Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Lisvane Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 4th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

With the greatest respect, my noble friend needs to look more carefully at what is being asked here. It is second-guessing the planning.

In terms of the size, it is the size of the Berlin Holocaust underground site. It is the size of the one in Jasenovac. It is the size of the large temporary exhibition in America. It is not particularly small art; it is adequate for its size. It will not have any exhibits. It will all be digital. That does seem reasonable. On the location, more than 50 different sites were looked at.

I apologise for going on for so long; I hope that I will have an opportunity to speak in further debates.

[Lord Lisvane (CB)]

My Lords, I cannot contribute with the degree of fluency and authority of those noble Lords who have spoken so far, but I have a question for the Minister and an observation.

The question stems from the Explanatory Notes. Years ago, I had the function in another place of looking at Explanatory Notes in draft—not taking responsibility for their contents but ensuring that they were not used by the Government of the day for the purposes of advocacy. I looked at these Explanatory Notes, and they were pretty much typical of the breed: they are certainly notes but they are by no means explanatory. Where I hoped that I would have their assistance was on Clause 1(3) of the Bill, which states:

“For the purposes of subsection (1)(a), ‘construction’ includes erection, extension, alteration and re-erection”.


I would dearly like to see the instructions that counsel was given before it drafted that particular provision. It sounds as though the memorial is going to be mobile, which I am sure is not the intention.

If I can move on to the observation, at the north end of the Victoria Tower Gardens is the education centre; I have a particular reason for remembering this because, as a corporate officer, I was the applicant for the planning permission when it was originally given in 2015. As noble Lords will know, the planning consent ran out on 22 August last year; it was renewed or extended to 2030. When that runs out—or in anticipation of it running out—there will be substantial works, but I have not seen any reference to those in any of the supporting papers that the Committee has before it today. There will be traffic of substantial character, such as heavy lorries moving kit to and fro. If that is going to happen, as is possible, as the memorial and learning centre is in the later stages of construction, whatever difficulties of security, access and safety that that is going to pose will be exacerbated by doing all this to the education centre at the same time.

I am not sure whether my observation should find a home in our discussion of security or in our discussion of planning, but it seems to me that the Clause 1 stand part debate is a pretty good place to put it to begin with. I would be very grateful for the Minister’s reaction to that simultaneity of works and to the additional element of complication and cost that is no doubt to be introduced.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I was not proposing to speak on this group, but I have been moved to do so by the speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Finkelstein and Lord Pickles. As I do so, I make clear my gratitude to them and to everybody else who has been determined that there should be a memorial and a memorial learning centre. I absolutely applaud that, for reasons I explained in another debate in the Chamber. However, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, that I was rather shocked by what I hope he will forgive me for describing as his grandiose lecture creating an analogy with Nelson’s column. First, I remind him—I regret having to remind him, because he has an extraordinary family history, of which we are all aware, and we are hugely grateful for the contribution that his family have made to the remembrance of what happened to my and many other people’s families and ancestors—that Nelson’s column was a memorial to a man who had lived and not to 6 million people who had died. It is a very different proposition.