Restoration and Renewal

Lord Vaux of Harrowden Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vaux of Harrowden (CB)]

My Lords, I remind noble Lords that I chair your Lordships’ Finance Committee and therefore sit on the commission. In those roles I have become more involved in the discussions around R&R in the last year or so, but I stress that today I am speaking entirely on my own behalf.

I wholeheartedly support the Motion in front of us today and the changes being made to the governance of the R&R project. We have heard quite a lot of doom and gloom so far and I am sure we will hear more, so let me try to put a more positive view on things, if I can.

First, I will say a word on what the proposal is, and what it is not. This is not about prejudging the end result—what options will be chosen, whether we decant or not, the level of accessibility and so on. Those decisions are for the next stage, once the delivery authority has done its job in providing us with a range of options. This proposal is about how we get to that point and ensure that we are able to take the right decisions. I am sure that some will think we already know what the options are, but really, we do not. No intrusive surveys have yet been carried out—they are, at last, happening this summer—and only very limited options have been considered. Like most noble Lords, I expect that a full decant or at least some decant will be required. But again, that is not a decision for today.

I thank our representatives on the sponsor body board. They have worked extremely hard to get us to this stage and, frankly, their task was pretty much impossible. They deserve our sincere thanks. But the existing structure was flawed and, frankly, not working. The sponsor body was created in part to put R&R at arm’s length from Parliament and to remove the politics from it. That failed. It was not the fault of the sponsor body but we ended up with the two Houses of Parliament taking opposing positions. The whole thing became, frankly, rather Brexity, split between “decanters” on one side and “non-decanters” on the other, rather than trying to find imaginative solutions to the problem. One of the great positives to come out of this new situation is that the two Houses are now working much more closely together. Personally, I have been encouraged by the amount of common ground we have had in our joint meetings.

The sponsor body was also meant to be the “critical client” for the delivery authority but, in reality, I am afraid that it has become its de facto communications arm. This has been most evident in the poor control of expenditure, as the noble Lord, Lord Colgrain, previously raised. The combined expenditure of the sponsor body and the delivery authority to date has been well over £200 million—I think the noble Lord said £212 million—which includes incredibly high expenditure on corporate overheads and consultants and, in particular, extraordinary levels of expenditure on IT. The sponsor body itself has been paying between £5 million and £7 million a year to a big four accountancy firm just for the business planning. As I say, the intrusive surveys are only now kicking off, nearly two years later than planned. Most of the work done has been desktop analysis and modelling rather than genuine “sleeves rolled up” investigation.

The structure also created a very “them and us” situation. Our in-house teams, who probably know more about this building than anybody else, have not been sufficiently involved in the R&R process so far. This reset should ensure much closer collaborative working—it is already achieving it. However, we should be looking at how we can improve the situation, and I believe that this reset creates some real opportunities.

First, we have heard comments, and I am sure we will hear more, about kicking the can down the road. I have a more optimistic view. There has been a tendency to defer decisions on important work simply because it will be part of R&R. Part of that is to avoid nugatory spend, but part of it has simply been “It’s simply too difficult to make that decision now: let’s park it.” We now have the opportunity to bring some of those elements forward, especially where they relate to safety and risk, and I very much hope that will happen. I urge the teams to give us tangible examples of that as soon as possible.

Secondly, I hope we will now see a fundamental change in approach and mindset. So far, the way it has worked is that the sponsor body and the delivery authority come to us to ask how we want things to look and then go away to investigate that scheme. To me, that is the wrong way round. As Members of this House, none of us are experts; we do not know what is the art of the possible; and we do not really understand the state of the building. Of course, we know the broad parameters of where we want to end up—safety, accessibility and fitness for purpose as a home for Parliament in the future—but there are many ways to achieve that. To prejudge the detail before we have the options is the wrong way round. In this, I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Carter: we should not set the endgame before we know the situation and before the delivery authority has imaginatively come up with what we need to do.

We need the delivery authority to do the work, including the surveys—which should have been done two years ago—and come back with a range of options that will allow us to take an informed decision. We must also test some of the articles of faith that have emerged that are not always entirely based on fact. One I hear regularly is that the building is falling down faster than we can maintain it. I see no evidence of that anywhere and, when I asked for it, the sentence was taken out of the paper.

This requires much greater imagination and creativity by the delivery authority. Let me give your Lordships some examples. One reason the costs are so high is the assumption that everything should stay the same. First, we must remove all the services out of the basement and then we put them all back in the same place. That has huge time and cost implications. If it is possible to do it differently—to install services in a different location—we could do those two things in parallel, or even avoid the first step by leaving what is there. We do not have to remove it if we do not have to replace it there.

We have also been overly cautious over heritage constraints. I am quite pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is not following me, because he might choke at this point. Of course we need to preserve this amazing building, but not in aspic. Buildings evolve, as this one has since it was built. We should look seriously at options that would reduce costs and, potentially, make the building a better home for Parliament, even if there are heritage implications.

The noble Lord, Lord Newby, mentioned glazing in the courtyards, and I agree. My example is lifts. Putting improved accessible lifts in current locations is very difficult, time-consuming and expensive. An easier solution might be to put them up the outside of the building in the courtyards, where no one can see them. That is easy and cheap, but has not been considered so far. That is just an example—it may not be workable—but I am asking that we think more creatively to save and improve this building. The current proposals would see a 20% reduction in usable space for the £7 billion to £13 billion we are talking about. Where is the imagination in that? Where is the out-of-the-box thinking? I am sure we can do better.

The new governance structure will help, with more co-operative working between the two Houses—it already is. It should allow some work to be accelerated and, I hope, will encourage greater creativity of thought, hopefully leading to better proposals for the Houses to agree. I am completely behind the proposed changes, and I urge noble Lords to accept them.