Palace of Westminster: Restoration and Renewal

Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the Motion before us and therefore do not support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, although I understand his arguments. I believe that a full decant as soon as possible is the only responsible way forward. As we have heard, it will be expensive, difficult and inconvenient, because all such projects are. We must ensure that only the most rigorous processes are in place to manage it well.

The proposed arrangements of the sponsor board and the delivery authority have been tried and tested pretty thoroughly recently by the Olympics and, now, Crossrail, so we can and should have confidence in them. However, we would be well advised to heed the words of the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, who gave us an entertaining but very pertinent description of what can go wrong when not contractors but clients do the wrong thing. Many projects go wrong because they are in the hands of bad clients. It is Parliament’s responsibility, if we go forward with this project, to be a good client.

I draw noble Lords’ attention to the book written by Caroline Shenton, Mr Barry’s War, which has already been referred to. In it, she asks: who was Barry’s client? Was it the Government, Parliament,

“or—most difficult of all—over a thousand MPs and Peers, fractious, opinionated, vocal, partisan and above all with as many individual views on how the work should progress as there were members”?

Let us not be those parliamentarians; let us not be our Victorian forebears. Let us be sensible, modern parliamentarians and good clients.

I was a member of your Lordships’ now-defunct Administration and Works Committee twice, the first time between 2007 and 2010, so it is over a decade since I first became aware of the increasing deterioration of this building. I took a tour of the basement back then as a member of the committee; it was pretty scary then and it is a whole lot scarier now. So I watched and listened with interest and, I have to say, increasing alarm as the Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster —to which I, along with everyone else, pay tribute—gathered its evidence and then delivered a detailed and comprehensive report. I experienced something close to despair as those clear recommendations began to lose traction in the face of political challenge.

So I am more pleased than I can say not to be making the speech that I prepared a week ago in the confident expectation—it is very nice to have been proved wrong—that we would today be discussing further delay in getting this vital project under way.

I am really delighted that Members in the other place have found the courage finally to set us on the road to a proper plan for the rehabilitation of a building which, like it or not, plays a huge part in our national story and belongs to the whole nation, as many noble Lords have said—indeed, to the world—and not just to Parliament.

I love this building. I love what it looks like and I love what it means, which my noble friend Lady Andrews expressed so eloquently. It is indeed a privilege to come here every day. I hate the thought of having to leave it, but I hate much more the thought that it might have been allowed to rot away or suffer catastrophe because this generation of parliamentarians—we are only passing through—was too squeamish or too self-absorbed to take the decisions necessary to save it.

Happily, we have the opportunity today to make sure that that disaster is averted. Let us embrace it as an opportunity to honour the past and protect the future, not for ourselves but for our children and their children and all those who will come after, and let us do it soon.