Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster

Damian Hinds Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

These Houses of Parliament are falling apart faster than they can be fixed. All the old fire, heating, drainage, mechanical and electrical systems need replacing, ditto the sewage system, which dates back to 1888, and there is asbestos throughout. The cost of maintenance projects and ongoing work has doubled in three years to £127 million a year.

The fire at Notre-Dame in 2019 reminds us of the importance of protecting the world’s most treasured and symbolic historic buildings. Our 150-year-old building has a floor plan the size of 16 football pitches, with 1,100 rooms, 100 staircases, three miles of passageways, four floors and 65 different levels. It houses 11,000 historic artefacts. Restoring this place is an enormous undertaking. It is also a duty—a legal duty for us, but a moral duty too, to protect this heritage asset and our liberal democratic institutions.

What it is not is something that will benefit Members here today. We do not yet know quite how long the project will take—that will come in the full plan that will come before the House in early 2023—but we do know that it will be a substantial period of time, completing sometime in the 2030s. MPs average 13 or 14 years’ service, and the average current MP has already done six of those, so the sobering truth is that, though many colleagues here will be around during the most disruptive times of the restoration, most of us will not be here when it is finished. None the less, as the shadow Leader of the House said, it falls to this generation of parliamentarians to ensure that the necessary work gets done and that we secure the future of our Parliament, and the building that houses it, one of the free world’s most iconic.

As MPs, we are answerable to our constituents. This is their Parliament; we are just passing through. Especially at this time of enormous economic and fiscal strain, we are acutely conscious of the need for best value. Given all that had changed since the publication of the independent options appraisal in 2014 and the Joint Committee report in 2016, to which the Leader of the House referred, it was right to look again at the plans. The recent strategic review concluded that vacating the building while works take place remains the best approach in terms of both time and cost, but that we can reduce the length of time away, with more done before MPs and peers leave through a more phased approach and possibly through the use of a cofferdam for access to the works from the river.

On the question of where to relocate during the works, that review looked at—or, in many cases, relooked at—41 different options in 20 different locations. When we talk about relocating, we tend to think first about this debating Chamber, but the footprint just of the Committee rooms, for example, is about four times the size of this debating Chamber and these two Lobbies, let alone the displaced office space. All told, on my rough calculation—colleagues are welcome to check this—the total space used by the Commons in the Palace of Westminster is 47 times the space of this Chamber. It is the combination of the need for a lot of space with the huge premium there is on being within the existing secure perimeter, for all sorts of clear reasons, that points to Richmond House, possibly in combination with other parts of what is known as the Northern Estate, which is better known to colleagues as Norman Shaw North and South and the other buildings in that part of the estate.

There are trade-offs and compromises that could be made to make the decant phase cost less and, in the time to come, we have to focus sharply on those. I stress that we are talking here about a temporary period during the works. Probably the three biggest compromises that could be made to reduce costs are, first, accepting having a slightly smaller Chamber and/or reconfiguring the voting Lobby, because although the Chamber may be a small fraction of the overall space requirement, its dimensions as a single room are a big constraining factor in the relocation; secondly, a willingness, to a degree, to rearrange our Committee business and other business to reduce the amount of space requirement; and thirdly, having fewer MPs’ staff having to be accommodated on the estate itself. Each of those three things—by the way, there will be others—would give more flexibility to the decant and so could make the temporary siting less costly. It will be vital over the coming months to hear further from colleagues on such compromises that could be made to reduce cost.

Notwithstanding the need to vacate, in the next phase, towards the full plan and business case, the programme will also examine the possibility of some continued presence —I think my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House referred to it as a maintained presence. Essentially, it is the question: could we keep this Chamber operating here during the works, even with other Commons functions being relocated elsewhere within the secure perimeter? If that were possible, my personal view is that it would be very valuable, because it would minimise the disruption to our liberal democratic institutions. But it is clearly not without risk or challenge, given some of the safety considerations, with the flow of large numbers of people, particularly when there is a Division, and as MPs, we must never forget that we are a relatively small minority of the people who work in these buildings. There are also all the other functions that today go with the operation of the Chamber, such as the Table Office, the Vote Office and so on. It is not guaranteed to be possible, but it is important to investigate thoroughly any possibility. We will have to look at the relative cost of it and the timings, as against a full decant and all the practicalities.

The cost of the decant is one thing. A much bigger consideration is the cost of the project itself—the thing we are decanting for. Here, again, there are choices, trade-offs and compromises. As my right hon. Friend said, it is a question of priorities. This project is called restoration and renewal, and clearly there is a balance between those two things. We must restore, but how much renewal is right for taxpayer value in aspects such as visitor access or the education function? In the approach towards the full business case, the programme will be working up a bare minimum option—what is essential to arrest the decay of the buildings—but also conducting value analysis in 14 categories, from logistics operations to environmental and net zero aims to visitor facilities, to see where it may make sense from a value perspective to go beyond that minimum.

Again, it is vital to hear from colleagues on these matters and for us all to consider that they do involve trade-offs. There are many things that we may want to see for the future of the seat of our democracy, but we have to consider their cost, what is essential and what can be done without. It is too easy to say, “We want X, Y and Z, and we want the thing to come in at the lowest possible cost.” Ultimately, this comes down to specifics, not generalities, and making physical trade-offs.

Debates such as this are one way—and an important way—for Members to make their points, and there will be a range of other channels over the next few months for engagement with colleagues on these important questions. Four of us in the House sit on the Sponsor Body board. We will hear shortly from the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) and the right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami). My hon. Friend the Member for Blyth Valley (Ian Levy) also sits on the board; he apologises for being unable to be here, as he is sitting on a Bill Committee. We are keen to hear from all colleagues on their views.

In the main, it will not be us who will see the end results of restoration and renewal, but many colleagues here today will operate in a time of significant change and disruption, and we need to ensure that MPs are still able properly and fully to serve their constituents and scrutinise Government throughout that time. We need to ensure that this centre of our nation’s democracy and symbol of democracy for the world is restored for future generations. A decision has been dodged repeatedly over the years, and that has made this more expensive today than it would have been. If we dodge it again, it will become more costly again. The most cost-effective thing to do is to act, and now is the time we must ensure that it is done at the best possible value.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

There is a lot of what the right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) said that I agree with. Let us get on with it. Let us come together in this. I commend both the Leader of the House for his approach and his speech and the spokesperson for the Sponsor Body, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds). They both spoke in a very outgoing, moderate and sensible way.

This is not a debate between decant and not decant. It is not a debate with, on one side, pragmatic modernisers who want to do what is right and, on the other side, stuffy traditionalists who just care about staying in a Palace that they love. It is far more complex than that. So it is not a debate about decant or not decant—it is about how we get on with the job of restoring this Palace and not having a gold-plate operation. That is what I want to address my arguments towards.

I have to deal, in that regard, with the present proposal—the Northern Estate programme as it is. This is the entire demolition of Richmond House, and this is where I follow what the right hon. Gentleman just said; I would argue that it is financially wasteful, environmentally unsound and not necessary.

Let me look at this in a bit more detail and go back to the original Joint Committee report, which my right hon. Friend the Leader of the House signed. It said that

“a temporary Chamber could be established in its”—

that is, Richmond House’s—

“inner courtyard and the rest of the House of Commons’ core operations could be consolidated in and around Portcullis House and the Northern Estate”.

The Northern Estate programme later found that measurements of the Commons Chamber, including the exact footprint of Division Lobbies with the oriel bay windows, would not fit in the courtyard, so the Northern Estate programme claims that this requires the entire grade II* listed building to be demolished, except for its façade, and for total replacement with a new permanent building.

On 31 January 2018, the Leader of the House said that

“the conclusion that we came to, preliminarily favouring a complete decant, was based on the assumption that a temporary Chamber could be put up in Richmond House.”—[Official Report, 31 January 2018; Vol. 635, c. 885.]

Demolition of Richmond House is a completely different cost basis and I, for one, would not have come to that conclusion, had we known the true picture. The possibility of demolishing Richmond House is not mentioned at all in the Joint Committee report.

[Damian Hinds]

My right hon. Friend is right, of course, about the historical sequence, but I hope that it is of some reassurance if I tell him that, since I have been involved in the Sponsor Body, I can honestly say that I have not met a single person, either in this House or on the restoration and renewal programme, who now believes that it is desirable to make the full demolition of Richmond House that he alludes to. We have to cut our cloth and, as I said in my remarks—and indeed, as the right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami) just said—we have to work within what we have, and we need to work out what compromises we need in order to do that.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

That is extremely helpful because, as I said, I have to work with what we have at the moment, and from what the spokesperson for the Sponsor Body now says, we seem to have moved on from the demolition of Richmond House. This will be of enormous comfort to the heritage organisations such as SAVE, with which I have been working very closely. If we are looking at a grade II* listed building, even the lowest level of listing is defined as

“warranting every effort to preserve”

these buildings—that is according to Historic England—and Richmond House is above that. It was, of course, one of the most important public buildings created in the 1980s.

I can cut short my speech, because I appear to be on a bit of a winning streak. I do not really need to quote all the various points that have been made by numerous distinguished architects and historic buildings organisations in favour of Richmond House, which was put up only 30 years ago. Of course, demolishing it would be environmentally unsound.