Restoration and Renewal

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2020 Commons Chamber

[Valerie Vaz]

I am a lot of things but I am not a prophet and I cannot see into the future. I cannot see into the minds of the Sponsor Body, much as I would like to, because I am sure I would be of great help to the House. I am just coming on to that in a second.

There is the challenge panel, which is interesting. I have a list of the hon. Members and various people on the challenge panel, but I cannot see on there a single member from the Opposition parties. We have a strategic adviser to the Prime Minister and various other people, but I cannot see where Opposition Members—any of the Opposition—can have their view heard on the challenge panel. It is good that Sir David Higgins is on there, because he ran a very successful campaign to deliver the Olympics. I had the privilege of interviewing him when I was on the House Governance Committee and I know that he is very conscious of how to have an end to a project. He talked about Gantt charts and proper schedules. It was different with the Olympic Delivery Authority because there was an end date, but I am sure the Sponsor Body can come to some conclusion on how we come to the end of the project.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am extremely grateful to the right hon. Lady for giving way. Is not the important point about the exchange that has just taken place that the Sponsor Body should be completely free to come up with a number of totally good options, from full decant to no decant at all, and then, as a result of that, come up with a properly costed project that Parliament can either accept or reject in a vote in 2022?

[Valerie Vaz]

As with any body of the House, the Sponsor Body will listen to what hon. Members say in the debate today and make up its own mind. I cannot tell it what to do. I do not even have a voice on the Sponsor Body, but other people do and, as they have set out very clearly, they will listen to hon. Members’ views until 7 August. Right hon. and hon. Members should feed into that.

The review will enable us to continue with progress ,and the Sponsor Body is in the process of updating the costings. The costings were undertaken some time ago, so it is right that it should do that. Before the work, we will vote on the outline business case, as the Leader of the House said, but that has already been pushed back to 2022.

As right hon. and hon. Members have said in previous debates, and in the debate in which we voted for a full decant, the project will be about the whole country benefiting from the heritage, and from utilising the skills and crafts of the whole country. There will be no blacklisting and there will be an upskilling of our diverse workforce. I hope that right hon. and hon. Members will see that this is preserving the home of our democracy for over 1,000 years and for generations to come.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I am delighted to catch your eye in this debate. My remarks will be made with some trepidation, because the Chairman of the Finance Committee and the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee are in the Chamber. I have been a member of both Committees for about a decade; I have been a long-serving member. I also draw attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests as a chartered surveyor. So I have lived with this problem long before it even arose and I have seen the decaying state of the Palace of Westminster.

In his excellent speech, the Leader of the House might have made the point that we are only trustees of this place. We are here for the present generation, but, above all, we are here for future generations. Why are we here? We are here to remind everybody that this is the home of our democracy. It is our history. It needs to remind us that our forebears went to war twice to preserve our way of life and democracy. I caution colleagues about indulging in the argument that we are spending money on ourselves. We are not; we are spending money to preserve our democracy.

This is one of the most important and iconic buildings in the world and, as others have said, it is a UNESCO world heritage site, which we are legally obliged to maintain in good condition. The standard of maintenance over the past few years has got worse and worse, as everybody can see. We only have to look around the Palace to see the amount of scaffolding, large quantities of which are because there is falling masonry. As one of the former Leaders of the House said, it is a wonder that mercifully so far nobody has been hurt or seriously injured by falling masonry. We need to do something about the maintenance of this place.

The Elizabeth Tower project has proved, largely for the reasons that the former Chair of the Finance Committee gave, that the authorities in charge of the maintenance of these buildings are not very good at planning big projects, and that is why it is absolutely right that the Sponsor Body and the Delivery Board were set up by Members of Parliament.

We must learn from history. The National Audit Office report makes it clear that the completion of renewal in 1870 was 18 years late and three times over budget. We must not make those mistakes again. The Sponsor Body started in shadow form, and then was made substantive on 8 April 2020 by the Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Act 2019. It is going to make an interim report, supposedly by the end of September, and we should not do anything to fetter any of the options. I want it completely freely to come out, with all the options and an indicative cost, and then leave Parliament, the Government and the staff in this place and everybody else to make their judgment as to what is the right thing to do.

However, there is no point doing all that unless all the stakeholders buy in to what we are doing. Part of the reason we are here, eight years after this project was originally proposed, is that the stakeholders in general—the 650 Members of Parliament, the 800 peers, the thousands of staff in this place and, above all, the public—have not yet bought fully into the project. I urge those on the Sponsor Body to extend the 8 August deadline for consultation, have wide publicity as to what we might do and then let the Sponsor Body with all that evidence come up with the best solution. I therefore suggest that we have a longer consultation period.

Having established the optimal way of determining what we want to do, we then have to decide how we do it. As a surveyor, I have been a long-term advocate of a full decant, and I still maintain that the most economical and shortest way of doing this vast project is to fully move out. There is no question about that. However, if the political will and the impact of the covid situation on finance and what the Government want to spend have changed the situation so radically, I have another solution for the House this afternoon: do the project in two halves.

I do not mind about the sequencing, but basically the idea would be to move the House of Commons into the House of Lords and do the restoration on this half. Then when the House of Commons was complete, move us back here and start on the House of Lords. In that way, the House of Lords would move out to the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, which the Government already own. All we would have to do was compensate the contractor there. It would mean that Members of Parliament—the elected House—never actually moved out of this building. All the fears that we might never move back and all the fears that we might lose our traditions and working ways in this House would be largely unfounded, because we would remain in the building for the entire time. It also has the huge benefit that we would not need the decant centre in Richmond House. Indeed, we would not need the Northern Estate at all to do the project—we need it, of course, for Members of Parliament. Richmond House is the controversial bit in terms of planning and what we do with it, but we would not need it. At a stroke, we would save £500 million, as we would need only one decant centre.

I say to the House that we have been discussing this long enough. The Chair of the Finance Committee, the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), makes a really good point: we should not be here debating this subject this afternoon. There are so many issues of national importance. I do not want to be here in another year or two’s time still debating what we should do. I want to be here in 2022 voting on a precise proposal to allow the Sponsor Body to get on with the work. The time for talking is nearly over. We need action if nobody is going to be killed because of poor maintenance of the Palace.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I do not think there was a slight question mark. It was absolutely clear that the Lords would not move out merely so as to accommodate the Commons sitting in the House of Lords.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I did make it very clear in my speech that my preferred option was a full decant, but the world has changed as a result of covid. This is a different Parliament. The political imperative is different now, and I still say, as a surveyor, that it would be possible to do it in two halves.

[Chris Bryant]

Well, all the advice we were given was that, as an engineering feat, it would dramatically add to the cost, it would significantly add to the risk of a catastrophic failure to the building, and it would increase the danger to the staff working either as contractors or as Clerks and others working in the building. On all three counts, the imperative still lies with the hon. Gentleman’s preference, and I am right behind his preference on this.

There are some things that have not changed since the 19th century. The Leader of the House rightly referred to Caroline Shenton, who wrote two books. The first was about the fire and the second was about Mr Barry’s war. The latter makes it absolutely clear that the biggest problem for Barry and Pugin was not the River Thames or the drainage system, it was MPs and peers who stayed on site and were constantly meddling. Governments kept on changing their mind about whether it was a Government project or not, and that dramatically added to how long it took to get the Commons back in. It was not until 1850 that the Commons was back in, and then all the MPs hated it and demanded changes, so Barry said he would never step inside the place again.

We focus on the risk, and the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken) said earlier that the cost is terrible and there are risks. That is true, but there are also significant opportunities here. This building is now wholly inappropriate for anybody with any kind of disability. We often focus on those who need a wheelchair, and it is true that it is catastrophically difficult to get around the building in a wheelchair, but it is very dark as well. The most common form of disability is poor eyesight, and many people simply cannot use the building for that reason.

We need a building that is better attuned to today’s democracy, so that the public can come in more readily and easily to understand our business than the present Chamber allows. The archives are very badly kept at the moment, not for lack of will from the staff working there, but simply because the Victoria Tower simply cannot accommodate the facilities that we need in the modern era. We also do not have an education space that will last beyond another couple of years, because it only has 10 years from Westminster City Council.

My final point is that we should be seeing this as a training and employment opportunity for the whole country. If this infrastructure project is to succeed, we will have to have people coming from every constituency in the land, learning trades that they have never had, whether that is in encaustic tiles or wood panelling, as well as modern technology. We should see that as an opportunity. My fear is that we will keep on shilly-shallying and call for endless reviews, more papers and more consideration. The danger is that we will fail in our duty to this building. I think that there should be an eighth deadly sin for a Government Minister: procrastination.