Baroness Deech
Main Page: Baroness Deech (Crossbench - Life peer)
Baroness Deech (CB)
My Lords, I hesitate to follow such a display of expertise and service to the House as has been displayed in the debate this afternoon. My only experience in construction was, as head of my Oxford college, bringing in a building that then cost £12 million on time and within budget. It was a five-year programme. The only serious problem we faced was that towards the end of the five years, with 100 builders working on site every day, one girl student complained to me that one builder had wolf-whistled at her.
In a similar debate in 2022, I expressed alarm at the delays that this project has suffered and called for an urgent start. If a full decant is needed, that is what we should accept. We need to earn the gratitude of future generations rather than their dismay that we let things degenerate to the level that is apparent now. This project has undergone change after change in governance, without penalties for failure and delay, and with some ambiguity in who is to take responsibility. The decision about decant that should have been taken years ago is still not taken. This is all well known. I add that if we are looking for a pain-free way to reduce the numbers in your Lordships’ House, a full decant to the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre is the best possible way one can think of. I am very surprised that the Leader of the House has not taken this up.
My main message today is quite different. I wish to bring up the question of the elephant in the room, or rather the scaffolding in the gardens—a difficult issue that R&R has so far shied away from. That is the impact of building a Holocaust memorial and underground learning centre in Victoria Tower Gardens, which will either render R&R impossible or make it more difficult and expensive. If the memorial and underground centre are built—and, of course, I hope that they will not be, as planned—and are built before R&R, they will get in the way. If they are built afterwards or during, it is impossible to imagine a memorial to 6 million deaths taking shape and being visited when it will be surrounded —right up to its boundaries—by all the paraphernalia that will accompany R&R. Instead of reverence and contemplation, there will be masonry, concrete mixers, builders, scaffolding, materials and a jetty, with trucks roaring by and unloading around Millbank.
There will be three projects ongoing, including the memorial, that conflict with each other—all of them centred on Victoria Tower Gardens. One is the repair of Victoria Tower itself, delayed, I read, by some error in the procurement process, but now expected to start imminently and run for at least five years. It is not strictly an R&R project, but I raise it because its repair will need some occupation of Victoria Tower Gardens. All the proposals for restoration and renewal will involve the use of a chunk of Victoria Tower Gardens as the main area for keeping all the equipment, access to the Palace and so on. Two of the proposals for repair involve tunnels under the Palace going into Victoria Tower Gardens, with great upheaval—remembering also that the so-called learning centre attached to the memorial will also be underground. It brings to mind the Channel Tunnel excitement, when the team starting in France and the team starting here eventually met exactly in the middle. The restoration and renewal works will reach nearly as far as the Buxton memorial, and the Holocaust memorial will reach up to the Buxton memorial from the other end.
The current plan—I express my gratitude to the thoughtful presentation given by my noble friend Lord Vaux to the Select Committee on the Holocaust Memorial Bill—indicates that almost half the area of Victoria Tower Gardens will be needed for the full duration of the works programme, which could last for 30 years or more. Work is unlikely to start until 2029, and the Holocaust memorial may or may not be under construction then. The planning permission needed for R&R will be more difficult to obtain if a memorial is built or planned to be built. Nothing of the gardens will remain open once all these works are under way, contrary to the London County Council (Improvements) Act 1900, which prohibited building in Victoria Tower Gardens—the very Act that the Government now propose to remove to make room for a Holocaust memorial. If a memorial is built, there will still be an obligation under that 1900 Act to keep the rest of Victoria Tower Gardens open for the public, and it is impossible to see how that can be achieved. I would welcome the Senior Deputy Speaker’s view on that.
If the memorial is built, it will damage the ability to get planning permission and may cause a need for further amendment of the 1900 Act. It will restrict the ability of the restoration and renewal to use the gardens as it might wish to, including early work to build a jetty and the tunnels that I mentioned. If both projects are undertaken, there will be no gardens left, and the atmosphere that might be conducive to a memorial will be destroyed. There will also be an impact on Millbank traffic, with buses of visitors to the memorial potentially conflicting with lorries of building works, even before R&R gets properly under way.
There is a simple solution. R&R is of course of great importance to the nation, to the work of government, to the dignity of Parliament and to the needs of future generations. It must, sooner rather than later, be allowed to go ahead as efficiently as possible. So the memorial, and in particular the underground learning centre, must either be moved to a more peaceful location or delayed until R&R is completed. The stubbornness behind the memorial project is hard to understand. It can now be seen to be adverse to the national interest, in addition to all its other flaws. We must get on with R&R and bring to an end the costly indecision and fire risks, et cetera, that we face now.