Restoration and Renewal (Report of the Joint Committee)

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

My hon. Friend makes a good point, but I think part of the role of the delivery authority will be to look at the best combination of cost, respect for our parliamentary democracy and, of course, the right solution for this Palace, which is what this debate is all about.

If motion No. 2 is successful, the sponsor board and delivery authority must consider three options: first, full decant; secondly, partial decant with access to one Chamber at all times; and thirdly, full decant with a parliamentary foothold, allowing for parliamentary access during the works, such as to Westminster Hall and Elizabeth Tower. It is important to note that the second motion before the House today does not commit to a final decision. By asking a delivery authority to further evaluate those three options, parliamentarians and the public can be confident that the delivery authority will take into account the risks, costs and benefits of each approach, as well as accommodating the needs of our parliamentary democracy, before recommending its final, preferred, fully costed option in 12 to 18 months’ time. The motion allows those who support the Joint Committee’s recommendations to see them properly stress-tested.

For the clarification of Members, motion No. 2 differs from amendment (b) to motion No. 1 in two key ways. First, the amendment recommends a single option of full decant. The first problem with this is the lack of decant accommodation available to us under the current plans until 2025. The amendment does not allow us to proceed any quicker with a full programme of work than motion No. 2 allows for. The second problem is the fact that the Joint Committee report itself acknowledged that, while recommending full decant, it had not fully costed that option. Amendment (b) therefore does not settle the issue of value for taxpayers’ money.

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

But the problem is that neither motion makes a decision, and in the end this place is here to make decisions on behalf of the nation. It is time we got a grip and made a decision. I do not mind what the decision is in the end, but make a decision we must, surely to God.

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[Pete Wishart]

I will make a bit of progress and give way in a moment.

Surprisingly, no one in my less-than-scientific survey of a few people in Perth and North Perthshire thought there were any admirable qualities in spending billions on a parliamentarians’ palace. I am pretty certain that, even if I went looking for anyone who thought there were, I would not find any in my constituency.

Let me compare and contrast what is happening in this Chamber with what has just been happening in the Scottish Parliament, where we are setting out our budgets. We are allocating billions of pounds to socially useful programmes that will enable our citizenry. What are we doing here? We are talking about spending billions of pounds on a royal palace to accommodate Members of Parliament. Nothing could distinguish better the priorities of these two Parliaments.

I do, however, accept that we have an issue. [Hon. Members: “ Oh really!”] Yes. Because of the decades of prevarication and indecision, this building is practically falling down. The failure of successive Government to face up to their responsibility in looking after this place means we now have a building that could, as people have said, face a catastrophic failure at any time.

The mechanical and electrical engineering systems are already well past their use-by date and the risk of that catastrophic failure rises exponentially every five years. Some of the high-voltage cables in the building are decaying, and fire is an ever-present risk, only compounded by just how easily any fire would spread. Most worryingly, as we have heard from the Deputy Leader of the House and the Leader of the House, there is a substantial amount of asbestos in the building. Mice and other vermin are a common feature, and I have heard that some staff even have names for the mice that they frequently acquaint with on a daily basis. It is not a robin we need in this House, but a flipping big eagle to pick up some of the huge mice that kick about this place. The Palace of Westminster is simply falling down.

The most important aspect that we have to consider is our responsibility for the staff who work in this place. This is a workplace for thousands of people, and we are putting them at significant risk by staying here.

[Chris Bryant]

I sympathise with some of the hon. Gentleman’s argument, but it is simply untrue to say that this building is falling down. It is not. There is work that needs to be done, not least to protect staff and give them a proper place to work in, and to provide decent disabled access, but if we simply let either motion go through, we will be committing more money than if we vote for the amendment in the name of the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee. That is what I fear.

[Pete Wishart]

I have an elegant solution to the difficulties and travails of this House, which is to consider making this beautiful building a tourist attraction for people from all around the world. There are immense development opportunities in this UNESCO world heritage building. Let us design and create a Parliament for the 21st century—one that will be useful for 21st-century parliamentarians—rather than try to shoehorn all this activity into a mock-gothic Victorian tourist attraction. That is what the hon. Gentleman should support this evening, not billions of pounds being spent on some parliamentarians’ palace.

[Chris Bryant]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Pete Wishart]

No, I want to make some progress.

We have a duty of care to the staff and for their wellbeing and safety. It is therefore disappointing that the motion seeks, once again, to kick any future works into touch and to delay the decision. The simple fact is that the decision should have been made a decade ago, not kicked into touch for another Parliament to deal with. The whole story of resolving our difficulties in this House is littered with prevarication and indecision. We will not support any measure that leaves our staff here for a minute longer than is absolutely necessary. We are not prepared to have them continue to be put at risk.

It will not come as any surprise to you, Mr Speaker, or any other Member to hear that I, as a Scottish National party Member, do not share the dewy-eyed affection and nostalgia that some Conservative Members feel towards the Palace. I love this building—it is fantastic. It is one of the truly iconic buildings in the world, and it is a real pleasure and privilege to see this place as I walk into it, but I have to concede that I could probably discharge my responsibilities as a Member of Parliament from somewhere else. I think I would just about manage. On the distant date when all these works may be completed, I and my Scottish colleagues will be well gone from this place. We will be sitting in our own independent Parliament in Scotland, considering the issues that all normal states have to deal with. Probably, when all this is concluded, the first colony on Mars will be thinking about independence.

When I look at this building, its stunning architecture and the condition it is in, I see it as a sad metaphor for Brexitised Britain: dilapidated, falling to bits around our ears, generally unloved and in need of a lot of attention and support. Does not that just sum up where this nation is?

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

I confess to being one of those who holds this building in enormous esteem. There are bits of it I do not particularly like, but I have to say that the experience of walking through Westminster Hall, looking up at the angels, carved in probably the 14th century and supporting the roof, is one of the great joys that I would want every single one of my constituents to be able to experience at some point. It is against that background that I care passionately about what we do.

It is not just that we enjoy being here and fought to be here, because we wanted to come into this building and change the world and this country in the way we think is right according to our particular light; it is that we know we are trustees of this building for future generations. The best political generations in our history are the ones that have taken that responsibility the most seriously. In the early 19th century, they did not do it well and it led to a massive fire in 1834, which destroyed ancient paintings and buildings that had been here since the 13th century and before. My terrible fear is that if we do not take our job as trustees seriously now, regardless of party political advantage or, I say to my SNP friends, of ideological interest, we truly risk losing one of the great treasures of this country.

The problems have already been laid out. As the Chair of the Administration Committee, the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford), said, there is a single 130-year-old drain that could burst at any time. There is a high-pressure steam heating system next to high-voltage electricity cables, with wires that are decaying into flammable dust every day, next to gas pipes, phone cables, broadband cables and running water, all wrapped in asbestos.

To answer the point made by the hon. Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Dr Johnson) about asbestos, about two years ago the Clerk had to ring the Leader of the House to say that part of the central heating system had burst through some of the asbestos around the cabling, which was immediately next to the air conditioning system of the Chamber of the House of Commons. There was a real danger that he would have to close the Chamber and Parliament indefinitely until that was sorted out. The real problem is that we have a central heating system that is elderly, at high pressure and could burst at any time. It normally takes us about two and a half weeks to switch it on because of the fear of its doing that. That is the real problem about asbestos in the building.

[Dr Caroline Johnson]

My point was that we are told that these wires and cables are in tall stacks, which are full of asbestos. We are also told that they are going to burn, but they are clad in asbestos. My point was about the assessment that has been made of the fire protection provided by that asbestos, which we know to be one of the most non-flammable products.

[Chris Bryant]

This is the problem. In many of the spaces we are talking about, which are effectively very narrow chimneys, there is very little room, because they were intended to be ventilation shafts, in essence, but are now so full of generations of heating, electricity and other kinds of cabling that it is impossible to get in there to check. It is even impossible to get in there to check the extent to which the cabling has decayed.

We know that there is asbestos in some places, but we do not know whether there is in others, so of course we have to take precautionary measures. That is the problem; we do not know where all the asbestos is. A lot of it will have to come out because we have to remove other things, not because we are specifically removing the asbestos.

There are long corridors with no fire doors. We have 98 risers in the building and miles of inaccessible and narrow wooden tunnels that would act as funnels for a fire that, I tell you now, would speed through the building faster than most of us in the Chamber could run. We do not meet the national fire safety standards that we impose on other buildings in the country, so we have fire wardens patrolling the building 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Remember the fire at Windsor castle? The major problem was that it spread rapidly because there was no compartmentalisation. The only royal palace in the country that has not had compartmentalisation brought in since that date is this one, which is the most visited by the public. It is a nonsense.

[Mr John Hayes]

The hon. Gentleman is making the measured case that I expected him to, but surely the characteristics he attributes to this building are shared by many great historic buildings. We think of cathedrals, which are widely visited every year and have the same problem with stonework. We think of the great houses that have the same fire risk. Many historic buildings have the same problems. The issue is not those problems, which we of course need to solve; it is how we solve them.

[Chris Bryant]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about big houses; I think he is asking me to advertise my book on the history of the aristocracy, which is in all the good bookshops at the moment. I would simply say to him that nearly every one of the major houses that fell into disrepair in the last 100 years did so as the result of a massive fire. I think we should take a lesson from that, which is that we must be very, very cautious in this building. When that fire comes, I would not want to be a Member who had voted against taking direct, clear action now; I truly would not.

It must surely also be a disgrace that this Parliament, which introduced proper legislation to ensure disabled access in every other public building in the land, has the worst disabled access of any public building in the land. It is almost impossible for somebody with mobility difficulties to get up into the Gallery, although the staff try really hard. On top of that, the building is very dark—it is almost impossible for many people who are partially sighted to see their way around—and we should, as a matter of honour, be putting that right.

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend mentions fires, as a number of hon. Members have done. We have talked about actual fires. Only a few months ago, in my office there was a smell of burning and soot falling from the grates in my ceiling. I phoned the emergency number, but by the time I had reached the door of my office there were fire wardens in the corridor. That is the reality of preventing fire, and happily, so far, it has been successful.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend makes a very important point. As several others have already said, this is not primarily about us; it is about the safety of the thousands of people who come to visit the building, the 8,000 who work in it, and the 15,000 who have passes.

The hon. Member for East Devon (Sir Hugo Swire) was absolutely right to say that it is crazy that great big scaffolding has been put up in the cloisters to make work possible on one of the most beautiful bits of the Palace, one of the other bits that survived the 1834 fire—the cloisters that were put in by Henry VII and then Henry VIII. The problem is that at the moment we simply do not have the capacity and the capability within the House authorities to get those major pieces of work done in the House. That means that parts of the building are falling apart, water is coming in where it should not, and we are degrading a national asset. That is why it is so important, as the right hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin) said, to set up a proper sponsor body and delivery authority to do this properly—to bring in really high-quality staff and to make sure the work is delivered on time and on budget, as we can do in this country.

In all honesty, motion No. 1, if left unamended, says, broadly speaking, “Let’s not do anything in this Parliament.” It is not the long grass; it is the very, very long grass. I believe that would be an utter dereliction of our duty, which is why Historic England, who are, after all, the Government’s own advisers on the built heritage in this country, have said that if we were to go down that route, they would have to put this building on the at- risk register. That is a profoundly shocking thing for us to be told if we are not going to take action.

Motion No. 2 is mildly better. I am a bit disappointed in the Leader of the House that she is not going any further than that motion, because it also means that we refuse to make a clear decision now. It means that we try to set up a sponsor body and a delivery authority, for which we want to get the best people, without giving them a clear direction of travel. It means that they will be repeating the work that was done by the Joint Committee.

We produced our report 16 months ago and it is only now that we are getting the debate, so my bet is that when this sponsor body reports, with the three options that it has looked at, the Government will not want to table the motions. There will be a general election coming up; there will be some issue that has to be sorted out, and the debate will be another two years after that. I say to hon. Members that if they are thinking of voting for motion No. 2, they will have to make this decision all over again in four years’ time, by which time the risk will have increased—and the cost.

That is why I support amendment (b) to motion No. 1. It implements the unanimous recommendations of the Joint Committee and the Public Accounts Committee; it sets up a sponsor body and a delivery authority; and it takes an in principle decision. It is the only way to take an in principle decision today.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I just want to set the record straight, because the hon. Gentleman is attributing inaccuracies to my remarks. Motion No. 2 will ensure that the best combination of urgent action can be taken in a cost-effective way. The delivery authority will come back to this House with a final preferred solution within 12 to 18 months and with proper costings. As for his proposal to go down just one route, his own Joint Committee acknowledged in its report that it had not done the costings properly.

[Chris Bryant]

Well, we disagree, because I know what has happened over the last 10 years. Governments have repeatedly fought shy of bringing motions to the House. I have enormous respect for the Leader of the House. She has worked very hard on this, but as she said to me last week, it may be that somebody else is Leader of the House in future and that person might not be so keen on bringing anything to the House. My guess is that when we get closer to a general election, no Government will want to bring the matter back to the House. Therefore, much as I admire and respect her, I just do not think that her solution is the answer.

I want to say just a few other things. The first is about trying to stay in the building while the work is being done. I appeal to colleagues to think hard about that. We are talking about 10 times as much work happening on a daily basis as is happening now. That is 10 times as many people hammering, drilling, sanding down buildings, moving cabling, bringing in vast amounts of material and all the rest, and 10 times as many portakabins. Earlier today I was on the roof of Westminster Hall, looking at the work being done there. Because people have complained about the noise, the people there are only able to work at night, and guess what that has done to the budget? It has tripled it. When work was being done on the Royal Gallery, the House of Lords said, “We can’t hear ourselves think,” and so decided that the work could be done only at weekends and at night, and guess what? That added £1 million to the work. The truth of the matter is that if we try to stay, we will dramatically increase the cost of the work, and we will be going bananas.

[Tom Tugendhat (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

Talking of which.

[Tom Tugendhat]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point. Does he agree that an emergency decant, should for example we discover something horrible in the woodshed—or rather, in the basement—or should something go wrong with clearing the asbestos, would massively increase the costs of us having to find alternative accommodation?

[Chris Bryant]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, which is why, incidentally, to those who say, “If we ever move out, they’ll never let us back,” I say, “Who is this magical ‘they’ who’s going to prevent us from coming back in?” The truth is that whether we choose to come back will always be a decision for Parliament. If future generations decide that things should be done differently, good luck to them, but we should not make a decision now that makes it impossible for us to protect this building, because—this is precisely the point that the hon. Gentleman made—the most certain way for us to be permanently excluded is to have a catastrophic failure in the building, such as a fire or a flood.

[Mrs Moon]

Before casting their votes tonight, those Members who want to remain should nip into the Library and read sections of “Mr Barry’s War”, in which they will see the absolute chaos when Parliament refused to decant the last time. It was horrendous. It drove Pugin almost mad. We must leave.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; that is a great book and it, too, is available in all good bookshops, although it is not by me.

[Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)]

I am swaying between the amendment that the hon. Gentleman is promoting and motion No. 2. The reason I am drawn more to the motion No. 2 is that I would like us to have the occasional foothold in this place—the occasional use of the Palace in an extended period. Is there any way that the amendment can achieve that?

[Chris Bryant]

“A foothold” is a difficult thing to specify, but some people have said, for instance, that we should keep the Chamber functioning—I guess that is what most people mean. The difficulty with keeping the Chamber running is that the Chamber is not just the Chamber. It is not a hermetically sealed unit; the air conditioning, the heating, the electricity and all the rest of it come from somewhere. The public have to have access through large parts of the building. We would also have to access from somewhere, and it could not just be through some kind of polytunnel. It is actually phenomenally difficult to achieve that.

There was one other option, which was for us to sit in Westminster Hall. I love the idea of sitting in Westminster Hall. The hon. Member for somewhere down in the south-west—the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg)—and I were joint advocates of that. The problem is that the floor is not solid—there are no solid foundations—and we would have to put something inside the roof, which could destroy it, so there are real problems.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Chris Bryant]

I have maybe one small paragraph more, Mr Speaker, which is simply to say that I am very fond of the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), but I disagree with his views on this, because, in the end, they are not in the long-term interests of the Palace of Westminster itself. In particular, the idea of us sitting in Portcullis House, I am afraid, is for the birds. The advice from the security people is that it is simply begging somebody to use the fact that Portcullis House sits on top of the tube station, so I would say to the hon. Gentleman that that is a non-starter.

My final point is that there is only really one proposal on the table that allows us to make a clear decision and to move forward more swiftly, and that is the amendment tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier).

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[Mr John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

There can be a broad measure of agreement that the House needs to be maintained properly. All those who have spoken would acknowledge that work needs to be done, and indeed, that has always been the case. Since William Rufus commissioned the building of Westminster Hall, there have been major refurbishments of the Palace. Geoffrey Chaucer was Clerk of the Works for one of them. After the great fire of 1834—

[Chris Bryant]

The right hon. Gentleman has obviously got my book.

[Mr Hayes]

Indeed.

After the great fire of 1834, there was the major refurbishment—in fact, it was largely a rebuilding of the Palace—that led to the place where we now sit. Buildings of this kind are always hard to maintain and will always require constant maintenance work. This is not a moment; it is a process. It will be an ongoing process whatever decision we take tonight. Let me make my case as quickly as I can—particularly given your advice, Mr Speaker.

I could make this case on cost grounds. Indeed the report produced by the Leader of the House is very honest about that. The report heavily qualifies the estimates therein. It says that there is significantly more work to be done by professionals before budgets can be set and the accounts therefore made certain. We are not absolutely certain what the costs of the decant would be, nor are we absolutely certain what the costs of staying here would be. But what I think we can say, from all of our experience and intuition, is that they are likely to be considerably greater than the provisional costs that we have now. Every building project I have ever known has run over budget and over time.

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[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I want to go back to this 16 and a half feet—16ft 5in to be precise. When we sat on the Committee, we looked at and studied the report from Deloitte, we took evidence from experts, we sat for hours and we came to a conclusion based on the possibility that an inexpensive temporary Chamber could be put in Richmond House. That was fundamental to what we concluded. It turns out that that was wrong—that actually the measurements were out and therefore it would not work. That seems to me to undermine all that we tried to do. If the people responsible could not even measure a courtyard, how could they possibly get the figures right on the overall proposals that were being made? I regret that the work that we did and the conclusions that we drew have been fatally undermined by the fact that the figures we were provided with on an essential basis for our conclusion were wrong.

[Chris Bryant]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I will not on this occasion because time is so limited. I do apologise. I always like to give way, but I think that I had better not on this occasion.

That troubles me. The other thing that troubled me throughout the Committee process was that we never looked at the figures on the basis of a discounted cash flow, and so the assumption that was made was that a pound spent in 40 years’ time had exactly the same value as a pound spent tomorrow. That is incorrect. A pound spent in 40 years’ time obviously has a lesser value. When we consulted the Comptroller and Auditor General about that, he said in evidence that that was not how Government projects were done: Government projects look at the economic return that one gets on the expenditure, and not on the discounted value of money that one may spend in future. However, this is not a project that reveals a return; it is not an investment in that sense, but a cost. Therefore we need to look at the discounted cost, at which point the remaining in becomes the cheapest option by a considerable margin. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) may shout no, but that is what the figures show when we apply a sensible discount rate.

The other thing that has concerned me throughout this process is that we are being too precious and we are assuming that we will not accept any modest inconvenience. The hon. Member for Rhondda said that costs go up because work has to be done at night. We have to accept that, in this process of saving this building and ensuring that we are here, there may be some modest inconvenience to Members of Parliament. Are we really so precious that there must never even be the slightest sound of a hammer bashing a nail into a piece of wood? Are our ears so sensitive that we cannot bear that strain upon them?

I, along with the hon. Member for Rhondda, was extremely keen that we should sit in Westminster Hall, because Westminster Hall is not part of the main restoration and renewal project; it is outside it. The argument that we got against Westminster Hall was the most negative naysaying approach that we could have had—that the roof put up by Richard II would fall upon our heads if we had a little bit of heating in there. The naysayers wanted to put us in a glass pod—a temperature-controlled pod to ensure that we were kept at the perfect temperature, boiled to the right level in Fahrenheit or centigrade, whichever you prefer. This is a building that has survived for 800 years, not a hot air heating system. Once they said it was a glass pod, the glass pod was then too heavy for the floor. Whatever way we look at it, they were naysayers. It seems to me that we could have sat there in our overcoats, as that would have solved the problem in the winter. And in the summer, some hon. Members more racy than I am might have felt it possible to take off their jackets. It seems to me that there is an easy, affordable solution whereby we maintain a Chamber in our historic residence. That is what we should do and that is what we should vote for.