Restoration and Renewal (Report of the Joint Committee)

Jacob Rees-Mogg Excerpts

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

My right hon. Friend raises a very important point about an emergency decant from this place. The security advice is that it is not safe these days for MPs to be coming in and out of the secure parliamentary state, so that would rule out a decant option off the estate. Secondly, and very importantly, on the day before the recess I attended—as I think you did, Mr Speaker—the emergency decant preparations done by the House in the event of the sudden need to move from this place, so those preparations are going ahead. However, what we are talking about here is about being out of this place for a significant length of time, so options such as Church House would simply not be suitable.

[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I am very grateful to the Lord President of the Council for giving way. I was on the restoration and renewal Committee, and 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. We now understand that the measurements we were given which led to that conclusion were wrong, and that Richmond House would have to be pulled down completely. That is a completely different cost basis, and I for one would not have come to that conclusion had we known the true picture.

[Andrea Leadsom]

My hon. Friend raises another key point, which is that the options for decant have recently been examined by the House Commission, with all the various options for refurbishing the northern estate, which many hon. and right hon. Members will know is also in dire need of refurbishment and work on the mechanical and electrical facilities. My hon. Friend is exactly right to point out that, in terms of Richmond House, and having costed the different alternatives, it now becomes clear that to knock down all but the grade I listed facade and to rebuild the building behind it is, in fact, the one solution that has the same cost estimates attached to it as all the various temporary solutions. Yet that project—rebuilding Richmond House—would give a permanent legacy, with better Committee Rooms, more accommodation for staff in this place and a proper business contingency Chamber, as well as offering a solution for the decant.

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[Pete Wishart]

It is a puckish grin with which I am also familiar. All I want to do is to assist hon. Members: help us in our campaign to reclaim our time so that we can properly spend the time debating and looking after our constituents—[Interruption.] Yes, take back control, as my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow East (David Linden) says.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

rose—

[Pete Wishart]

On that very issue, how can I resist the hon. Gentleman?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am extremely grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He says that time in the Division Lobby is wasted. On the Conservative Benches, we find it quite useful talking to our friends and colleagues. Is that not true in the SNP?

[Pete Wishart]

I do not know how much of a blessing it is to Front Benchers when hon. Members get backstage and buttonhole them. And this is what we get—the shrieks of, “Oh, we need to meet up with our ministerial colleagues in the Lobby.” But that prerogative is exclusively the right of Conservative Members. I do not detect many Government Ministers, as we spend most of our time voting with Labour, and I am pretty damned certain that no Labour Members have encountered a Government Minister in their Lobby over the course of these years. The Conservative Members may have that right, but it is a right that is not open to the rest of us.

I will help Conservatives Members with this one: we could have electronic voting that we would have to do in the vicinity of the Chamber. We would all have to come here and we would get some sort of device, because the technological solution would be to press a button that is handed out to us. We would all be here, so if hon. Members wanted to speak to Ministers or talk to the Leader of the House about a particular issue, they could just go up to them and say, “Hello, Leader of the House. Can I have a word with you please?” None of that would be stopped.

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[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow so many erudite speeches, particularly that of the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). He is a former Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, and I have enormous respect for him, but I was puzzled to hear him say that he wanted quick action, but also that he did not want to make a decision tonight. He and I share a healthy scepticism of experts—someone does not get to chair the PAC without being able to challenge experts—and that is why the Committee considered the work of the Joint Committee of this House to assure ourselves and help to assure the House that its work was robust and thorough.

It is no accident that the Deputy Chair of that Committee, the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), 13 Select Committee Chairs, my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) back my amendment (b) to motion No. 1. We regularly consider large projects and how they are managed. We routinely and regularly criticise Departments for their poor procurement, poor project management and poor contracting, and it is important that we get all that right. It is also important that we bottom out what we are trying to achieve right at the very beginning and that we work through the figures. We know that the Joint Committee did not draw up full and detailed costings, which would take a long time to get right, but its figures were robustly reached and were orders of magnitude of the cost. However, the costings are still pegged to 2014 prices, so let us not use them as though they are the actual figures. That is why further work needs to be done. It cannot be done unless we make a very clear decision tonight. That does not mean kicking it into the long grass; it means making a firm decision about the options. That is why I propose a decant, because we know that moving the project quickly, specifying it well and doing it over a short period of time will be a lot cheaper.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

My concern is that the figures are not, in fact, robust—they are out by 16.5 feet in the proposals for Richmond House. We had hundreds of pages of consultants’ reports, and this key fact is wrong. If that key fact is wrong, how many other facts are wrong?

[Meg Hillier]

My Committee’s work did not particularly look at that aspect. We were looking at the refurbishment side. The hon. Gentleman sat on the Joint Committee and agreed its report. The National Audit Office assessed the robustness of the methodology used in that report—it did not do a full analysis, because such assurance is a very long job—and it assured us that the work was thorough and credible.

There was a sampling of some of the examples we have heard from other hon. Members tonight, and the costs were considered in order to extrapolate the indicative cost figure—the order of magnitude. The work of the Joint Committee was robust and thorough, as far as it could go, but until Members of this House make a decision, we cannot go into the full detail of the figures. That is why we need to make a decision.

The Palace of Westminster is, of course, a world heritage site, which means it comes under UNESCO rules. I have been in touch with Francesco Bandarin, UNESCO’s assistant director general for culture—I have copied our correspondence to the UK permanent delegation—and under UNESCO rules the UK Treasury is responsible for funding this building and making sure it is preserved as a world heritage site.

By December 2018 the Government have to provide information to UNESCO about their plans for this building, and in 2019—incidentally the year that we are expected to leave the European Union—we will also be on the world stage because UNESCO’s committee will consider the Government’s decisions and proposals and assess whether they are acceptable and will do enough to preserve this world heritage site.

As other hon. Members have said, it is not about us. It is about members of the public and the staff who work here, but this is also an internationally iconic building. Are we really saying that we are unable to make a decision tonight to ensure that we work up full costings and a full programme of work so that we can get on with the job, as the Public Accounts Committee concluded?

I have also seen correspondence from David Orr and Jennifer Wood, the external members of the Palace of Westminster restoration and renewal programme board, who wrote to David Natzler, the Clerk of the House, in March 2017 and last week to reiterate their “serious concerns” about the “continuing delay” in holding debates on this issue, so I congratulate the Leader of the House on ensuring that we had this debate today. They also say that

“the idea that the debates…will not be a Decision in Principle but instead would give approval to a shadow Sponsor Board and shadow Delivery Authority and commission them to study further options before bringing the matter back to Parliament”

is a matter of concern. They say that one of the motions

“envisages only essential work doing this Parliament followed by a further review before 2022 to consider the need for comprehensive works…We are dismayed by these developments and seriously concerned about the level of risk that is being tolerated.”

We have heard about the risks and safety issues, and it is a real concern to me that we must move forward. We cannot keep putting this into the long grass. We have to make a decision.

Let us be clear: we are a group of people who, as my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) said, aspire to run the country. In doing that, we have to make decisions. We need to make a decision tonight about this building. Of course it is going to cost money but, let us face it, it is not as if the Treasury is going to give that money to something in my constituency—we cannot see such things as equivalents.

This building is at risk unless we make a decision. Let us move forward and get the full costings and the full programme of works so that we can get on with the job.

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[Mr Jacob Rees-Mogg (North East Somerset) (Con)]

I want to go back to this 16 and a half feet—16ft 5in to be precise. When we sat on the Committee, we looked at and studied the report from Deloitte, we took evidence from experts, we sat for hours and we came to a conclusion based on the possibility that an inexpensive temporary Chamber could be put in Richmond House. That was fundamental to what we concluded. It turns out that that was wrong—that actually the measurements were out and therefore it would not work. That seems to me to undermine all that we tried to do. If the people responsible could not even measure a courtyard, how could they possibly get the figures right on the overall proposals that were being made? I regret that the work that we did and the conclusions that we drew have been fatally undermined by the fact that the figures we were provided with on an essential basis for our conclusion were wrong.

[Chris Bryant]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I will not on this occasion because time is so limited. I do apologise. I always like to give way, but I think that I had better not on this occasion.

That troubles me. The other thing that troubled me throughout the Committee process was that we never looked at the figures on the basis of a discounted cash flow, and so the assumption that was made was that a pound spent in 40 years’ time had exactly the same value as a pound spent tomorrow. That is incorrect. A pound spent in 40 years’ time obviously has a lesser value. When we consulted the Comptroller and Auditor General about that, he said in evidence that that was not how Government projects were done: Government projects look at the economic return that one gets on the expenditure, and not on the discounted value of money that one may spend in future. However, this is not a project that reveals a return; it is not an investment in that sense, but a cost. Therefore we need to look at the discounted cost, at which point the remaining in becomes the cheapest option by a considerable margin. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) may shout no, but that is what the figures show when we apply a sensible discount rate.

The other thing that has concerned me throughout this process is that we are being too precious and we are assuming that we will not accept any modest inconvenience. The hon. Member for Rhondda said that costs go up because work has to be done at night. We have to accept that, in this process of saving this building and ensuring that we are here, there may be some modest inconvenience to Members of Parliament. Are we really so precious that there must never even be the slightest sound of a hammer bashing a nail into a piece of wood? Are our ears so sensitive that we cannot bear that strain upon them?

I, along with the hon. Member for Rhondda, was extremely keen that we should sit in Westminster Hall, because Westminster Hall is not part of the main restoration and renewal project; it is outside it. The argument that we got against Westminster Hall was the most negative naysaying approach that we could have had—that the roof put up by Richard II would fall upon our heads if we had a little bit of heating in there. The naysayers wanted to put us in a glass pod—a temperature-controlled pod to ensure that we were kept at the perfect temperature, boiled to the right level in Fahrenheit or centigrade, whichever you prefer. This is a building that has survived for 800 years, not a hot air heating system. Once they said it was a glass pod, the glass pod was then too heavy for the floor. Whatever way we look at it, they were naysayers. It seems to me that we could have sat there in our overcoats, as that would have solved the problem in the winter. And in the summer, some hon. Members more racy than I am might have felt it possible to take off their jackets. It seems to me that there is an easy, affordable solution whereby we maintain a Chamber in our historic residence. That is what we should do and that is what we should vote for.