Charging for Access to Parliament

Duncan Hames Excerpts

Thursday 15th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Nadine Dorries (Mid Bedfordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) on bringing this debate to the House. He seems to have developed a trend and penchant for securing debates that get everybody very excited and hit right on the nerve the issues we want to talk about.

Everybody has said what needs to be said, so I will make only a couple of short, substantive points. I visited years 3 and 4 in a school in my constituency recently. A teacher asked the pupils to prepare questions for when I spoke to the class and to draw pictures of what they thought was my job as an MP. Almost every single picture contained Big Ben, and almost all the pupils thought I worked in Big Ben—that was my job. This charge will affect schoolchildren. Any barrier that we put in the way of schoolchildren coming to the House of Commons to learn about what we do and about democracy and to visit Big Ben is a mistake. We should not be doing anything to prohibit school parties and schoolchildren from coming here.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harlow said that he always wanted to be an MP. Anyone who has known him for many years, as I have, will know that that is true. Since he got here, he has never stopped talking about how he always wanted to be an MP. This place inspires schoolchildren.

[Duncan Hames (Chippenham) (LD)]

Is the hon. Lady aware that last year 950,000 people visited the Houses of Parliament without taking part in a Clock Tower tour? Clearly none of them was deterred from visiting Parliament by not taking part in a tour.

[Nadine Dorries]

I take the hon. Gentleman’s point, but I want to keep to the substantive points, as we are down to a five-minute limit.

As everybody has said, Big Ben is owned by the people—the taxpayers. It is their Big Ben, not ours. It is not ours to make such a decision. Richard Branson owns Virgin. No one says to him, “You have to pay to get on your planes”—I should mention, for all the twitterers, that I have received that comment from Twitter. The people own Big Ben, and they should not be charged to visit it. Just as they own the House of Commons, they should not be prohibited from seeing their MPs working in their Committees. People should be not be barred from going up into the Public Gallery, or charged for doing so, to watch what takes place in the Chamber; nor should they be charged to visit Big Ben, because it is all the same. There is the option—I am sure that there must be a way round—of saying that UK taxpayers should not be charged to visit Big Ben. There must be a way of pre-booking tours from overseas where a charge would apply. That would be perfectly reasonable. There must be a way of administering that.

Let me turn to waste in general, which many Members have mentioned. In my previous life, before I became a Member of Parliament, I worked for organisations such as SmithKline Beecham, Pfizer, Shell and Coca Cola-Schweppes. All those organisations, along with many other big corporations, had subsidised canteens and restaurants. The reason they were subsidised was that the overhead costs of the building had been met, so there were no losses from food sales. We have a captive audience in this place for meals in the restaurant from 8 o’clock in the morning, sometimes to midnight, with no overhead or infrastructural charges. Why do the restaurants in this place not make a profit, when they have a captive audience, very long hours and no overhead charges? It must be due to labour costs being too expensive, management being overburdened by costs and inefficiency. If there is inefficiency and money being wasted in this place, it is down to the managers, the Commission and others who are paid to do this work to find out where that waste is. We should not be saying, “Let’s plug the gap by charging people to go up Big Ben,” but then throwing good money after bad; rather, it is about finding out where there is waste at the moment, and there is indeed gross inefficiency and waste.

Those are the only points that I wanted to make. There is huge waste, and we should not be charging British taxpayers to go up what is their own property.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon).

I first visited this great Palace of Westminster in the summer of 1976, at the age of 11. It was part of a school visit. My parents were not particularly well off; we could not afford a foreign trip, so we came and visited all the London sights, one of which was the Palace of Westminster. The Palace of Westminster, including Big Ben, has been intrinsic to our national Parliament—some may call it the mother of Parliaments—for 150 years. It was Sir Giles Gilbert Scott who said:

“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

Ever since William Rufus built the great hall in 1099, a Parliament has existed on this site. In 2008 Big Ben was voted the most popular UK landmark, and this debate is very much about that. This is not an administrative housekeeping issue; this is about setting a precedent. I believe that the public, who have already paid their taxes—as people have done over the hundreds of years there has been a Parliament here—should not be charged twice to visit a place that is theirs. The influence, power and discretion that we exercise here is done on the basis of a leasehold in the name of the people we represent. They ultimately own these buildings, and we are responsible and accountable to them.

That leads me on to the discussion that we have had today—thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon), who secured this debate—on the antediluvian, opaque nature of the governance of this place, and on the Commission and the Management Board in particular. I was never consulted on the closure of Bellamy’s bar in order to create a crèche, or on the closure of Annie’s bar. I have not been consulted on the alternative proposals on sitting days, on early-day motions or on the duplication of administration and paperwork in the House, all of which should be presented to us. We really need to have a proper debate on all that.

Are the House of Commons and the House of Lords really to become a kind of glorified Harry Potter-esque theme park? In this, the 200th year since Dickens’s birth, are we really so focused on taking a Dickensian, “Mr Gradgrind” approach that we must destroy the basic tenet that the people of this country who pay taxes should have free access to all the public parts of the precincts of the Palace of Westminster?

[Duncan Hames]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Jackson]

I will not give way, if the hon. Gentleman will forgive me.

We must keep that access free, because it sends an important message. If we do not, we could find that only the wealthy, the well connected and businesses will have access to the mother of Parliaments. That would be a sad day, and a tragedy for democracy. It would further undermine people’s faith and trust in us. Let us imagine that a husband and wife and their two children get on the train in my constituency of Peterborough and pay £90 return each to come to London. Why should they have to pay £15 each to visit the Clock Tower? Why should we charge them an extra tax to visit part of the political and historical heritage of this country, one of the most famous buildings in the world? I do not believe that that would be right.

We need to explore the governance that has led to this proposal, because it has not involved ordinary elected Members. This feels like the script for “The Da Vinci Code”, because it is not open and transparent; far from it. I also reject the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (John Thurso). His remarks have been erudite and eloquent, as ever, but I nevertheless smell an establishment stitch-up.