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

Debate between David Jones and Chris Bryant

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

[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.