Holocaust Memorial Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

3rd reading
Tuesday 17th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Lord Khan of Burnley) (Lab)]

My Lords, it has been my great privilege to steer this Bill through the Lords. I thank all noble Lords who have dedicated so much of their time to scrutinising the Bill. I hope I have demonstrated my personal commitment to seeing it passed through my engagement with noble Lords from all sides of the House. Through this Bill, the Government are moving a step closer to delivering on the long-standing commitment to build a national Holocaust memorial and learning centre next to Parliament, where it rightly belongs.

As has often been repeated throughout the Bill’s passage, this commitment has cross-party support and the endorsement of every living Prime Minister, as well as the support of leading representatives of the Jewish community, other faith and community leaders, survivors and the wider public. The most important group of supporters is, without doubt, the Holocaust survivors, who have dedicated their lives to sharing their testimony so that the truth of what happened in the darkest, most appalling period of history is understood and remembered. I was delighted to see the Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg, whom I met in February and who is a firm supporter of the memorial, receive a well-deserved MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours List. We owe it to survivors to ensure that there is a permanent memorial to honour the 6 million men, women and children who were murdered in the Holocaust, together with a learning centre, so that they can be confident their testimony will live on for decades and centuries to come.

The Bill has been amended to include a new clause on the purpose of the learning centre. As I said on Report, I am sympathetic to the intentions of this amendment, but it will now be for the other place to consider the amendment and respond. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, for her unstinting support for the Bill, and the many noble Lords—I will not mention them all—who have spoken so passionately throughout its passage. I particularly thank the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, for his unwavering support. I cannot mention every civil servant, but all my officials have been instrumental behind the scenes.

I finish by quoting the words of Dov Forman, the great-grandson of Lily Ebert, a most remarkable Holocaust survivor. His words encapsulate what we want to achieve by creating the new national memorial and learning centre:

“With education comes remembrance—this memorial will give people somewhere to remember and reflect. When we no longer have survivors like Lily among us, this memorial will help to ensure that their experiences are never forgotten. We can create the next generation of witnesses”.


Lily has since sadly passed, in October 2024 at the age of 100. We now need to get this memorial and learning centre built so that we can indeed create the next generation of witnesses. I beg to move.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for his courtesy during the passage of the Bill and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, on her leadership of those of us who felt there were problems with it. I thank all those who pointed out the risks and drawbacks of the choice the Government have made about the location of the learning centre and express a hope that, on reflection, the Government may in time make a different choice.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, one has to congratulate the Minister and the department on their patience and persistence, and indeed perhaps on a record. Rarely can a one-page Bill with three clauses have achieved the potential of doing so much damage to the environment, to local facilities, to restoration and renewal, to security—what a shame that the House did not see fit to follow the wise words of the expert noble Lord, Lord Carlile—as well as damage to the beauty of the locality, to the understanding of antisemitism and Jewish history past and present, to intra-community relations, to the recommendations of the Prime Minister’s 2015 Holocaust Commission, and to the public purse.

Once we are free of the fears of this Government that any alternative is somehow giving in to the antisemitism of which the party was accused a few years ago—that is simply not the case—we will go forward with a planning process that might yet rescue this botched plan. It is not too late to tweak it and build not a monument to death and the Nazis but one dedicated to the need to preserve and understand Jewish life. At a time when a new version of the desire to destroy Jewish life in the Middle East and elsewhere is playing out as we speak, we could have a learning centre that extended to the achievement of the survivors of the Holocaust in building what was a safe haven for Jews: a land of their own. Is it not ironic that this Government are so respectful of 6 million dead but so cavalier about the fate of 7 million of their descendants in Israel right now?

There is indeed much to be learned, not just close to Parliament but inside our debates. We who understand what is at stake will continue to press our case. The fight is not over.