Restoration and Renewal Programme Board

Lord Robathan Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

£9 million is it now? You see, it has gone up £2 million since yesterday. We have been putting up scaffolding all around the place, spending millions and millions of pounds, but this building will never be satisfactory. It will never be good for people to get around and do a proper job.

I mean no disrespect to those who have been suggested as members. They are excellent. They are all younger than me, particularly my noble friend Lord Collins. Of course, the Clerk of the Parliaments is the youngest of all; he is the baby of the lot. The other two are only in their 70s. Will they still be around when we even get to the next stage of this hilarious—no, not hilarious: awful—exercise that we are undergoing at the moment? At some point, is someone going to say that this is all going in the wrong direction and we should not be doing it? In the 21st century, a modern and dynamic country, as the United Kingdom purports to be, ought to have a modern, dynamic parliament building and make this into a museum, which it could be appropriately.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, I am not looking to join the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, in his garden shed across the way, but there is a very real issue of accountability. We are already talking about millions and millions of pounds. Nobody is quite clear how this has happened. I am delighted that we have a new commission. Who is making the decisions and when will they be made accountable to Parliament for this huge spending of public money that a lot of us disagree with?

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I remember when we moved from the old governance system to the new one. Without any disrespect to the Members mentioned today, I am not at all confident that we have the expertise inside this House and in the Commons to do the job. An outside body should be doing it. This has been going on for 10 years. Only this morning, I was leaked on by water coming from yet another falling ceiling. It is a national disgrace that we have been talking about this for at least 10 years. We have no answers on when and if we are going to move out—and, if so, where. We do not know when the work will start and when it will be completed. We spend more time discussing governance than getting on with the job. I want to see it started.