Houses of Parliament: Co-location

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Thursday 16th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Southwark. I hope that he and his colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of London, will continue to care for the spiritual health of your Lordships as we remain in the capital. I join others in complimenting my noble friend Lord Norton on his choice of subject, his introductory speech, and his tireless campaign to promote the effective working of your Lordships’ House and, in particular, to prevent us being physically separated against our wishes from our partner down the corridor—a no-fault divorce if there ever was one.

The issue of R&R came up at the Members’ forum last week. These are very welcome initiatives and I hope that more will be held. However, it put the issue before us in perspective. Andy Helliwell made it clear that although the issue of where the House of Lords moves to was important, it was not holding up progress on R&R; it was not on the critical path. Therefore, there is time for us to persuade the Government to think again about their proposals.

Although I am complimentary about the Members’ forum, I am less enthusiastic about the Joint Statement from the two commissions, which was published on Tuesday, purporting to set out the next steps on R&R. I read it twice and confess that I was no wiser at the end, and that I was puzzled by the jargon that was used, such as this:

“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.”

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

Quite so.

Turning to our future location, in his Written Answer to a Question from me on 30 May asking why the QEII Centre was not suitable, referred to by the right reverend Prelate, my noble friend Lord Greenhalgh offered no reason why it was not suitable, but the first and last sentence of his reply were that:

“Levelling Up is central to the Government’s mission and the Government would welcome the House of Lords playing a leading role in that effort…. For this reason, the Secretary of State cannot support the use of the QEII Conference Centre, a location in the heart of Westminster, as a decant location for the House of Lords.”


I have two questions arising from this. Is that a statement of government policy, carrying collective agreement, including that of the Leader of the House and my noble friend the Minister, or was it just the personal view of the current Secretary of State, which might not have gone through the normal process of Whitehall clearance, and which might well be altered if it did?

Secondly, if the Secretary of State has his way, £10 million of abortive expenditure will have been incurred. Which unhappy accounting officer will be hauled before the NAO and the PAC to explain this? If it comes off the Parliament vote, will it be reimbursed by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities? Has there been a direction from the Secretary of State that feasibility work on moving to the QEII Centre should stop?

I notice that it is not proposed that the other place should join us in this exodus. If relocation of your Lordships’ House elsewhere would have a leading role to play in delivering the levelling-up agenda, as the Secretary of State asserts, would not that impetus be magnified several times over if we were to be joined by the other place? Sauce for the ermined goose is surely sauce for the plebian gander. R&R can proceed only with the agreement of both Houses. As we have discovered over the past eight years, getting that agreement is difficult. It is made more difficult, unnecessarily so, if there is a pre-emptive strike on options by one party to the discomfiture of the other. One lesson from the events of last month is that there should be no more of it.

In considering the proposition that we should move out of London while the other place remains here, I am reminded of the sketch in which Peter Cook is holding auditions for the role of Tarzan in a film and Dudley Moore hops on to the stage, clearly, in the words of Peter Cook, a “unidexter”, for the role conventionally played by a biped. Having complimented Dudley Moore on his residual leg, Peter Cook then says:

“I’ve got nothing against your right leg. The trouble is, neither have you”.


So it would be under the Government’s proposals: the country’s legislative Tarzan—Parliament—would be unable to play its role effectively, shorn of one limb. In the words of Peter Cook, next candidate, please.