Restoration and Renewal

Debate between Chris Bryant and Meg Hillier

Thursday 16th July 2020 Commons Chamber

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

It is always a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), but I do rail a little against his comment about group-think. If I remember rightly, there was a group-think that we must stay here come what may, until we had a vote— I remember it very well—on 31 January 2018, when the House decided that the best option was to work up one option in detail and move out.

As the right hon. Gentleman said—he is an illustrious predecessor of mine as Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, and I am delighted to be here today with the deputy Chair, the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown)—we do, all of us, value spending and watch how taxpayers’ money is spent. It is not our money that is being spent on this place, nor is it our place. It is the nation’s and the world’s: it is a UNESCO world heritage site.

The hon. Member for Harwich and North Essex (Sir Bernard Jenkin) talked about what makes big projects work. We know that there are many multiple projects within this big project—everything from how the stone masonry will be dealt with to the education centre, how the archives will be stored and the wood carvings, let alone all the mechanical and technical work that goes on. However, the challenge of a major project is to bring all those together and make sure that each is delivered in a time that means the others can carry on.

We therefore see the need for integration, and I refer to the comments by my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood) about the rail system. The integration of our rail system has been one of the big problems about delivering such projects. We can deliver the tracks, the trains and the signalling, but if they do not work altogether at the same time, passengers do not get a benefit. That is the challenge, and that is why we set up the Sponsor Body, after a lot of work by a number of us.

It is interesting how this House has divided today between those who have been very heavily involved in meetings, discussions and papers on this project and, hearteningly, a lot of new Members who have probably had less time to get into the subject. I hope that they have been listening carefully to those of us who have been very closely invested in this project.

The project will cost money, but it is not an either/or. On the idea that we should not spend money on a place that everybody who has spoken so far agrees is a huge fire risk and a huge health and safety risk, that money will not be available to spend on other things. Under UNESCO rules, as the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling) highlighted, the Treasury is responsible within the Government for paying for this project.I have checked this out, and the Treasury is ultimately responsible for making sure that this place does not crumble and for maintaining it to UNESCO standards. It is vital that that work is done. As I say, fire is a real risk, and there is an important question here for the Leader of the House about who is ultimately responsible for the health and safety of all who work here and all who visit here.

I disagree with the right hon. Member for Gainsborough again on the point about the visitors who would come here if we did it in parts. I would not ask schoolchildren from Hackney to come to this building if we were ripping out asbestos and there were building works going on. I would not expect my staff or the staff of this House to come here. I hope that the Leader of the House is taking that very seriously. Has he been talking to the trade unions and staff representatives, whom I have had the privilege to meet on a number of issues, and who are very thoughtful and considerate? They love this place, but they want people to be safe, just as I hope we do.

Value for money is absolutely vital, which is another reason we wrote in the role of the National Audit Office, to get it involved now, before any work is done. One thing I have been trying to promote as a member of the Public Accounts Committee—I put the implication out there, although there is only one Government Minister present—is to do more looking at projects before they go wrong, ensuring that the assurances and the methodologies are in place. We need to ensure that the Sponsor Body is set up well to do its job and to hold the Delivery Authority to account for whatever is ultimately delivered.

But how much longer? We have been waiting a long time for this. Some have talked about 2013, some about 2015, 2016 or 2018, but it is 40 years, really, that we have been having to look at this. The amount of money and time spent on patching this place up is no longer justifiable. It is still taxpayers’ money; we just do not see the big tag. Let us not kid ourselves that by avoiding doing it in one hit as a major project—actually, this building is a major project whichever way you cut it up—we will save money. That is a myth. Obviously, the full figures have to be worked up, but we would still be spending millions and millions.

Let us take the risers with some of the electrical and other facilities in them. For work to be done to take asbestos out, all that has to be removed and rebuilt outside the building, while ensuring that the connections are not lost. Then the asbestos is removed in roughly half-hour slots by someone in asbestos gear. It takes more than a year and costs multi-millions of pounds to do each one. There are contractors rubbing their hands with glee as we keep dodging the decision about getting on with this. A lot of people are making a lot of money out of the taxpayer’s pockets—our constituents’ pockets—and we need to get on with this quickly.

We need to be careful about the smoke and mirrors around whether there should be an exact replica of the Chamber in Richmond House. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant); I remember that there was a very loud cacophony of voices here saying, “We will not consider leaving this Chamber unless we have an exact replica.” I am not wedded to an exact replica. I can do my job pretty much anywhere. I do not need this Chamber. I love this Chamber; it is a great place to debate, it is very atmospheric and it provides a lot of opportunities for us to get our constituents’ points of view across. But we do not need to have it precisely like this. We can compromise, as the past few weeks have shown. We have adapted very well.

We need to be aware, as well, of the smoke and mirrors from No. 10 Downing Street’s suddenly announcing the suggestion of a move to York. I put the move to York for the House of Lords in the same category as the bridge to Northern Ireland or the estuary airport.

[Chris Bryant]

Or the garden bridge.

[Meg Hillier]

Or the garden bridge, indeed. Only £30 million of taxpayers’ money went through the Department for Transport to the garden bridge, so that was a relatively cheap proposal by the current Prime Minister. We need to be careful: it is very easy, and very much a tactic of the current incumbent at No. 10, the right hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip (Boris Johnson), to throw out a random thought and let everyone talk about that, and meanwhile we stop talking about the real issue: that this place needs to be sorted, and it needs to be sorted now.

I turn to the Leader of the House again and ask him who is responsible if someone gets injured or hurt. Who would be responsible for asbestos poisoning in this place? I think it would end up being the Clerk of the House and the corporate body of the House of Commons. That means that the Leader of the House is sitting there and everyone is waiting for the musical chairs to stop, hoping that they will not be standing at the moment when a disaster happens in this House.

Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme

Debate between Chris Bryant and Meg Hillier

Tuesday 23rd June 2020 Commons Chamber

[Chris Bryant]

I think it will, but that will obviously depend on the quality of the people that we appoint to it. I very much hope not only that the House will go through a thorough process to ensure that we get good people, but that good people around the country will seriously consider taking on this role, because it will probably be a fairly thankless task. We need to ensure that we have the right people.

I warmly commend the Leader of the House on bringing forward his motions today and on the way he has approached today’s debate and the discussions that have taken place over recent days. I should say, as Chair of the Standards Committee, that I have deliberately not spoken to any complainants, because it is perfectly possible that something might be coming to my Committee, and it would have been inappropriate for me to have done so. I have only one issue with the Leader of the House, which is about the one-hour debate, as he knows—hence the amendment that I have tabled. His motion 6 is effectively a sort of self-denying ordinance. It sort of says, “There are lots of things that you will not be able to address in the debate”, and I commend him for tabling it, but in the end you cannot be half-chaste. It is a bit like when you decide to give up chocolate for Lent. You cannot decide on Ash Wednesday to stock the fridge with chocolate, because that shows that you have not really decided that you are going to give up chocolate for Lent.

The point about a self-denying ordinance is that it has to be absolute, and in this case we have to declare an absolute self-denying ordinance in relation to debating a decision that has already been reached by an independent body, that has an appellate process within it, where all the evidence has been considered, where both sides of the argument have an equal opportunity to put their case, and where both sides have equal forces. That is not the case in a debate in the House of Commons, and many complainants would be frightened that they would be re-victimised—to use the word that was just used by the former Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire—and that they would be put through a second ordeal. Even words that the Speaker might allow, because they did not understand that it was a subtle way of getting a dig in, could be terribly, terribly wounding to an individual who had made a complaint. It is terribly easy in this small world to reveal what is meant to be confidential.

[Meg Hillier]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Chris Bryant]

I will not, if she does not mind, because I have very little time and I know others want to speak.

It is important that there is equality of forces when it comes to a process such as this, and I say to those who worry that non-elected people will be making decisions about whether somebody can be suspended or expelled from the House that that is already true. It is already true, for instance, of an election court, a criminal court that decides to give somebody a sentence of more than 12 months or, I think, a bankruptcy court.

I fully understand that we are making a very significant change to our constitutional process, but my amendment would simply mean that the motions would be taken forthwith. In 1910, Asquith was absolutely blind drunk at the Dispatch Box and nobody ever knew about it. Churchill wrote home to his wife Clemmie that it was

“only the persistent freemasonry of the House of Commons”

that meant it never became a scandal. That is the fear that many complainants would have. We must not have a debate.