Hammersmith Bridge

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Tuesday 21st April 2026 Westminster Hall

[Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith and Chiswick) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship today, Sir Alec, not least because you have allowed me the privilege of speaking although I was a couple of minutes late. I was chairing the Justice Committee, but I did not want to miss this debate. Fortunately, I can be reasonably brief because my hon. Friend the Member for Putney (Fleur Anderson) and my friend the Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) have covered most of the bases on this issue; I will not repeat what they said.

I welcome the Minister to his place. I will say something complimentary about him in a moment, which will perhaps convince him to spend some money on the bridge. I will also take the unusual step of welcoming the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Mid Buckinghamshire (Greg Smith), who knows as much about this as any of us, because he was the deputy leader and then leader of the opposition in Hammersmith and Fulham—we all know where the bodies are buried, even at the high water mark.

Hammersmith bridge is a unique structure. Before people start shouting “Albert bridge”, I will come on to why that is different in a moment. Hammersmith is a beautiful bridge across the Thames—I am prejudiced, but I would say it is the most beautiful—but it has unique challenges. Whether through bomb damage or the corrosion of the materials that make it up, the bridge has reached a state of catastrophic failure. At one stage, it had to be closed in its entirety, even to pedestrian and cycle traffic. That is fortunately not the case now, but I think it is accepted on all sides—people sometimes say, “Oh this could be done cheaply”, by which they mean for a few million pounds, but it cannot—that restoring Hammersmith bridge to its former tolerances would require the replacement of most of the elements of the bridge. It would effectively be a new bridge, albeit looking like the old one. That has particular, unique implications. It is right that this Minister and this Government have taken a far more proactive view than the previous Government—they could not take a less proactive view than the previous Government, who did not answer my letters for three years.

The taskforce has met since this Government came in, and it has defined the issues and pointed the way to next steps. In my view, there are three issues. One is: let us define clearly what the costs are. There is the clear preferred option, which is the Foster and COWI scheme; it is very expensive, but other schemes are less efficient and more expensive. What will the cost of that be and what are the opportunities for funding it? My hon. Friend the Member for Putney mentioned the application to the structures fund, and I welcome what the Minister said about that. I notice that the guidelines for grant funding were published last week, so I do not imagine that an application has gone in yet, though I am sure that one will go in quite shortly. It is still an extremely expensive project.

In addition to the costs and sources of funds, there is the thorny issue of traffic loading. I have seen many different figures for traffic displacement to other bridges, including Putney and Wandsworth bridges and Chiswick bridge, which is also in my constituency. There are serious concerns about that, but we must have sets of figures that we can all rely on—I hope the Minister will say that he now has those figures—because otherwise it is pointless if we are going to not agree on those matters. Those are the essential ingredients, from my point of view. The taskforce met last year.

To be full and frank, it is also right to acknowledge that there is a strong lobby against opening the bridge to motor traffic. I know that from my inbox. I have always said that the presumption should be that the bridge goes back to its previous tolerances, which requires a major reconstruction. This has gone on so long that we need certainty and an answer now.

The other thing—I am grateful to the hon. Members who spoke about this—is the acknowledgment of where Hammersmith council is in all this. I think it is right to say that the council has spent over £50 million on preventing the collapse of the bridge, restoring it to make it a walking and cycling bridge and continuing to maintain it. To put that into perspective, that is half the sum spent on repair and maintenance for all bridges over the Thames in the decade between 2010 and 2020.

That local authority, like most local authorities these days, is cash strapped. It prides itself on running a very tight ship, has the third lowest council tax in the country and provides extremely innovative—and, in some cases, unique—services, such as free social care and free breakfast clubs in all its schools. Those are the priorities that its electorate set out for it, and, I think, will again when it is re-elected in two weeks’ time. I did not believe it was feasible to add the £50 million in there. Hammersmith and Fulham council deserves a huge amount of credit for that, but the idea that it will make another substantive contribution towards the bridge is for the birds. The money is just not there. If we are saying that, we are saying the bridge will never reopen. We need a little bit of honesty here.

The comparison was made with Albert bridge. It is very unfortunate that another bridge needs repair. Yes, it is another Victorian suspension bridge with some, shall we say, challenging materials, such as its cast iron structure. But there the similarities end, even though, or partly because, Kensington and Chelsea council is only a minority shareholder, if I can put it that way, but more so because, although Albert bridge will take at least a year and cost £8.5 million on the current estimate—and I am sure that that will grow—Hammersmith council has already spent six times that just on the maintenance of Hammersmith bridge at its current standards.

Let us try to move this forward. I do not want to say anything more today other than that a conclusion has to be reached as a matter of urgency. Decisions have to be made. Not everyone will be happy with those decisions one way or the other, but so long as they are made based on a sound mathematical basis and classic surveys, the finances are there and we are not just wishing for money that does not exist, and we have a secure model for replacement of the bridge, we can go forward in that way. At the moment, we have the worst of all worlds: nothing is happening while everybody is putting forward their own version of reality or events. Whatever side of the coin they are on, my constituents want that to end.