Restoration and Renewal: Annual Progress Report

Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, with whom I have had many encounters over the years. I thank the Senior Deputy Speaker for a characteristically thorough, rigorous, courteous and careful report, but decisions have to be made. It is now just on 10 years, and we cannot faff about any longer. We cannot kick it into the long grass, hope an election will come along, conceal or deceive. It is not going to work. We have to make decisions, and we have to make brave decisions.

I was reflecting on those infrastructure projects that many of us have been involved in. Very few people who come into politics know anything about project management or infrastructure. The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, does because he was leader of Sheffield City Council and knew a lot about this. My friend, the noble Lord, Lord Morse, knows a great deal about this area, but many of us came as innocents to the subject.

We have all been bruised and burned in the bonfire of public opinion and hostility, and we have all had to make impossible decisions. I suppose my first one was after there had been 29 reports into why London had too many hospitals, all not very good. It needed to have fewer, better hospitals—it needed critical mass—and they needed to integrate with the universities. I just knew that I had to make this decision. Sir Bernard Tomlinson came along and helped on it. He could not believe the hostility and viciousness of people in the public sector. My former boss, the noble Lord, Lord Clarke, used to say that the charm of a board is often in inverse proportion to the virtue of its project. The BAT board was charming, but the Great Ormond Street board was often very difficult indeed. As many in health will know, people can get very emotional. But I made the decisions, and I was not going to back off them.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I commend the noble Baroness on what she is saying. Perhaps she will recall that on this issue—perhaps not on others—I backed her to the hilt as the shadow Health Secretary, and nearly lost my place on the shadow Cabinet as a consequence but was praised enormously by Tony Blair. I thank her for that.

[Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone (Con)]

That has made my day.

People do notice. Various vice-chancellors kept writing and saying, “We’ve got a new project or development, and we wouldn’t have had that without the decision”. This is not supposed to be a vain speech in any way; I am just trying to gird us up to make the decisions. No more paralysis by analysis—it is time for action, not options. We know the options; we do not want to know them.

I will touch on one or two other examples. There were terrible rows about the British Library—which is now an iconic, world-famous library—with rage that it had overspent, overrun and so on. Gloriously, at the Millennium Commission I was charged with all sorts of projects. For example, there was rage about the Portsmouth millennium tower, which was going to cost £32 million but actually cost nearly £40 million. It opened five years after the millennium; what a disgrace. I was getting a fierce kicking by the media on this one, and I needed to go and look at my sources. So I thought, “Well, the Battle of Trafalgar was in 1805, and Nelson’s Column wasn’t unveiled until 1843—and the price had doubled”. So I felt I was not alone. These matters are almost inevitable.

But what is best practice? We cannot talk just about all these problems. Who has done this spectacularly well? I must declare all my interests from my professional life. The 2012 Olympics were an excellent example of project delivery and management. I say this to the politicians: appreciate that, of all those who campaigned for the Olympics, none of them was on the implementation team. This is one of the dilemmas of government. You campaign in opposition, but in government you have to implement, and they are totally different skills. Most people, when they come into government, think that a press notice is an implementation plan. You have a 10-year programme, as a Minister, to work out that this is not actually the same activity at all.

I decided that the Olympics were a very good example. What was their advantage? They had a deadline: a decision had to be made. Otherwise, we would be humiliated in public. Of course, this was Notre-Dame’s great advantage, in a sense: a crisis mobilises people, so action had to be taken and taken fast. It is difficult for us to create that sort of timescale.

Money is always tight: there is never enough money. What the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said was interesting. You must not be entirely duplicitous, because that just generates the rage and cynicism of the public. You can modify scope. Some of the ideas for the redevelopment or refurbishment of Parliament are thrilling. Somebody who helps me was talking about the US congressional visitor centre—a wonderful, state-of-the-art centre. We should take the opportunity to make this a great centre of education, tourism and so forth.

Personally, I am for the decant and am very in favour of Portcullis House for the Commons, but I am not an expert, I am not on any of the committees, and I hope I will not be serving on any of them. I remember going around with Michael Hopkins when he first finished the design—I was a Heritage Minister—and it is a thrilling location. But I am sure we have to move—we cannot do it in half-measures.

The real issue is to have a good client. A former Permanent Secretary used to do a lot of the funding of the renovation of some of the royal palaces, and it was quite difficult at that stage to get not only the lead members of the Royal Family but some of the junior members to realise that if you have a contract, every time you modify it, tinker with it or change it, that is money down the drain. You have to make your decision, stick with it and get on with it, and that of course is what we have to do.

I so admire the committee. Michael, the chairman, is a really excellent man, as we know, and his team are excellent. But poor them, having to deal with parliamentarians, because parliamentarians cannot help but think in five-year terms, and they are particularly vulnerable to getting a kicking from public opinion and so on. I am very sympathetic, and I greatly admire all those who have taken on this huge responsibility. I have looked at their backgrounds. They are obviously extremely competent, capable people, and let us hope they can stay the course and not be driven to frustration by all of us. In short, I admire all those who have put so much into this already, but it cannot go on; we now have to make decisions at the earliest opportunity.

I have a small point that I know noble Lords will appreciate. As I understand it, the renewal and restoration of Parliament requires quite a large working area, and I think Victoria Tower Gardens is the area they will be looking for. That is surely the final nail in the coffin of the ridiculous Holocaust memorial museum, which is an utter waste of public money. It should shoot off to the Imperial War Museum or somewhere else. This is another excellent argument in that department.

I will leave noble Lords with the comments of that Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke—words that I often used to refer to:

“Those who carry on great public schemes must be proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappointments, the most shocking insults, and, worst of all, the presumptuous judgements of the ignorant upon their designs”.


In my humble opinion, courage, tenacity and decision-making are required.