Lord Best
Main Page: Lord Best (Crossbench - Life peer)Parliamentary Works Sponsor Body: Annual Report
Lord Best Excerpts
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, as the Lords spokesperson for Parliament’s restoration and renewal sponsor body overseeing this mighty project, alongside the noble Lords, Lord Carter of Coles and Lord Deighton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, it falls to me to open this important debate. I follow in the footsteps of the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, who was our spokesperson from April 2020, when the sponsor body became a statutory organisation. I pay tribute to her diligent and committed work and am delighted that she will be contributing later to this debate.
My job is to draw attention to our annual report and accounts, but I know that such reports and accounts are seldom priority reading for any of us and I am sure this debate will cover wider matters. Indeed, I intend to refer to one such issue—an urgent one—myself. I must begin by underlining the critical need for the wholesale restoration and renewal of the Houses of Parliament. Noble Lords will be aware of the scale of this task, but it bears repeating. Our 150 year-old building, a UNESCO world heritage site, is vast; it has a floorplan the size of 16 football pitches, with well over 1,000 rooms, 100 staircases and four floors on 65 different levels. Beneath us, there are three miles of passageways and 250 miles of wires and cabling. The building has 4,000 original windows, 3,800 of them in bronze, and it houses 11,000 artefacts.
Shockingly, however, this iconic Palace is falling apart faster than it can be fixed. There is a growing backlog of repairs. The cost of maintenance has doubled in three years to £127 million a year and, if left alone, will no doubt double again. The heating, drainage, gas, mechanical and electrical systems all need replacing, as does the sewerage system, which dates back to 1888. After the last war, the building was packed with harmful asbestos, and of course falling masonry is a serious hazard. After decades of patch and mend, and despite the very best efforts of our excellent in-house maintenance and repair teams, whose recent work has included installing new fire safety systems, we are doing little more than managing the continuing decline of the building.
If noble Lords have not done so, I encourage them to book a place on one of the tours of the labyrinthine basement—the sponsor body will be organising the next round of these in the new year—to see what lies beneath: over half a mile of jumbled pipes and cables, with no one knowing where in the Palace half of them end up. There are photos of all this in the modest exhibition on display today in the Royal Gallery as part of the ongoing work of consulting Members and staff. The alternative to restoration is demolition, but Parliament, recognising that this landmark building is known the world over and is much loved by the British people, has determined that it should be restored. This exercise will of absolute necessity be extremely costly, but the public—as our sponsor body board has discovered from surveys of thousands of people of all ages and in all four nations this year—have real pride in the Palace and they want it renewed.
Nevertheless, the public also want to see value for money, and this has to be at the heart of the R&R programme. While resisting the temptation to downplay and underestimate costs, and to be overoptimistic when presenting the business case, we must be ever mindful that all our spending really is essential. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Vaux of Harrowden, as chair of the Lords Finance Committee, for his attention to the detail of our spending, which will help to ensure we keep on the straight and narrow.
The annual report and accounts show that this has been an important period for the R&R initiative, with valuable progress in this planning phase. Substantial progress has been made with our delivery authority in considering the requirements from all sides, preparing designs, undertaking extensive surveys of the Palace, working on the decant proposals for the House of Lords and for the heritage assets, while preparing for numerous contracts which will create jobs, skills and social value throughout the UK.
Since the annual report and accounts were published, the programme’s survey work has been stepped up with 50 specialists spending nearly 5,000 hours investigating the building, examining 2,343 rooms and spaces, recording thousands of defects, including cracks in stonework and widespread water damage. Acoustic experts are considering how to improve audibility within the building and have run 300 sound tests in 80 rooms, taking 2,000 measurements. Intrusive surveys will be done over the Christmas Recess and archaeologists will be studying the ground beneath the building.
This work has already engaged people from across the country: ecological and door specialists from Manchester, window surveyors from Glasgow, architects and engineers from across London, historic surveyors and specialists from Cambridge, Suffolk, and Hampshire. When building works begin, materials will be sourced, and training, apprenticeships and skills will be supported for thousands throughout all parts of the UK.
As the annual report and accounts make clear, post Covid the programme has concentrated on those works which are essential for saving the Palace for future generations, with the emphasis on efficiency and economy, using industry-standard benchmarking methods to ensure value for money. We are learning from other major heritage programmes including the Canadian Parliament, Manchester Town Hall and King’s Cross station. The programme has adopted governance and assurance functions as recommended by the Treasury, the National Audit Office and the Infrastructure and Projects Authority.
I can testify that all this has not been easy: there are strong and conflicting views on the priorities for R&R, always with the desire for more to be achieved and less to be spent. There are myriad external interested parties, from the Westminster planning authority and English Heritage, to the Port of London Authority and the Environment Agency in respect of creating access from the riverside, to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, which owns the QEII Centre, which we need for the Lords decant. Satisfying everyone may not be possible, but the sponsor body team, and the delivery authority that we oversee, are making steady progress toward a comprehensive plan that will be fully and realistically costed and ready for Parliament to consider in 2023.
Once the plan is agreed, building work can commence on the decanting accommodation. With a fair wind, these adaptation works will be concluded by the end of 2027 and this House would then decant to the QEII —although I rather suspect that we will not be moving before 2028.
Before we can complete our proposed plan for presentation to both Houses in 2023, a prior decision must be taken on a key question. Those representing the House of Commons have expressed a strong desire for that House to retain a continued presence in the Palace during restoration. We have commissioned work to consider the feasibility and costs of this staying-put proposition and will make a recommendation accordingly in the next few weeks.
What we know already is that a decision for the House of Commons to remain in situ, first in one Chamber and then the other, would hugely increase the costs for the taxpayer and more than double the time taken. During this extended period, the public would not be able to visit the Palace, and Parliament sees 1.25 million visitors in a normal year and 300,000 children. The other House will have to operate in the midst of the probably largest restoration project in the world, facing all the hazards of fire, asbestos, noise, dust and vibration. There will be a high additional cost of security for MPs in and around the Palace. Since the underground plumbing and power will be out of action, temporary systems and generators will be needed in the courtyards, occupying space which is also needed by the contractors.
However, it is not for me, as the Lords spokesperson, to comment on what is best for those in the House of Commons, but an insistence on retaining a continued presence within the massive building site would have significant implications for the House of Lords too. Our House has accepted the necessity—however inconvenient—to decant to other premises in order to expedite the restoration, with the assumption that the House of Commons would do the same. This means a move for us to the QEII building, which obviously has significant downsides as a working environment. If the Commons is to be accommodated in the Palace throughout the building works, the move to the QEII by your Lordships’ House would be for twice as long as originally expected, twice as long operating from a less satisfactory environment and twice as long detached from the rest of Parliament. This is bound to have wider implications for us.
Decisions will need to be made on this hugely important matter in the next few months. It is entirely understandable that those representing the Commons should want Parliament to continue to operate out of the Palace, but the implications in terms of cost, time and convenience illustrate the dilemmas and complexities of this whole gigantic project. The sponsor body is the creature of Parliament and will accept whatever decision Parliament takes, but, speaking entirely personally and for myself alone, I sincerely hope we will not be asked to proceed with the requirement of a continued presence for the other House throughout the restoration and renewal of this extraordinary building.
I conclude by thanking my fellow members of the sponsor body board, chaired so expertly by Liz Peace. I am delighted to present, on the board’s behalf, our annual report and accounts for the last year, as a record of good progress, and although I have shared my concerns on the current issue of a continued presence for the House of Commons, I congratulate the extremely professional and talented new teams serving the sponsor body and our high-powered delivery authority. I look forward to hearing the views of noble Lords. I beg to move.
Lord Best (CB)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their very rich contributions to this debate. I am very grateful to all of them for their support for the line that the sponsor body is taking. I also thank Clementine Brown, the parliamentary liaison officer, who is behind me as I play this part of make-believe Minister just for the day. I have discovered how difficult it is to be the Minister in this position, when excellent notes are passed to you but you do not have time to absorb them and set them out in an orderly fashion. I am grateful for that presence behind me.
What a lot of wisdom has been added to this debate, beginning with the noble Lord, Lord Deighton. It is great to have somebody who really knows how it is to set up a new delivery authority and be part of that whole process, having done this with the 2012 Olympics. Having that knowledgeable insider among us has shown us the way. We have also engaged people from that Olympics experience in our staffing team. It is powerful stuff to have this group around us. We have recruited some very high-powered people to the team.
The noble Lord, Lord Deighton, made a whole series of important points. I shall not go over them all again, but I picked out one or two that particularly impressed me. He was glad to be able to say that, in our phasing-in of this whole system of a sponsor body and a delivery authority, in this first period, he felt that we had been getting it right. He was pleased to give the whole sponsor body a commendation. If he says that we are on the right track, that is powerful stuff.
The noble Lord pointed out that three-quarters of the cost of what is coming down the track and will have to be paid for will be just to satisfy the core engineering, and only a quarter of the funding that we will need will be available to satisfy all the other demands and the things that people want. We need to be realistic up front, recognising how much of this is the fundamental stuff at the back of it. The noble Lord made the point that whatever number we finally announce as the likely cost of the project, there will be shock and awe, and probably horror, around the country. We will need to weather a storm. It will cost an awful lot of money. We will have to be determined, grit our teeth, recognise that and stand up for it.
The noble Lord, Lord Carter, who has also been on the case from the very beginning, recognised that some compromises will have to be made. He pointed out the interrelationships of the different demands. We need accurate, up-to-the-minute, accessible and useful information —that is the key. We are spending £100 million a year getting there, but it is really important not to make the same kind of mistakes, as the noble Lord pointed out, as have been made in estimating the costs in relation to the Elizabeth Tower—Big Ben and all that—running from a hoped-for £18 million at the beginning to something nearer £80 million today. We need to get things right at the beginning. He also made the point that the public at large need to understand the importance of the whole project. We need to work on that; maybe quoting St Luke somewhere along the way would help.
The noble Lord, Lord Vaux, was kind enough to say that he is utterly supportive of the project and wants to see it go ahead, but he raised a number of points. We are really grateful for having the noble Lord performing this role and keeping us on our mettle. That will be a continuing process that I think we will appreciate a lot. We need it to help us see the wood for the trees and understand what is going on.
The noble Lord’s comments added up to telling us not to gold-plate the whole operation and to spend only what really needs to be spent. That is a message that we have to keep before us all the time. He was worried about the high staff costs. They have been high, but that is because of having to recruit, train and retrain a highly skilled programme group with the necessary leadership, engineering skills and infrastructure knowledge and understanding. These are expensive people who have had to be drawn in and attracted by the proposition. It does not look the most secure job to take and costs have been high. Of necessity, we have also had to use a lot of consultants. Their costs, as the noble Lord, Lord Vaux, pointed out, can be four times as much as having your own staff, but that is changing: we are now getting to the position of being able to replace the external consultancies with an in-house team, which will make a significant difference.
The noble Lord, Lord Vaux, was worried about the surveys that have not been undertaken. I mentioned the ones that have, and there has been a lot of work on doing these, but the intrusive surveys where you really poke about have had to be put back. This is partly due to Covid, because it has been more difficult to get access to all the places, and partly because the Palace authorities want us to keep clear when the House is sitting and things are operational. Perhaps parliamentarians are going to have to get used to the fact that having people poking around, inconvenient as it is, is a necessity. Those intrusive surveys are now all organised and contracts for them are being placed as we speak. They will be very detailed and will, I fear, discover all kinds of other things that we did not know about: that is bound to happen and will be the next stage.
The noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, as a newcomer, brought fresh insights with experience of handling other major projects elsewhere. That is going to be important and helpful to us. She emphasised that we need to be very transparent and share the details of all the costs. This is a common undertaking. We do not want to worry that there are commercial decisions going on here: we have to be outgoing in showing what things really cost. We must avoid the hazard of underestimating costs to try to keep them down as low as possible: that, of course, will create critical problems later on.
The noble Lord, Lord Birt, brought us the lessons of history and the details of Pugin’s extraordinary life, reminding us that the first time around, it went, I think, four times over cost and took three times as long to complete. It is so important to get the facts and figures and make the assessments in advance, so we are not caught out in those kinds of ways. He also made the important point that we need to recognise what we are saving each year in the capitalised costs that we put in. The net present value of maintaining the Palace will soon be £200 million a year: what is it worth spending to save £200 million a year? That is a lot of money just to break even, so there is that decision to take.
The noble Baroness, Lady Scott, brought up the rear, and we are all grateful to her for her initial input, so important in the formation of this great enterprise. She was the first, I think, to mention falling masonry— I am not sure that I had added that to my list. It is a pretty important issue. We have to fix everything: all the stonework has to be inspected. There are hairline cracks and potential dangers there. The place is increasingly unsafe but her call to us was to remain steadfast. She expressed particular concern about the “continued presence” concept, which I think was reflected by almost everyone who spoke. We need to be mindful that the decision is only weeks away. It will have to be taken within a very short space of time and will affect everything that happens thereafter. It is a crucial moment.
I will go away further resolved to get on with the job. Everyone who spoke was supportive of us not delaying things, of making progress and of not accepting the difficulties that are out there, and that support is very much appreciated. The Committee has reinforced our eagerness to get on with the job and, to quote the noble Lord, Lord Birt, to remember that what we are doing is investing in the very future of our nation.