Palace of Westminster: Restoration and Renewal

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Tuesday 6th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie—I spend my parliamentary life doing that—and he has again demonstrated his characteristically expert, forensic line of questioning. He asked some important questions. I respect the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, and I listened carefully to his speech. I will read it again tomorrow. I think he has a role in the future evolution of this project. As the noble Lord, Lord Carter, said, this is a dynamic situation. His experience is obviously invaluable. But I think—I hope—he has sufficient experience of parliamentary occasions to know that the argument is going against him at the moment. I hope he will consider that carefully—I know he will—when he comes to decide whether to divide the House.

It has been a very good debate. There is a huge amount of experience in this Chamber. Like the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, I was on the House of Commons Commission at the time we were commissioning Portcullis House. I was press spokesman for the commission at the time, which was my misfortune, because I discovered —and this was a point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, when he said that the detail of the contract would be important—that I had missed the fact that the architects had allocated 2% of the contract for what they called “soft furnishings”. The contract was a huge amount of money and I had to appear on the “Today” programme to defend the fact that we had imported 18 special trees from California to put in the atrium at a cost of £250,000 when the same trees could be bought in Homebase for £17.50. It was a lesson hard learned and I hope we do not get into that situation in future.

I also had the pleasure of serving on the Services Committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, who made some really important points. You do not have to be on the Services Committee for long to learn about gas leaks and the risks. The extended seven-year period extends the risks, as a number of colleagues have said, and it is very important that we make what speed we can. I also want to underscore what the noble Lord, Lord Maude of Horsham, said—and this also comes from my experience with Portcullis House. You cannot deal with anything like this scale of project on a steady-state basis. You need to have your sponsoring boards and your delivery authorities and we must take that seriously.

Like others, I think that the Joint Committee’s report is excellent. It is a really thorough piece of work which is hard to contradict in any way. I would be interested in talking offline to the noble Baroness, Lady Stowell, about this. The Joint Committee worked so well and yet the two Houses have completely separate services. Apart from the bicameral IT contract, everything is run separately. Well, the wiring downstairs does not run separately, so you think to yourself, “Why are we not taking this opportunity to have Joint Committees in a grown-up fashion which would secure efficiencies of scale in how we manage this place?”. That is something that we should be contemplating as well as the bricks and mortar as we move forward with this project.

I am in favour of a full decant. It is the cheapest and quickest option and it minimises the risks, so therefore it is a bit of a no-brainer. The one point I really want to make, if your Lordships are going to take away anything from my remarks, is that we should be much more optimistic about selling this project. Again, the noble Lord, Lord Maude, made some important points about technology. He is right that, if we are going to do this, we must take the opportunity to make it future-proof. It is difficult to future-proof technology because it moves so fast. But this could be a beacon programme for people around the world. There is a government policy at the moment called Digital Built Britain. We have world experts in places such as Cambridge who can look at intelligent buildings. We have a manufacturing technology centre which is world-beating. This building could be an intelligent, sustainable, accessible exemplar project—and we should be selling it as that.

The sense I get from the debate is that we are being very defensive about the costs and the time. That is true. I am not stupid. I do not have another election to face, so I can be a little bit more long-term in my thinking, but we really could be making more of what we can achieve. A number of colleagues have spoken about the ability to change the terms of democracy and the way it is operated. We will come back into this building in 2030—just think about what we could be doing then. I do not have time to go into it in detail, but we should think about the fact that we have been using iPhones—smartphones—for only 10 years. The change has been delivered by consumer need generating inexorable change in the way that we communicate. I now talk to my wife through text messages. It causes fewer arguments. So everything that we do gets changed, and we need to factor that in.

I learned the other day that Rolls-Royce does not really sell aero engines any more. What it sells is the data that tells the airlines what is happening to the aero engines at 37,000 feet over the north Atlantic. That is the power and the value of data. We have to capture that, and we can. We are clever enough to do it. We have people in here—the noble Baroness, Lady Lane-Fox, who was here a moment ago, is a world leader in this kind of dynamic situation.

I have one further thing to say to the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, in my last minute. I am a fan of technology but we must always remember that, while we may be digital by default, there are other systems that need to be put in place which allow people to work at their own level in their own way. The method of individual Members’ working is discrete from an enabled building or asset, so we must always protect the rights of individual Members to do their job in the way they think is best—but otherwise it is an absolute no-brainer. We must get on to the front foot, we must get a communications package, we must tell people what we are trying to do and we must sell it as an invaluable opportunity to extend democracy. If we do that, we can win the argument hands down.