Palace of Westminster: Restoration and Renewal

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, what a pleasure it is to follow the noble Lord, Lord Addington. As he said, everything has been said and I occasionally feel that, as I am almost tail-end Charlie on this, once everything sensible has been said and there is nothing more sensible to say, call on Dobbs. I will do my best.

I love this place. The honour and privilege of being asked to come here is something that I could never have imagined. Frequently, in the late evening, when the place is empty, I go and sit in the corner of the Royal Gallery, or even on the steps of Westminster Hall, and try to recreate the history and images of this place and listen to the echoes of former times. One of the most striking images that I always love is that of 11 May 1941, of Winston Churchill walking through the ruins of the House of Commons, symbolising defiance, determination and his love of parliamentary democracy.

There have been other disasters of course, 16 October 1834 being the most classic. Others have mentioned it but I must say that our former archivist, Caroline Shenton, did so much to reinvigorate and bring home the realities of that extraordinary day. Why do we need novelists when we have beautiful, colourful and brilliantly written history such as that? That time was of course an age of conspiracy. York Minster had been fired just a few years before and everyone assumed that it was a Catholic conspiracy, although it turned out to be the work of just one demented Methodist. It was said that the fire of 1834 was God’s revenge for the 1832 Electoral Reform Act. Let us hope that He does not take against Brexit or we are all in trouble. It was not conspiracy—it was simply cock-up.

There had been so many warnings, but they were ignored. It came, as is well known, through the burning of the tally sticks. The flues in the House of Lords were lined with copper and copper melts at 1,000 degrees centigrade. The furnace was coal-fired and coal generally burns at between 600 and 800 degrees centigrade, so there was plenty of spare capacity. But those tally sticks were made of old, dry wood. They were raked so that the workmen could get off to the Star and Garter pub over the road in a hurry, and old, dry wood burns very differently. The copper in the flues melted and we know the consequences: almost the whole of the Palace of Westminster burned.

The editor of the Standard—I am not sure if it was the Evening Standard then, but it might well have been—said that the only regret was that the Lords and Commons were not sitting at the time. In other words, it probably was the editor of the Evening Standard. It was an accident waiting to happen. The warnings were ignored. The Prime Minister of the time, Lord Melbourne, said that it was,

“one of the greatest instances of stupidity upon record. We lost almost the entire Palace of Westminster”.

There were other lessons to be drawn from the record of the loss of this place and its reconstruction. The first is the political hash we managed to make of that reconstruction. There were huge delays and enormous cost overruns. Every man an expert, every man an architect, every man a plumber and an electrician—nothing much changes.

Are we to turn this exercise of reconstruction, renovation and renewal into another third runway for London’s airport or another bypass for Stonehenge—those sagas that go on and on and turn out to be disasters and disappointments? Too often, when we approach activities such as this, we turn out to look like the Wizard of Oz. When the curtain is drawn back, we hear all the noise but there is almost nothing to deliver. We refurbish Big Ben, and no sooner have the bongs been stopped than the cost doubles overnight. We do not have a very happy record of these assignments, so I have some sympathy with my noble friend Lord Naseby and his reservations. He, like me, is a romantic sceptic—or are we sceptical romantics? I am not sure.

I am not a plumber or an electrician but I do know that the building is dangerous. We have heard time and again that we are on the brink of potential disaster. For many, Big Ben is a clock tower but an engineer will tell you that it is also a chimney waiting to do its work. To delay is not an option. The dangers are real. In the great fire of 1834, no one died. That was a bit of a miracle. We dare not rely on being so lucky this time. There will be huge cost overruns. My noble friend the Leader of the House said that there was no blank cheque, but of course nobody can tell us how much it will cost. We have to do our best, but delay is not an option. I hope, as my noble friend Lord Cormack said, that we can be more imaginative about where we should decant to, because in 1834 all sorts of options were considered, not just the QEII conference centre.

Before we start on that work, we must make sure that there is not another single Grenfell Tower left in the country because that, too, would be a dereliction of duty. We owe it to the thousands of staff and millions of visitors—almost 1 million visitors came here last year —to make sure that this place is safe for their use. The answer lies not just in the basement but also at the top of the Victoria Tower. Go up there on a clear day and you will see the magnificence of this Palace and the view from the top, which makes you think that you can see to the ends of the earth. It is a hugely powerful force.

I support the Leader’s Motion. I support and wish my noble friend Lord Deighton luck. He has done so much to show us that we can take on a public project such as this and make a success of it. That red-eyed clock is telling me to finish, so I conclude by saying that 413 years ago Guy Fawkes tried to destroy the House of Lords. It was said that Guy Fawkes was the only man ever to enter the House of Lords with an honest intent. That of course is not true: I have the privilege of being surrounded by many honest colleagues, men and women. But let us make sure that we do not, by accident, end up doing Guy Fawkes’s work for him.