Parliamentary Works Sponsor Body (Abolition) Regulations 2022

Baroness Doocey Excerpts

Tuesday 13th December 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean (Con)]

My Lords, this is not an area that I have looked at very carefully but, when I looked at these regulations, I was rather puzzled by what we hope to achieve by them. The Lord Privy Seal, in his opening remarks, told us that we would not lose the existing expertise and that the delivery authority would be unchanged. So it is not clear to me why transferring responsibility to a corporate body, which is undefined but I assume is the two clerks of the respective Houses, will alter the proposal that was going to cost £13 billion or £14 billion—whichever it was—which, as the noble Lord, Lord Best, just pointed out, is pretty unaffordable in the current climate. Whether you need to be elected or not, spending that kind of money is simply not possible in the current climate. The money is not there. I am worried by exactly what the benefit of this will be, because it looks like the same people are confronted with the same problem, which they have to take forward.

The noble Lord, Lord Best, talked about the belief, which he described as “naive”, that it would be possible to do this without political interference. The reason I want to speak on these regulations is to express frustration at the way projects are carried out in this place, without proper consultation with the Members. In the other place, Members are responsible for voting the means of supply. In this place, to some degree, we are responsible for explaining why these sums of money are being spent.

I can give a more recent example. The decision to alter the security arrangements at Carriage Gates results in traffic going in a one-way system along what is called Chorus Avenue at the front of the House of Lords. That will cost £70 million and, in the process, will put pedestrians at considerable risk. A number of colleagues have argued that there should be a perimeter fence around the House and that that area should be closed to pedestrians. It is very dangerous, and one person lost their life crossing the road. When colleagues make these remarks and talk to the authorities—the corporate body, as it exists—they are ignored.

There is huge opposition to the creation of a new front door to this House. The cost was £2.5 million and it is now £3 million—for a front door. One worries about value for money. The argument put forward is security but, at the end of the day, it is up to Members to discuss these ideas instead of them being imposed on us. We are told that the changes to Carriage Gates and their effect on us are going to happen, that we have no say in the matter and that considerable sums are being spent.

I want to ask my noble friend the Lord Privy Seal a number of questions. First, how much have we already spent on deciding what to do? I understand it runs to hundreds of millions of pounds. Secondly, why is it going to be any different and where is the accountability? The only thing I can see in these regulations is that there is going to be an annual report:

“At least once in every calendar year, the Corporate Officers must prepare and lay before Parliament a report about the carrying out of the Parliamentary building works and the progress that has been made towards completion of those works.”


There is nothing about the expense, estimates or accountability. I find it difficult to accept the idea that an annual report will provide accountability to Members of this House or the other place.

In short, I look at these regulations and it seems to me that nothing is actually going to change and that the fundamental, systemic, strategic problem remains. The noble Lord, Lord Best, said he thought that we might end up doing a series of small projects, perhaps concentrating on the problems in the basement, if indeed that is practical. I may be a Peer, but I do not have a stately home. However, if I imagine for a moment that I have a huge stately home on the scale of this place and I have to be involved in restoration and renewal, if a bunch of consultants came to me and said, “The cheapest way to do this is for you to move out and for the whole thing to be done in one go”, if I were spending my own money I would almost certainly say, “Not on your life.” I would say, “Why don’t we do it a bit at a time over the next 30 years, because that way I might be able to afford it?” To try to do everything in one go is unaffordable. Of course it is always possible to argue that the costs will be less if you do it all in one go, although the experience of building this place in the 1850s was that it did not quite work out that like.

I say to my noble friend that I worry about these regulations. I understand what they do, but I am not sure that they will deliver for the taxpayer what the taxpayer might expect or what the Members of this place might expect in carrying out their duties.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

My Lords, this building is like a patient held together with bandages and sticking plasters when only serious surgery can restore it to health. Advice from a range of experts makes it clear that the best way forward is for Members to move to temporary accommodation while the intrusive and very disruptive work is carried out.

It was precisely because making this happen would be so difficult and controversial that Parliament put into statute a sponsor body for the project to act independently and supposedly free from political interference. However, ever since the ink was dry on the Act of Parliament, the sponsor body’s work has been sabotaged by powerful Members of the Commons who want the Palace to be restored and made safe only so long as it causes no inconvenience to them personally and they can remain in the Palace while the work is carried out. Meanwhile, the functions of the delivery authority, which needed to undertake extensive surveys, have also persistently been held back by restrictions on access. So short-term expediency and convenience have won, while the longer-term interests of this Parliament have lost.

So what now? We now have to examine the new arrangements and ensure that they are fit for purpose. If we are no longer to have an independent sponsor body and the project is to become the province of Parliament, it follows that the new arrangements should at the very least be more accountable, but I worry that the new structure will not live up to that ambition. There is to be a programme board with day-to-day responsibility for the project. It is to be

“as small, as senior and as stable as possible to support its effectiveness, but as large as necessary to reflect the range of key stakeholders that need to be represented.”

Meanwhile, the client, in theory replacing the sponsor body and instructing the programme board, will be the two commissions of the Commons and the Lords sitting together. Having been a member of the commission in this House for four years, I say with great respect to its individual members that I am not confident that those arrangements will result in accountability either. Each commission is a large, opaque body and is noted for neither its transparency nor its swift decision-making. So I worry that this structure loses the independence the sponsor body set up but gains us nothing in accountability.

This is important, because Parliament’s in-house record of managing very large- scale projects on time and on budget is dismal. Every very large project, from Westminster Hall to the Elizabeth Tower, has run vastly over budget and miles behind the original timescale. Unless there is very careful oversight, there is no reason to believe that the limited restoration and renewal now on offer will not suffer the same fate.

We have to ask whether the commissions as client of the programme board will really devote the necessary time and be sufficiently independent to scrutinise this project. Of course, the Public Accounts Committee in the Commons will do its best to keep an eye on progress, but it already has an incredible workload. The National Audit Office will likewise continue to conduct its in-depth analysis of whether what has been spent provides value for money for the taxpayer, but both bodies have the whole gamut of public spending to look at, and their accountability mechanisms rely entirely on very busy Members of the Commons. Meanwhile, they both act retrospectively, blowing the whistle after vast sums of money have been spent rather than identifying problems coming down the track and raising the alarm.

I wish the commissions, the programme board and the delivery authority well, but I have very serious reservations about whether today’s SI really leads us to a better, more robust and more accountable means to achieve restoration and renewal. Regrettably, I fear that we are setting up overlapping echo chambers that, despite the best of intentions, will result in less transparency, less accountability and ultimately less chance of delivering a successful project. I very much hope that events will prove me wrong, but I am not holding my breath.

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, the very fact that we have to contemplate a new structure for undertaking this work shows what a dismal period we have been through, lasting many years, with huge amounts of work, vast expenditure and virtually no output. Although everybody agrees that major works are indeed essential, we just cannot carry on as if things will carry on.

The three issues that this proposal attempts to deal with have been aired by a number of speakers. Until the structures are set up and operating, the jury will necessarily be out as to whether they will be successful.

The first issue, which the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, raised, is: what is the prospect of this body being any better than its predecessor in actually taking any decisions? The answer is that the previous structure was prey to the whims of one or two powerful people in the Commons. The decision-making structure here, being vested as it is in both commissions sitting jointly, at least means that we will not be subject to whimsical decision-making. That might be a modest expectation and aim, but frankly, given the history of this project, if we can avoid that it will be a major step forward.

The second issue relates to the cost and scope of the project. As the noble Lord, Lord Best, said, there has been a lack of clarity on budget, scope and timescale. In asking for a prospectus that is crystal clear on all those fronts, he is slightly crying for the moon, because, as anyone who has ever done anything in an old building knows, once you start you find that there are problems that you did not know existed. Saying, “We know this is going to cost £X billion and that’s the cash limit”, would be a rather unsatisfactory way of proceeding. We need to know what we want to achieve and the process for getting there, because everything else flows from that. That is what the current process seeks to achieve.

On cost, I completely agree that the original approach is unsustainable in the current climate. The original approach, which we saw in most detail in the plans for decanting your Lordships’ House, was almost on the basis that money was no object. It was terrific: in some of the options we would have had a roof terrace and all these wonderful things, and offices for everybody—far more than there are now. That was unaffordable then in reality, but it is doubly unaffordable now.

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There are lessons to learn. My understanding, and the assurances I have been given, is that those lessons have been learned and will be absorbed.

[Baroness Doocey (LD)]

I am very pleased that the Minister said that there will be more transparency. That is very welcome. I wonder whether he would consider how the figures could be more transparent, because the whole of the spending on both the delivery authority and the sponsor body has been shrouded in secrecy—not for those of us on those bodies, but for everyone else. It would be much better if there was a process—I am not suggesting what it should be—whereby vast expenses are much more open and transparent, so that we can see what the money is being spent on before it is spent.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, that is an important challenge. On the local authority that I once had the honour to lead, one of the first things I did was ensure that items of spending over a certain level were put on the web immediately, which was not then current practice. I am sympathetic to the aspiration. I am only Leader of the House of Lords; I am not commanding this process. As Leader of the House of Lords I will try to ensure that matters are as clear as they should be.