died of flu, but that was all.” I have no idea whether those people believed that or not.

We are obviously concerned about the growth in the number of anti-Semitic incidents being reported on our university campuses. Our universities must be welcoming and inclusive environments for all students. I welcome the Tuck report into anti-Semitism, published last Thursday. This important report includes details of some quite shocking episodes and illustrates how prevalent anti-Semitism is within the ranks of the National Union of Students. The NUS will have to work hard to ensure that it represents all students in future. This was further underlined by today’s report from the Community Security Trust, which saw a 22% rise in anti-Semitic incidents on campus in the last two years.

The Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine have further fuelled the soaring levels of online anti-Semitism. Understanding the ways in which hate permeates the online space is not easy. The Online Safety Bill, which arrived here yesterday, will give this House an opportunity to address that hatred.

Close to 80 years since the Holocaust, there are still people waiting for justice and recognition of their property that was stolen by the Nazis. It has been 13 years since 47 countries signed the Terezin Declaration in June 2009. There has been progress: 13 countries in Europe have adopted legislation that either addresses or partially addresses heirless and unclaimed property from the Holocaust era. However, sadly, only Serbia has put together legislation on heirless and unclaimed property. Poland, the anvil of the Holocaust, is the only democracy refusing to address the concerns of dispossessed Holocaust survivors and their heirs. Time is running out; it has a moral obligation to ensure that Holocaust survivors and their families receive justice.

I co-chair with Ed Balls the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. Our role is to oversee the British promise to remember and to build a striking and prominent new national memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens. I am most encouraged by the pledges from the Government and the Official Opposition to introduce a Bill to facilitate the memorial’s construction. It is possible that your Lordships will have an opportunity to debate the merits of its location at greater length than in this brief debate.

We are clear that the learning centre will adopt a warts and all approach. Our narrative will be balanced, addressing the complexities of Britain’s response to the Holocaust, avoiding simplistic judgments and encouraging visitors to reflect critically on whether more could have been done by both policymakers and society. We are determined to face history honestly. I am conscious that 2025 will be the 80th anniversary of the Holocaust, and that every day which passes means that fewer Holocaust survivors will be around to see that we honour our pledge.

Finally, I thank Olivia Marks-Woldman, the CEO of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, for her marvellous work in delivering the UK’s national Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony and thousands of local activities. I also pay tribute to Karen Pollock, the CEO of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which is the driving force behind Lessons from Auschwitz. Professor Stuart Foster and Associate Professor Ruth-Anne Lenga from the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education have ensured that the UK leads the way in teaching and learning about the Holocaust. Many other organisations provide help in understanding the Holocaust, and I thank them.

The Holocaust and subsequent genocides show that ordinary people have choices. It is up to all of us to ensure that the choices that we make today and tomorrow ensure that our statement of “Never again” is not a single empty pledge.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has contributed to this debate. I will be brief but I want to say a couple of things.

This is the first time the House of Lords has had an opportunity to debate Holocaust Memorial Day, and it has been a very big success. I say with much love and affection to the Front Benches that this could become a regular part of the calendar. I will give some evidence for that. There is no padding in a speech on the Holocaust and Holocaust Memorial Day. You do not do it just to take up a little bit of time; it is well thought out and it comes from the heart, and that has been very clear today. It also says a lot about people as individuals and what is important to them. I do not want to sound too soppy, but I feel that I have got to know people a little bit better today. It is particularly effective when we talk about the impact on our families, as shown in the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, and my noble friend Lady Altmann.

I will not mention everybody, but I refer in particular to speech of the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, who talked about his experience in Ukraine. It struck me a little while into doing this job that the legacy of the Holocaust is a great gaping hole inside Europe. You see it particularly in Poland: the heart has been almost ripped out of that country. A noble Lord—forgive me, I cannot remember who—spoke about the people who would have been born, and all the possibilities.

I was talking to the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, in the downstairs cloakroom before the debate. Like him, I was around when Holocaust Memorial Day began. It was essentially three men and a dog to start with, but gradually, we managed to get something going nationally. Now, there is not a community in the United Kingdom that will not have a commemoration involving schools. We do this not just because the Holocaust framed the latter part of the 20th century and the beginning of this century, but because the Holocaust speaks to us all.

That is why, following on from the Stockholm declaration, Malmö renewed that in 2021, and this next year is going to be enormously about dealing with Holocaust distortion. It is why the definitions that IHRA has put together, both in terms of anti-Semitism, Holocaust distortion and anti-Roma sentiment, are so important.

I thank noble Lords very much for their contributions, and look forward to this time next year—with a slightly longer debate.

Motion agreed.