Palace of Westminster: Restoration and Renewal

Lord Desai Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord because he has more or less helped me to say what I want to say. Economists make a distinction between the normative and the positive: “normative” is what we want there to be, ideally, while “positive” is what actually happens. I consider this Motion and report as normative observations—this is how we would like the world to be.

As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, just said, this started in 2007. Almost every word he said is so right, so ideal, but of course it did not happen. I am always puzzled when people say there are 60 fires per day or whatever it is downstairs and we have to do something urgently. By 2025, we are to move out—2025. If we are at all serious about health and safety problems, and we want this to happen in most of our lifetimes, it cannot be right to wait until 2025 to decant ourselves. Of course, as noble Lords have said, every estimate of the time to completion and amount of expense will be proved wrong by a factor of three or four. We know that. The money numbers do not matter, and one cannot compare full decant and say it will cost less than if you do not decant. We know from past experience that none of that is true. What will happen is, in a sense, very simple. The noble Lord, Lord Naseby, has no friends in the House today—except me, and that is not much help—but he will be proved right in the positive world, whereas we will pass this Motion for the normative purpose. Of course we will pass it, but it will not happen. It is like House of Lords reform: it will never happen because every time we have a scheme, somebody will think of something else and we do other things.

We are not actually taking this at all seriously. If we really thought this place was a health and safety hazard, we would not come here another week. We would have thought of a decant by now. Even now, 11 years after the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, in his former existence, was thinking about this, we do not have a place to decant to, because this is a palace, and you can only decant people from a palace into another palace. I have a simple suggestion: we should decant ourselves to Buckingham Palace. It is the only building large enough to contain all the facilities we have, with room to spare. The present owners would have to show us some kindness, but it will at least make the State Opening of Parliament much easier for them than it is right now. We have to think in those terms, because except for maybe Windsor Castle or Buckingham Palace, I do not believe there is another building in the vicinity of London that will accommodate all the things that go on here. If we think like that, we could get a decant in 18 months. But we will not do it. I can assure your Lordships that it will not happen because, as I said and as economists know, that is a normative situation and we are not going to do it. We will have committees and debates—after all, this debate is happening at least two years after the report and 11 years after the debate started. Even so, in the Commons, one-third of the Members were not there to vote on the crucial decant amendment. The majority was very small—almost the exact image of Brexit, with 52% to 48%, or 236 to 220. As only 456 Members voted, the Commons does not think this is either important or urgent. On the final resolution, fewer than 456 voted. One should not think that the Commons has made this important decision and we ought to follow it. It has not.

Maybe we will or will not do this, but we ought to think of a more urgent way of decanting, if decanting is what we are going to do—which I doubt. The way we are going, we will pass this Motion and act on what the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, has proposed. We shall stay here and muddle our way through without either House decanting. We will complain and suffer, but we love this place so much that we will not be able to move out. Given that, let us enjoy the situation.