Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill

Baroness Smith of Basildon Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 22nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews]

My Lords, I shall be very brief. First, I thank the Government most warmly for the amendment they have brought forward. It is an exemplary amendment: it has none of the conditions attached that I thought might have been tempting. It is a simple, elegant and comprehensive statement of what it is we must take care of and it has the right balance of technical and emotive language. So I am very grateful and I can say that Historic England, with which I still have a continuing connection, is extremely pleased and grateful to the Government for this. The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is absolutely right.

We heard a very powerful speech at Second Reading from the noble Earl, Lord Devon, which warned us, essentially, not to be completely obsessed by the simple presentation of a Victorian building. He was absolutely right, but very much of the medieval Palace—in fact most of it—has disappeared and the cloisters are the most significant part of the archaeology and architecture left, so we should have a special care for them. I am not entirely certain whether they are designated as being at risk. I am very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is meeting the chair of Historic England, because we can get very good guidance as to what to do. In my experience, you can always do urgent conservation and repairs, so I see no reason why that should not happen before R&R starts properly, let alone before it finishes, because, frankly, there will be nothing left if it is the stone itself that is so fragile. I would be very interested to know what comes of that meeting, and so, I suspect, will many Members of the House: maybe we can follow that up informally, or maybe through the estates department of the House, to make sure that we know that action is being taken.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak relatively briefly, I hope, on this issue. I welcome Amendment 8 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, and I thank the Minister for his comments. My noble friend Lady Andrews spoke at Second Reading, as did other noble Lords, about the historical significance this building has, and I am pleased that that has led to the amendment today to ensure that a duty is placed on the sponsor body to have regard to,

“the special architectural, archaeological and historical significance of the Palace of Westminster”.

The amendment addresses the concerns felt across the whole House and we welcome it.

On the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, in a sense, what he is saying is the very basis of the restoration and renewal programme. I said before that we all recognise that there is that line to be trod between the necessary changes to the building and preserving its historical fabric. The whole basis of this programme is that, while we recognise the historical and archaeological implications of the building, we adapt it for modern use. He made a point in his amendment about us returning to the building. If we were not going to return to the building, we could just have a museum and patch everything up as it is now. However, because we are returning to the building, we need to have those types of adaptations and improvements. The only reason so many of our historic buildings have survived is because they have been adapted to modern use. If you go back to history, the reason why we have so many old buildings is because they have been kept in use and modernised over many years. I am also pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, makes reference to the building’s status as part of the UNESCO world heritage site, as that is an important distinction to make. The point of his amendment, which is well made, is covered in Amendment 8, so we are grateful to the Minister and the Government for bringing it forward.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this short debate and for their welcome of the wording of the amendment before us. It resolves very neatly the concerns raised by many noble Lords and indeed many Members of the other place, and I am genuinely glad that noble Lords feel that it is entirely appropriate.

I hope that I can briefly give some words of comfort to my noble friend Lord Cormack and the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, on their perfectly understandable concerns about the condition of the medieval cloisters. First, I assure them that Cloister Court is part of the Palace of Westminster. That point is material, because it means that it will be included in the restoration and renewal works. Furthermore, however, the House authorities are planning some exterior conservation works in Cloister Court before restoration and renewal begins. Following that, the whole Palace, including both the external and internal spaces of Cloister Court, are in scope for the restoration and renewal works. With those words, I hope that my noble friend in particular will be at least partly reassured on his concerns.

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[Lord Adonis]

My Lords, I will be brief: the situation is worse than that described by my noble friend Lord Berkeley, if I can deepen his gloom. With HS2 and Crossrail, with which I was deeply familiar, by the time we came to publishing legislation we knew what the project was going to be. The project was defined; indeed, at the second stage of the HS2 Bill, which had just been agreed by the House of Commons, we knew within a few metres what the line and specification of works would be and so on. We have a defined project—it has just proved much more expensive and problematic to deliver than was conceived. The problem we face with the parliamentary rebuilding work is that we are setting up the sponsor body before we have a defined project.

There is a very good reason for that: we are literally starting from scratch and trying to decide the best way forward, and this probably is the best way forward. I have views on whether we should consider other options —we will come to that in a while—but we are currently at such an early stage of the work that we do not have the faintest clue what the costs will be. We do not have a project description; all we have is a few back-of-the-envelope, broad objectives, a very old costing on the basis of them and a few timelines plucked out of a hat. We also have the potential for massive controversy, which we can already see, about the nature of the decant, where we will go, what we will come back to and so on.

What the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, is proposing—that there should be best estimates for the timeline at the point at which the strategy is published—is perfectly sensible. There is also another reason why it should be done: it is my view that we are at such an early stage of planning, and the issues involved in the restoration and renewal of the Houses of Parliament are so great—because of the wider context referred to earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Norton, of big questions about the future of our parliamentary democracy—that I do not believe it is sensible to be closing down significant options at this stage; we are at such a preliminary stage in devising what the project will be. I am sorry to keep making this point but, since we will be returning to it in September, I am very anxious to keep it open: we should include the question of where the decant should be—there is very good reason to propose that it should not be somewhere immediately adjacent to the Houses of Parliament but could be in another part of the United Kingdom—and where the ultimate Parliament will be.

I agree with what the noble and learned Lord said. On the basis of my knowledge of big infrastructure projects and the stage we are at currently, it is very plausible that there could be three or four years’ delay before the decant starts. If the decant does not start until 2028, we will not move back here until between 2038 and 2040. To put some context on this, phase 2 of HS2 is currently scheduled to open in 2032. So, relatively speaking, it is going to take much longer to complete the restoration and renewal of Parliament than to build a 330-mile high-speed line, which is the biggest single infrastructure project in the world outside the Republic of China. Keeping a few options open at this stage is sensible in terms of planning. We should take advantage of the situation at the moment to think a bit more broadly about where we intend our parliamentary democracy to go over the 100 to 150 years ahead, and in doing so demonstrate the same vision that our Victorian forebears showed when they designed these Houses of Parliament to be the centre of an imperial legislature in the 1840s.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, I feel that we have already segued into later debates. With due respect to my noble friend, I have to challenge his “back of an envelope” assessment. If he comes to my office, I will show him a huge amount of paperwork—documents that some of us have worked on over the last couple of years. If it was all on the back of an envelope, the envelope would be enormous.

We have gone a little wider than the amendment by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, but I do think he is on to something. I understand that the question of the Ministry of Defence and the car park has now been resolved—but, I suspect, given the extra cost that would have been involved had it not been resolved, that public attention might well have encouraged them to move a little more quickly than they did. Again, we come back to what we are really talking about here: engagement, information and openness. The more that we can say what is intended to be done, the greater will be our ability to monitor the project.

In most large projects that I know, there is some slippage. Noble Lords are right that this project is at a relatively early stage, but quite a lot of planning has gone into it already. We do not need to say, “This will happen on 3 January 2022”, but it should be possible to have an idea of a timeframe for when certain things are likely to happen. That would help with public engagement and the engagement of colleagues around the House.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, for his amendment on the important issue of decant and its timeline. His amendment would require the sponsor body to provide its best estimate for the timeline of the Palace restoration works when consulting parliamentarians.

As noble Lords are aware, the full decant, restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster is scheduled to take place from the mid-2020s until the mid-2030s. I absolutely recognise that noble Lords are seeking further clarity on those dates. It is very much my hope, and that of the Government, that the work will be completed expeditiously and that we will move back to the Palace as swiftly as possible afterwards. Under the Bill, the delivery authority is required to formulate proposals for the works, including the timing of those works. This will form the outline business case, the OBC, which Parliament will need to approve before the substantive works commence. If for any reason the timings change significantly, the sponsor body will need to come back to Parliament for further approval. It is at that stage—the presentation of the OBC—that the timing of the works will become clear.

The Government have of course thought about requiring the sponsor body to provide its assessment of timings at the consultation stage, even if it is just a best estimate. The trouble with that is that the sponsor body at that stage will still be in the process of formulating the OBC, and any forecast timings will be at best a very rough estimation. I argue that this would risk setting expectations prematurely. Those expectations would then inevitably need to be revised when the sponsor body placed its proposals before Parliament prior to approval.

I shall give a simple illustration of that. We have had a wide-ranging and interesting debate on what noble Lords would like to see from a restored Palace. Those aspects of the plan are not the sort of thing that can be nailed down a priori. They are therefore bound to affect the length of time that the works will take.

Furthermore, one essential first step for R&R is the works to Richmond House, which the noble and learned Lord mentioned, to enable the decant from the other place. The timing of those works will inevitably affect the start time for R&R—so clearly we would not want to decant before those works had happened. The noble and learned Lord asked where we were in the planning process for Richmond House. All I can say is that the Northern Estate programme is currently consulting the public on its plans for Richmond House. We expect it to make a formal planning application to Westminster City Council by this autumn.

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[Lord Stunell]

My Lords, debates today have probably added £1 billion to the total cost of R&R. When we look at we have said about disability, constitutional changes, public engagement and future-proofing, I think that we can forget £4 billion and start to look at £5 billion. All that is in square brackets anyway.

This legislation is not a money Bill; if it were, we would not be discussing it. It is a governance Bill, but how we arrange the governance affects how much money is spent. For example, the opaque governance of the process leading up to this Bill reaching your Lordships’ House has already cost us money, because it could perfectly well have come at least a year and probably 18 months sooner, which would have saved money. If it is hard to see how, perhaps I may say that the index of consumer price inflation in the last year was 1.9% and the index of construction price inflation was 2.8%—more or less 1% greater. That 1% leads to the whole project’s expenditure falling one year later than it would have done, which has cost us £40 million on a £4 billion project—probably £50 million—simply by starting a year later than we needed to. That is before we have a plan or a project on the table. My amendment is intended to enable us to avoid unnecessary delay and cost, and to learn from that story and the lessons of Crossrail.

Once upon a time when this project was first floated, the governance model in this Bill was advocated and supported because it was going to follow the magnificent models of UK construction projects where we had at last cracked the problem and, as seen with the Olympics and Crossrail, we could now deliver on time and on budget. We still say that, except we leave out the phrase “and Crossrail”; we only say, “the magnificent example of the Olympics”. What Crossrail illustrated is that once you have a delay you automatically and unavoidably have cost increases. That is not only because it costs money to take longer; it costs even more money to try to catch up.

My amendment is designed to save the large amounts of public money which come from delay in taking decisions about how the project should proceed. A project of £4 billion intended to take eight years is going to spend, on average, £500 million each year. That is not a trivial sum in anybody’s counting and certainly not in the Treasury’s counting. The year’s delay will not cost you all the £500 million but it will probably, à la Crossrail, cost you two-thirds—£300 million, say, will be the cost of holding things back for a year, for one reason or another. So the current way we are going to decide whether we can afford something goes something like this: the sponsor body develops a programme, signs it off and passes it to the delivery authority, which gets the design work and the tendering going and then reports back to the delivery authority, which reports back to the sponsor body, which sends it to the estimates commission, which at that point consults the Treasury. The Bill says it “must have regard to” the information or advice it gets from the Treasury. In fact, three of the Bill’s 15 clauses relate to having to have regard to the Treasury’s advice.

Whatever might be said in some idyllic constitutional theory about parliamentary supremacy, the actual tap is turned on and off by the Treasury. That is no surprise and certainly it is the reality of this piece of legislation. The point is that at least a year, and probably 18 months to two years, after the sponsor body has commissioned the work to be done, the Treasury will say, “Oh, no, sorry, that is not in scope, we cannot afford that. Spread it over 10 years, drop all the stuff about getting into the turrets, never mind Lord Stunell and hearing, let us just have it like it was in the old building and cut costs”. We will still have the delays. Incidentally, it will be very difficult to save as much by cutting things out of the design as it will cost to have the delays—which, of course, is another Crossrail story as well.

What we have is a system where we know it will be the Treasury taking the decision on whether the money is going to be spent, but instead of asking before we start, “Can we have the money to do this?”, we are going to wait until we have done everything and then the Treasury is going to say no. Amendment 23 simply short-circuits that in a very simple way. It says that it is permissible to have a Minister of the Crown on the sponsor body. It does not require that there shall be, and it is therefore still a matter of choice as to whether such a person is appointed or not. What that means is that, at the start of the process and not at the end, the Treasury would be saying what can and cannot be spent. In terms of parliamentary accountability and lots of other things, people will say, “That is completely wrong”, but the Government’s fingerprints are going to be on this and they are going to do their best to wipe their fingerprints off it, which they will be well able to do if they present it in anonymous advice to the estimates commission two years after the process began and the delays will be there.

My amendment allows the Government to find a way of being more transparent about taking the inevitable decisions that the Treasury will make and putting those in the public domain at the earliest moment. I know that I do not have too many friends on this, but I have given the House an option, which it does not need to exercise but which in five, 10 or 15 years’ time, a future Administration and the future House will be very grateful for, so that they can indeed save any more delays than those that will by then already have accumulated. I beg to move.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, I listened carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Stunell. If I understand his argument correctly, he seems to be expressing a lack of confidence that Her Majesty’s Treasury will come up with the money and deliver on the funding at the end of the project, and to avoid that he is suggesting putting it on the committee that is deciding what the project should do and what money should be requested.

I understand why the noble Lord made his arguments, and, as I said, I listened carefully, but I am not persuaded by them. This is a parliamentary project, not a government project—that is an important distinction to make. There are times when I suspect that there may be battles between Parliament and government on this, although I hope not. I hope that in bringing forward the Bill, government is showing its intention to recognise that the work has to be done and paid for.

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All the amendment does is ask for this project to be costed properly so that we can have a debate about it. My noble friend said it is not going to delay things. I hope that we can do this and then debate over the next few years whether we go somewhere permanently or temporarily, what the cost will be and what the benefits will be to the region. My noble friend and I do not always agree on HS2, but we certainly agree on transport and the need to have somewhere with good transport in the middle which would work fine. I support the amendment.

[Baroness Smith of Basildon]

My Lords, I always have a sense of déjà vu when discussing this issue. I am grateful to my noble friends Lord Adonis and Lady Quin for contacting me prior to the debate. My noble friend Lady Quin’s amendment is somewhat different from those we have seen before. It is not about relocating Parliament but about a temporary relocation while the works are being undertaken. I have listened carefully to what has been raised today, and I wonder whether we are almost having two separate discussions. There is a challenge with this project so that all nations and regions of the UK feel engaged with it. I might have made a slightly different argument in pushing for this.

We face three things as a country: economic inequality, democratic disengagement and a loss of confidence in the political system. They have been raised at different times when talking about this issue. However, I am not convinced that moving Parliament necessarily addresses them. Having said that, the proposal before us today is about the restoration and renewal of this building to provide a home for a 21st-century Parliament. My noble friend Lady Quin referred to the comments I made at Second Reading about the administrative capital and the plans to build it on the Yorkshire moors. Other countries have done that. That is a completely separate issue from what is facing us today, which is the restoration and renewal of this building. There is nothing that says that in future, if as a nation we want to take that decision, we could not do so, but we would have to accept that the cost would make the cost of restoration and renewal pale into insignificance because Parliament does not exist in a vacuum. It exists as part of a system involving government, civil society, business and the Civil Service. I have always taken the view that we need to keep those elements of governance of the country together and have those communications.

A huge challenge to this programme is to address the issue of benefiting the regions. The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, in particular, has some interesting ideas and I hope the Government will pursue them and will be a little more positive than they have been to date on engaging young people and others throughout the country. However, issues of confidence in the political system cannot be addressed by this programme. The costs would be greater than if we have to do the work here. However, there is nothing to stop Parliament at any time looking at creating a new administrative capital if that is what it wishes to do, but I do not think this Bill is the right place to address that. If there had been new arguments that could have persuaded me otherwise, I would have been happy to take them on board, but I am still not persuaded that this programme is the right time to be looking at a different site, even temporarily.

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Quin, and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for their amendment, which brings us back to the vexed issue of decant. The amendment would require the sponsor body to prepare, publish and lay before Parliament a report giving an assessment of relocating the Houses of Parliament, for the duration of the parliamentary building works, to a location outside London.

As noble Lords will be aware, the Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster suggested that the Commons should decant to the Northern Estate, including Richmond House, and the Lords should decant to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. I can only underline the words of my noble friend Lord Haselhurst: those recommendations were based on substantial analysis of where Parliament could be relocated during R&R. This included a pre-feasibility study commissioned by Parliament in 2012. Just to clarify what I said at Second Reading, that study looked into the preliminary business case for R&R and considered whether Parliament should decant and, if so, whether it should be to a location outside Westminster, whether temporarily or permanently. It concluded that because the,

“geographical proximity of Parliament to Government is of significance … substantial additional costs would be incurred”.

On the back of the pre-feasibility study, the House authorities commissioned the independent options appraisal. This was scrutinised by the Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster, which considered the various options for R&R. In its report the committee noted that it had considered the proposal to temporarily relocate Parliament during R&R. It concluded, as was well summarised by my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth, that,

“the option of temporarily locating Parliament outside London during the works, while attractive in many ways, carries an unacceptable burden of cost and inconvenience, which would otherwise be avoided”.

It reached that decision as Parliament currently owns a number of buildings around the Palace of Westminster, such as the Northern Estate and Millbank House. These buildings provide both office space for Members and many committee and meeting rooms. If Parliament were to relocate during R&R, it would mean abandoning these buildings, thereby increasing the costs associated with decant.

I listened with care to the noble Baroness the Leader of the Opposition. In its report, the Joint Committee brought our attention to the evidence of the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, who served as Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service for a decade. He described how he had,

“no doubt in saying that Parliament needs ready access to Ministers and vice versa. Departments also need ready access to Ministers and vice versa. It is an old-fashioned syllogism. The three need to be closely co-ordinated if Government is to work properly”.

I hope to convey that there has already been substantial work to assess whether the permanent or temporary location of Parliament should be outside London. On the back of that work, the matter was decided by Parliament in the Motions passed in 2018. Furthermore, contrary to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, I have concerns that the noble Baroness’s amendment, however well intentioned, might seriously delay progress on R&R. Significant work has already been undertaken to identify the decant locations and to formulate designs for the Northern Estate. If we were to decide to decant to somewhere else at this stage, we would need to start the process all over again.

I just do not think that we should go back and unpick the clear decision taken last year or the substantial work that has already been undertaken. To do so risks delaying this important, and urgent, project. Many of us would say that the work is already overdue. We absolutely must secure the Palace of Westminster—a grade I listed building, part of a UNESCO world heritage site and the home of UK democracy—for future generations. I am sure that I do not need to remind noble Lords of the problems that this building faces. Falling masonry, sewage leaks and the alarming number of fires caught just in time all demonstrate the pressing need to pass this Bill and get on with the job. We simply do not have time to delay.

So, for the reasons I have set out, I am afraid that the Government must express significant reservations about this amendment.