Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill (First sitting)

David Jones Excerpts

Committee Debate: 1st sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 4th June 2019 Public Bill Committees

[Meg Hillier]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We need to start now and make it a mission of this place to set a tone for how other large projects should be run, to ensure that we support our thriving and exceptional small business sector, which, even with Government attempts to try to send more money in its direction, sometimes still feels cut out of large Government contracts, which are not broken down to a small enough scale. I hope the Minister will take that on board.

I want to comment on the education centre. The hon. Member for Hertford and Stortford suggested an elegant manuscript amendment—I am not sure what the procedure would be, Sir Gary, or whether that would be accepted—but the general principle raised by my hon. Friend the Member for City of Chester is right. We must not forget that the current education centre is a temporary building. It had planning permission only for a decade, it did not get built straightaway, and where it is now will have to be a space for heavy plant, so that building will be gone during—if not before—the restoration.

With the prospect of a new temporary Chamber or facility in the northern estate, there is every opportunity to plan in education from day one. It should not be an optional extra. I am often in and out of that building with schoolchildren from Hackney South and Shoreditch—it is very close by and easy to get here—and the building has had a major impact in helping them to develop their political understanding and skills. I will have plenty of successors from Hackney South and Shoreditch, and there will be heavy competition when I hang up my shoes and move on, because they have been inspired by coming here.

I pay tribute to the education team. In fact, I have also looked at their value for money, and pound for pound they provide extremely good value for money in what they deliver. We must ensure that education is a definite part of the future, not an optional extra. The danger is, if there is a budget problem—with proper audit we hope there will not be, and we will consider audit later—it could be dropped if we are not careful. I hope the Minister agrees that it needs to be written in more firmly. The Government did not accept points on this in the Joint Committee’s report, but I hope that, in the light of the debate, the Minister, who is a reasonable fellow, will consider a change of heart. In the end, it does not affect Government; it affects this House, this country and all the young people of the UK who come through it in future.

[Mr David Jones (Clwyd West) (Con)]

I want to speak briefly about amendment 14 in the name of the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch, with whom I served on the Joint Committee. The amendment is on all fours with the Joint Committee’s conclusions. She is right that the restoration and renewal of the Houses of Parliament will be one of the biggest and most important public works projects in the country, and it should, as the Joint Committee’s report mentions, emulate what was done for other large public works. She mentioned the Olympic park, and its aquatic centre was partly constructed by Welsh companies. Similarly, when Heathrow had two terminals either constructed or reconstructed recently, its owners went out of their way to ensure that companies throughout the country benefited from such large-scale public work. Again, I was pleased to see that at Heathrow a number of Welsh companies had the opportunity to contribute.

The restoration of this Palace will require a huge number of diverse skills, which may already be possessed right across the country. It is important that the Government remember that this is the restoration of our national Parliament building, so it is entirely appropriate that each and every part of the United Kingdom should have the opportunity to benefit.

The hon. Lady’s amendment accords entirely with the Joint Committee’s conclusions, and I very much hope the Government recognise that this is an issue for this House rather than for them. There is much support across the House for the proposition that companies right across the United Kingdom should have the opportunity to tender for the work and benefit from it, with skills and businesses created that will endure long after the restoration of the Palace of Westminster has been completed. I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to give serious consideration to the amendment.

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[Chris Bryant]

I wholeheartedly support the fact that the Bill is finally before Committee, and regret that it has taken so many years, not only under this Government, but under previous Governments, to get to this point. I wholeheartedly support the idea in the clause of handing the work over to a Sponsor Body, which in turn has an arm’s length body—a Delivery Authority—because that is probably the only way to stop us lot from continually meddling with the project.

Every building contractor always says that they want a good client. A good client could mean one of two things. Either it is someone who continuously changes their mind about what they want, which means that the price goes up and up—that is good for one end of the equation—or it is someone who makes up their mind at the beginning, decides what they want and sticks with it right through to the end, and ends up with a project delivered on time and on budget.

I desperately hope that we will end up as the latter and not the former. I fear that we, both individually and as a House, may find it far too tempting to keep on meddling with the project, which is why it is really important that we do it this way. If someone ever wanted to know why handing over to an arm’s length body is particularly important, they would simply have to look at what happened after the fire in 1834. Caroline Shenton’s book on that is masterful in showing how terrible self-opinionated and self-aggrandising MPs can be, of which I am glad to be a fine example.

I warmly congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Hackney South and Shoreditch and for City of Chester on their amendments, which are important for different reasons. I will address only amendment 14. I completely agree that, in delivering the work, which will be one of the most important infrastructure projects in the country for many decades, costing many billions of pounds, we need to ensure that there is a benefit for every part of the country. I am not denigrating the pros—I think it important that the project goes ahead for all sorts of different reasons, which have been referred to elsewhere.

However, the single biggest difficulty will be having enough people with the skills to be able to do the work. I simply do not think that, if we just hope that that will happen, these people will materialise from nowhere. I am not going to use the B-word in this debate, but I simply note that the building industry in this country has been heavily dependent over the past 15 years on workers from other countries in the European Union. We will want to make sure that we still have access to those people in future.

The bigger point is that when Wembley was rebuilt, large numbers of workers from the Rhondda worked on the project. Crossrail has large numbers of people who travel up every week. They come up very early on a Monday morning and go back on a Thursday evening. I want to make sure that that happens on this project as well, but that means several things.

First, some kind of parliamentary building academy is needed in many different parts of the country to make sure that we have the specific skills that we need for this project, especially considering the fact that Buckingham Palace will be going through a similar project at a similar time. Some of the skills that we will need simply do not exist in the main in this country any longer. If you want somebody to build a drystone wall—we will not need them here—you will pay over the odds because very few people now have that skill and it will take a long time to get 100 metres done, unlike 100 years ago. [Interruption.] I am not sure whether the right hon. Member for Clwyd West is offering to come and mend my drystone wall for me, not that I have got one.

[Mr Jones]

I can assure the hon. Gentleman that there are any number of drystone walls in north Wales.

[Chris Bryant]

They are not very useful for this project, but there may be stonemasonry skills that could be very important for this building. It is interesting that the recent work on the cast-iron roofs and the stone courtyards has drawn in pretty much all the skilled labour in this field in the country. If we are to deliver this project on time and move out in 2026 to 2027, we will have to train people by that time. That is why the amendment in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch is as important as any other tabled today.

My final point on the clause relates to the education centre. One of the problems is not only that the building has to come down in a couple of years—it has permission for only 10 years and that piece of land will probably be a major part of the building site that will be needed for the project—but that Victoria Tower is no longer fit for purpose for the Archives centre. The photography room in the Archives centre has never worked, which is why a lot of the really valuable photographs are now in danger of decaying—because they are a fugitive technology. We are not keeping the historic rolls well. They are in the right order, but they are not kept separately, which is why they are jumbled on top of one another.

All that is a good reason why there must be a serious legacy at the end of this project. I very much hope that that is an education centre, which retains the Archives here on site so that people from our constituencies and from around the world can fully understand how democracy has been advanced on this site since 1258.

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[Kevin Foster]

We would be happy to take this away and look at how we can provide further reassurance to Members. The intention is that the Delivery Authority will look for work across the United Kingdom, but I am afraid that if the amendment is pressed to a Division, the Government will have to resist it at this stage, despite the fact that we all seem to have the same objective.

Things such as the yearly audit of the works will mean that the Delivery Authority remains accountable to Parliament, and parliamentary members will be on it. There will be appropriate discussion to be had about exactly how they face questions and how they can be held to account on a day-to-day basis, including by the Public Accounts Committee, which I cannot believe for one minute will not take the opportunity of regular reports and examinations of how the authority is spreading its work, contracting and making sure that this a project for the entire Union.

[Mr Jones]

I have heard what my hon. Friend has to say, but as he will know, subsection (4) provides steers as to how the Sponsor Body shall exercise its functions. If my hon. Friend is not willing to allow the amendment, is he prepared to consider, maybe on Report, moving this provision into subsection (4), so that the Sponsor Body has to have regard to the need to spread the work around the United Kingdom? That compromise may be of assistance.

[Kevin Foster]

I thank my right hon. Friend for his suggestion. Given that it is constructive, I would be quite happy to offer to do that. We could look at this, perhaps on Report, if an amendment was brought forward. Again, if Members wish to work with Parliamentary Counsel to deliver something, we will be happy to consider that and to see if we can reach an appropriate compromise on Report and insert it. However, the way my right hon. Friend suggests may be a better option.