Lord Berkeley
Main Page: Lord Berkeley (Labour - Life peer)
Lord Berkeley (Lab)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness; I agree with every word she said. I worked on the Channel Tunnel as an engineer for 15 years under Sir Alastair Morton, and I have to tell her that we did meet in the middle. We had a nice party, but we did meet in the middle, which was just as well.
I thank the Senior Deputy Speaker for this report. It is very useful, but some of the comments from other noble Lords have put it into context. I will say just a few words about the issues of fire and evacuation, which again I have been following for some time. I have to challenge the report, where it says on page 6:
“Our most important responsibility is making sure that the Parliamentary estate continues to be a safe place for the thousands of people who work in it”.
I would challenge “continues”, and I shall come back to that.
I have worked on fire issues in tunnels—the Channel Tunnel and Swiss tunnels—and I try to follow some of the awful fires that we have had since then in the UK and elsewhere. The noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, mentioned Notre-Dame, and I also remember putting down a Question about how the Government or the chairs of the committees, or whoever, will stop the same thing happening here. I got a very long Answer that said, “It won’t happen here because we’ve sorted out the risks and the evacuation”.
I believe that one of the problems in this building is evacuation. One of the answers I got a few years ago was deeply worrying. Some of us were thinking, “If there’s a fire on the committee floor, somewhere in the centre between the Lords bit and the Commons bit, and it involved the people in the committee rooms at the Lords end of it being evacuated but they could not use the main staircase because that was blocked, how would they evacuate?” The answer was that there are two staircases on the Lords side, as we all know, where one person goes down at a time. I could not even help people in wheelchairs—they would not answer that question. But there could be 500 people in those rooms, and how would they get down these stairs, with or without guidance?
I wonder how many noble Lords who are lucky enough to have offices in this building have thought about what would happen if their main staircase were blocked by fire or something else. That is quite a worry too because there is no other way out. They would probably find that a fire engine could not get to the outside and, if it did, the ladder would not be long enough, and all that. So we have some serious risks.
What really worries me about the evacuation, particularly on the first floor, was that I was told that somebody in the House of Commons, probably the Speaker, said that they could not have a proper evacuation with real people who might be going to committee rooms because that would delay the business of the House. In other words, they did it with staff. Most staff here are pretty agile—they probably have to be to get around this place—but they did it with them a few years ago because they could not do it with real members of the public. That is a really serious issue. If we get 50 people in a committee room and there is a fire, it is not going to look good. So I hope something can be done about that in the short term.
My suggestion in one of my several meetings with the Senior Deputy Speaker was that they should install more sprinklers—or mists. Mists is the latest way of putting out fires. I was basically told—of course, he did not do it, but he got his specialists in—that you cannot really do that until you have finished all the building work, then you install all the mists or the sprinklers when the building is nearly finished. The obvious question is: what happens if the building does not get finished because it burns down before you have even put them in? Why do not you put them in first? My question today to the Senior Deputy Speaker is, if there is work being done on the roof of the Chamber, what about having some mist in there, or anywhere else? That is just one idea. The idea that we leave it all until the end confirms to me that we do not have a particularly safe place to work.
Looking at the alternatives, I favour the total decant. I am sure that we have to. Several noble Lords have talked about the problem of cost overruns on HS2 and other major projects. I can name Hinkley Point, Crossrail and a few other ones. The one thing that these projects and many others have in common is that they seem to provide very large and expensive palaces for their temporary workers. They might be four or five storeys high, and they will be fully air conditioned, obviously, probably with lifts and everything else. They last for however long the project lasts and they are taken down. I wonder whether we would not actually be better off starting from a clean, flat piece of land that does not include Victoria Tower Gardens—because that is a that is a garden, as the noble Baroness said—and build a temporary building in there, or several temporary buildings. One thing that I do not think many noble Lords have spoken about is the importance of the House of Lords and the House of Commons operations being close. I personally go in there quite often, and I am sure a lot of other noble Lords do too. I think of going from QEII and crossing several roads to the Department of Health building, which I think is proposed at the moment. It has the advantage that it is also listed, so it is a “We can adapt that listed building, but we are not going to destroy this one” kind of thing. It is still listed.
A flat area for a temporary building could look extremely nice somewhere. I would favour Horse Guards Parade. I think we could probably do without marching the Army once a year for a few years, but other noble Lords may have different views about that. A new temporary building for the two Houses close to each other would be worth looking at. It is much easier, as contractors will tell you, to build a new building, a temporary one on a flat site with the services close by, than trying to adapt something, even if it is QEII or another building. By the time we have gone into it and decided how much adaption needs doing for our perfection, I think we should be better off looking at another site which is close to here but, at the moment, free from other interference.
I think I have probably covered enough ground now to explain why I would like to challenge, if you like, the report saying that it continues to be a safe place. I think that in addition to taking it forward, and I hope we do take it forward as far as possible, we should see some proper evidence that the precautions that can be done at the moment are being done and are not being delayed due to further complaints from the Speaker of the House of Commons, or whoever.