Holocaust Memorial Bill

Baroness Harding of Winscombe Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (CB)]

My Lords, I will briefly endorse some of the comments of the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, about building costs. He has much more experience in the world of construction than I do, but it is a matter that is both of interest to people and very important more generally.

We all know that since Covid there has been huge cost inflation in the building industry, partly because of the difficulty in assessing specialist forms of construction. This project falls into a category where generalised prediction is really not very helpful, for all the kinds of reasons that the noble Lord mentioned about the site and the nature of the processes involved in developing it.

When we think about this—it is a relevant consideration to us all—it is worth our while thinking about some well-known parliamentary projects. I think it was the case that the Scottish Parliament overshot 11 times its original budget. This—I am glad to be able to say—was worse than Portcullis House, which in 2000 was estimated to be £80 million over its original budget. That was only roughly half the overshot per square metre of the Scottish Parliament. We need to be very cognisant of the problems that are faced in the financial aspect of all this.

The Government assure us that they have been advised by experts, although, as I think the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, said, we have not seen any detail about all this, as the Government say that they cannot disclose commercially sensitive information into the public domain. Well, fair enough, but no doubt the Government were advised by similar—if not the same—experts on those other two projects, which seem to have been rather inaccurately valued at the outset.

Frankly, as far as costs go, I can see no reason to have any confidence in the amounts that we hear for this scheme, which, after all—as I think has been mentioned already—have gone up from £50 million in 2015 to £137 million now. Like the noble Lord, Lord King, the only thing that I am confident about is that if this project were to go ahead, that will turn out to be an underestimate.

The reality is that with projects of this kind, it is invariably a matter of “build now, pay up later”. It is not a fiscal rule; it is a rule of experience.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, as I have been for nearly a decade, and a resident of Westminster who walks my dog in the park.

I remind us all that this is Report, not Second Reading, and I will attempt to resist the huge temptation to remind noble Lords that the foundation considered more than 50 sites and that there is huge value in collocating the memorial with the learning centre—I could go on. Instead, I would just like to focus on this actual amendment.

We all know that putting the costs in nominal pounds in the Bill is a bad idea. It does not matter what the building is or what we are trying to do: putting costs in a Bill makes for bad legislation. Each of the speeches we have heard today has been a Second Reading speech, because this is really an amendment designed to wreck the memorial. I think we should be honest about that.

We should not put costs in the Bill. It is not surprising that the costs have escalated over the last decade—we have been living through a period of very high inflation. We have not put a spade in the ground precisely because of the planning process that has taken so long. This is not unique to the Holocaust memorial; sadly, it is a fact of life for every major building project in this country, which is a subject for a much broader debate.

It is not surprising that fundraising has not been started, because it cannot be until there is planning permission to build something. So I am afraid that the arguments being used in favour of this amendment are actually arguments against a Second Reading of the Bill, and therefore we should dismiss them.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in that I am also a member of the foundation. In fact, I am one of the co-chairs and trustees. I can confirm what the noble Baroness said: we cannot start fundraising until there is planning permission.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

The core of the problem is that the learning centre is too cramped, small and poky. I do not think it should be underground, but the real problem is that it is too small to tell such a huge story. What we have is a site that is too small for the Shoah but a project that is too big for the site. The learning centre is what really matters.

My credentials to speak are not nearly as good as others. My father was an Army doctor at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, but he never told us anything about it, so shocked was he by what he saw. I learned about his role there—I think he was the first Army doctor in—only after he was dead. I think that he would have said that what matters most of all is the education, and for that you really do need a lecture theatre and libraries as well as electronics and computer desks. A tourist exhibit down a hole in the gardens does not match up to what one is looking for from an education centre.

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I will address directly the question that my noble friend posed on why collocation is important and why this is the right location. I would just like to dispel a couple of myths in this debate. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Russell, for bringing it, and I think it is a very important and measured debate that we are having. It is an honour to contribute to it at all.

As I said, I have been on the Holocaust Memorial Foundation for a decade. That is my only lived experience of this. But what I have learned in that decade from sitting alongside real experts in Holocaust education is that it is so important that we feel this, as well as learning facts. I remind noble Lords that the leaders of all Holocaust education organisations in this country believe that this is the right place, the right size and the right way to do this as a national memorial. They know a thousandfold or a millionfold more than I do. I have watched them at work over the course of the last decade and I think that we should respect them, as my noble friend Lord Howard said earlier.

It will not be a tribute to British greatness—quite the opposite. It will ask us to think very deeply about Britain’s role in the Holocaust. There are some things that we can proud of but lots that we cannot. I would argue that, tempting though it is to believe that this is like the Cenotaph and that we would walk past and feel the pain of the victims and their families, actually the most difficult part of Holocaust education is not to think, “Oh my God, it could be my family who were victims”. The most difficult part of Holocaust education is to ask yourself “Could you have been a perpetrator?” That is the lesson that could not be more important today.

The sad thing is that, with every week that I have been on the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, it has felt more important that, as a country, we ask people to think about that. Collocating the memorial and the learning centre in the shadow of the Mother of Parliaments, where so many people have fought for liberty and freedom, is why it is the right place at the right time.

[Baroness Berger (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not going to rise in response to this amendment, but I was struck by contributions on all sides of the House from noble Lords that have drawn reference to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. In the course of this debate, I did some investigation to understand why that memorial is underground, and I reflected on the experience of the architect who created Yad Vashem. It is primarily underground, and that was done to create a powerful symbolic and emotional experience for visitors. I have had the opportunity to visit, and have done so on more than two dozen occasions. The architect, Moshe Safdie, designed the museum representing the rupture in Jewish history caused by the Holocaust. Visitors descend into the earth, moving through dark galleries that evoke the descent into one of history’s darkest chapters.

I share that reflection only because there is a good reason why Yad Vashem is underground. Noble Lords can read more about it, if they wish to understand more, but for me, having been there and visited, it is part of the experience and why I shall vote against this amendment if it goes to a vote.