Restoration and Renewal (Report of the Joint Committee)

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman just clarify that he is saying that we should have individual desks?

[Pete Wishart]

A number of solutions have been designed in Parliaments around the world. In some Parliaments, that solution may include desks. What I am suggesting is a technological solution, whereby we would come to the Chamber and press a button to vote. We could vote on anybody’s proposal and time would not be wasted.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

The problem with today’s debate, and the reason I will be supporting motion No. 1 in the name of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, is that in many ways we are being asked to take a bit of a punt and a bit of a guess. What I like about the motion is paragraphs (4) and (5), which amendment (b) seeks to amend, because I honestly do not believe that we have enough facts before us. We should have been given a plan set around a timeframe, showing how and when certain components could be delivered.

We are told on principle that we must all just leave, and that it will cost billions. As my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg) pointed out, some of the facts in the report are not correct. But regardless of that, when I was listening to the speech by the right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake), I noticed that the project has become a shopping list to which we can add new items. The cost goes up and up. Even in the words of my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House, only 75% of the projected costs are for the necessary work. So at a time when there is tightness on the public purse, it appears that we are bringing in a shopping list of things that we may not need. I find that very hard to defend to my constituents. I have rightly told them, and will carry on doing so, that the Government have a responsibility to live within their means, but now it seems that with our own buildings, money is no object.

I will be supporting motion No. 1, but I would like to see more detail, especially with regard to paragraph (4)—

“funding should be limited to facilitate essential work”.

Because there is that other aspect of this debate, and for all the Members who say that there is absolutely no way that we would not return to this Chamber, there has been movement. The SNP has now made it quite clear that it does not think we should come back, and we have just heard that the Liberal Democrats think we should change the way we do our democracy—that we should have a horseshoe, and that we should sit at desks. We are a debating Chamber. We do not sit here and read things into the record, like they do in the United States Congress; we debate. This afternoon, I have sat through this debate and it has been excellent; I respect all the points that have been made. At times this afternoon I was wondering where I might be going tonight, but I have listened very carefully, and the arguments I have heard tonight in this great Chamber have led me to believe that at this moment in time, motion No. 1 is the one to support, because we need more details about exactly how the work will be carried out, when, and at what cost, and that process needs to be developed and brought forward in a more sensible way.

None of us in here would like to create a situation where the health and safety and wellbeing of the people who work here would be seriously put at threat. But one cannot on the one hand argue that we must move because there is a 50:50 chance that a fire will occur by 2020, which could kill everyone on the top floor, and then say, “But we would not leave until 2025.” We have heard that in the second world war, this Chamber was bombed and we moved to another area. Well, we could go from the invasion of Poland to the moment Adolf Hitler shot himself, and we would still wait another year before we left the Chamber. So if the urgency for health and safety reasons is that great, why are we not doing anything until 2025?

Many points have been made. I absolutely agree with what my right hon. Friend the Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin) said about working 24/7. That absolutely should be mandated, to get on with this work, but I urge my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House also to look at the parliamentary timetable and what we do in those two weeks in September. Can they be redistributed in the year? Could that be the tour of the United Kingdom that many people are suggesting? Three months at 24/7 over the next seven years would give us quite a lot of time to get a lot of the work done—including the total decant out there.

I want to see a lot more robust detail laid out, and motion No. 1, in the name of my right hon. Friend, allows that to happen. We are taking action today: we are having this debate. It has fleshed out a lot of the arguments, and there has been movement on both sides, but I feel that the time has come for us to have things laid out more clearly and more succinctly.