Restoration and Renewal

Lord Fowler Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Fowler (CB)]

My Lords, I agree very much with what the noble Lord has just said about the Government and their role. One of the more misleading statements in the general debate so far—not in this debate this afternoon, but outside—has been that it is all a decision for Parliament. That is patently not the case. If Parliament was to make a decision on financial spending which went over the accepted limits, then it is a pound to a penny that the Government would intervene; there is no doubt about that whatever.

As it is, over the last eight years, government Ministers such as Mr Rees-Mogg have not thought twice about intervening in the debate of Parliament. Even more to the point, Governments can take decisions which limit the action of Parliament. If we take the issue of a decant of Members—I agree very much with what the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said about Members working while it is going on, and I do not want to argue the case because he has done it so well, as have others—the obvious place is the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre.

However, the former Secretary of State, Mr Gove, whose department ran the centre, said bluntly—rather like a 19th century mill owner—that this was not acceptable to him and that the House of Lords should not go to the Queen Elizabeth II Centre but hundreds of miles away. We have a position where a Secretary of State—here yesterday and gone today—appointed by a Prime Minister who is still here today but gone tomorrow has vetoed the most sensible proposal for a decant of this House, if it ever decided to go that way. I hope that the Leader of the House in replying to this debate will say if the veto on the Queen Elizabeth II Centre is still part of the Government’s policy—or was it just Mr Gove’s policy and not the Government’s? It is rather a crucial question. If we cannot go to the Queen Elizabeth II Centre, that limits where a decant could go.

I cannot resist saying in passing that I am puzzled by a process that has a commercial conference centre run by the Government and not the private sector. I see that my old friend the noble and learned Lord, Lord Clarke, is here. We worked together very early on in the Thatcher Government in transport. We found a company called National Freight Corporation, which included a removals company called Pickfords. We came to the conclusion that you did not need a nationalised removals company in this country. I do not think its abolition as such has caused any controversy with any known political party.

In my position as a—what am I?

[Lord Newby (LD)]

Cross-Bencher.

[Lord Fowler (CB)]

In my position as a Cross-Bencher, I think that it is a very odd position for the Conservative Party. I do not believe that it is in our national advantage. I gently say that it might be better for the Government to go down the privatisation route in this area rather than in one or two others that they seem to support.

That brings me to my second point about the joint report. Frankly, I did not find it to be the clearest exposition of the case or the clearest piece of writing. I give one example, from page 6:

“The Panel recommends that the parameters ‘should be augmented by clear evaluation criteria’ which are designed to support option assessment, and key trade-offs which will need to be made to arrive at a progressively shorter list of possible options for the works. These criteria should take account of longer-term perspectives and link to the programme’s end-state vision and intended outcomes.”


I am sure that that is persuading people around the country to be in favour of this report, but I am not altogether sure that it persuades me. There is much in the joint report about generalised vision but precious little about some of the real issues, such as the real cost of eight years of work—carried out prior to what is now called a “new mandate”—that we are turning our backs on.

Thirdly and finally, after the Great Fire of 1834, to which the noble Lord, Lord Haselhurst, referred, various efforts were made to agree a rebuilding plan, and it took 30 or 40 years for it all to be agreed. We should learn from that. I am concerned not just because of the complexity of the task but because of the many interests, including the Government’s and government Ministers’, all intervening at the same time. Unless we are very careful, we are likely to face exactly the same kind of indecision and delay as they did in the Victorian times—we have certainly done that in the first eight years. So far, we lack both leadership in this project and a determination to stay on the plan.

I agreed with the spirit and almost every word of what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said, but I was not encouraged when the Leader of the House said that it would take “decades” to complete this project—I think I quote her right. Is it really going to take decades? If it is, we are in for a certain amount of difficulty. We need to get on with this; we should decide a plan and stick to it, rather than having the kind of debate and discourse that we have had over the last eight years.