Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster

Mark Tami Excerpts

Tuesday 12th July 2022 Commons Chamber

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this timely debate on how we will govern the essential programme of works needed to preserve the heart of our democracy for years and generations come.

Only yesterday, the sitting of this House was suspended as water poured in. It is not the first time that business has been disrupted by a potentially unsafe working environment, and while yesterday’s sitting was suspended for only an hour, who knows how long we could be forced out next time? Electrical, plumbing or mechanical failure—there is urgent work to be done, so I am glad that we have the chance to get things moving again today.

Whether it is the weight of history on one’s shoulders as one walks through the 11th-century Westminster Hall, or the beauty of the sunlight beaming across New Palace Yard through the colonnades, the honour of working on a UNESCO world heritage site comes with a duty to be a responsible custodian. It is an honour to work in the Palace of Westminster, with all its architectural, cultural and historical significance. We also have legal and moral obligations to preserve this listed building, which around the world is a symbol of Britain and our democracy. But those who work here need to be able to carry out the functions of a modern-day Parliament, and those who visit here ought to be able to experience the Palace in all its glory, and they must be able to do so safely.

Whether they are working or visiting, everyone on the parliamentary estate must not only be but feel safe—safe from falling masonry, safe from asbestos, safe from a catastrophic failure of the building. I share the fears of my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) that we are heading for that catastrophic failure if we do nothing. I recognise the concerns of right hon. and hon. Friends and Members in all parts of the House that that is where we are heading.

When I say everyone, I truly mean it. The estate must also be made more accessible to people with disabilities. Not only does the lack of accessibility make visiting the estate difficult, but it disenfranchises a talented group of people from working in Parliament. Restoration and renewal could provide opportunities to improve access and step-free accessibility, as well as visitor facilities.

I think no one is likely to disagree with anything I have said, which is similar to much of what the Leader of the House said, so Members could be forgiven for wondering why we are here—why we are where we are in the restoration and renewal of the Palace. In 2018, the Commons and the Lords agreed that work was pressing and rightly concluded that it should be undertaken by a statutory sponsor body and delivery authority. Subsequently, as my amendment highlights—it pains me to have to say this, but I do have to and I notified the right hon. Gentleman that I would—the former Leader of the House of Commons, the right hon. Member for North East Somerset (Mr Rees-Mogg), worked to undermine progress and spent time wrangling with experts instead of working with them to secure the future of the building. We must follow the evidence and the advice of experts. I did think that the Government could have learnt by now that ignoring experts is just not advisable. I am afraid to say that in my view there is a political dimension. The Leader of the House asked me not to make it a party political matter. I am afraid to say that there is a huge aspect that is. It is on certain members of the Government that we are here. The right hon. Member for North East Somerset just kept changing the goal posts. I have seen that happen. That is typical of the whole Government.

However, today’s motion, much as I might regret that we are here, is purely about the governance structure of the works. As shadow Leader and therefore member of the House of Commons Commission, I was part of the Joint Commission that took this decision, as the right hon. Gentleman said. I will support the motion. I do so not because I am happy with how we got here—I am very much not—but because it seems to me that we are running out of other options. I do not want to undermine the skill and undoubted dedication of the people involved in the Sponsor Body, but for whatever reason—there is a range of reasons—confidence had been lost over emerging costs and so on. The Independent Expert Panel reviewed the situation and has concluded that the current model is unlikely to be viable.

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend talks about costs and we have heard about spiralling costs. The Sponsor Body has been honest about what the costs are. One of the biggest problems in this place is that we come up with figures—the Queen Elizabeth Tower being a classic example—that are totally unrealistic. We have to be honest that this project will cost a lot of money.

[Thangam Debbonaire]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right. We do not have to be expert builders to see that this is going to cost money and it is going to take time. I see no alternative to both Houses having to move out for a period of time, as yet undetermined.

I also say in response to my right hon. Friend that this shows the critical role of the Commons Finance Committee, the Parliamentary Works Estimates Commission, chaired so ably by my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown), and the Public Accounts Committee, which has done such excellent work. Members of the PAC are here today and are very knowledgeable and skilled at exactly that sort of line by line scrutiny. We would need that whoever was commissioning the works—whether it was the Sponsor Body, and both Committees have paid close attention to the current structure, or any future structure.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Grayling (Epsom and Ewell) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend the Leader of the House is new to this. I recognise that both as a friend and a thoughtful politician he is approaching this in the way he judges the most sensible, so I do not want him to take any of the comments from me or from other Members tonight as being about him, but it is about seven years of failure, in my view.

We are standing in what is, for all of us, the office, but it is also a global landmark. We have all seen how—thank goodness, in the wake of the pandemic—the streets outside are full of tourists again. People come here to be photographed alongside the Elizabeth Tower and see this building as a symbol of the United Kingdom. The reality is that it is a world heritage site. People who question whether we should spend money on updating, restoring and protecting it, and say that we should move to a new building elsewhere, miss the point that we have a legal duty, whatever we do as a democracy, to restore this building and protect it for the future.

Back in 2015, the hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) and I, and others, including the right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), sat on a Joint Committee of both Houses saying, “What are we going to do about the problem?” It is a very real and acute problem. When I became Leader of the House in 2015, about four days later, we very nearly had to relocate out of this building because up there in the vents the engineers found asbestos. Had they discovered that that asbestos had been disturbed—fortunately it had not; it had remained unmoved for decades—we would have had no choice but to close the Chamber for months and months.

That kind of risk is with us every day of every week. The hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) referred to the leak yesterday. Thank goodness it was a small problem. But we saw what happened at Notre Dame. Yes, the Leader of the House is right that it was down to a workman in the building doing the wrong thing, but we have workmen right across this building all the time, and it can happen. We saw what happened at Clandon Park. The thing that really brought it home to me at the time of the Joint Committee was when Kingsway caught fire—a road caught fire—because of electrical problems underneath its surface, and it burned for about two days.

The shadow Leader of the House is absolutely right: the fire service have always said, as they said back in 2015—it is not just about now—that, if there is a serious incident in this place, they could save the people but they could not save the building. So every day of every week in this building, we live with the risk that we may discover that an asbestos problem or a critical failure of the plumbing system means that we have to move.

[Mark Tami]

The right hon. Gentleman is a fellow person who has been at this for seven years. We have already seen a release of asbestos in Speaker’s House that will lead to a group of people having to be monitored for probably about 40 years to see whether in those terrible circumstances anything actually develops, and that can happen in any part of the building.

[Chris Grayling]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We went through all this seven years ago. It is hugely frustrating to me that we are here seven years later still working out what to do about it. I thought that we would have done something by the time we got to 2022.

The right hon. Gentleman and the hon. Member for Rhondda will remember me pushing hard to get the northern estate project started so that we could move on and decant quickly. At least the northern estate, or some parts of it, is being done, and we have taken over Richmond House, as we planned at the time, but here we are seven years later still discussing how we are going to do this. It is not about discussing how we are going to do it starting in about a year’s time. I cannot see how we quickly get to a point where the works are actually starting. With every week that goes by, there is the risk that we as Members of Parliament wake up in the morning and discover that we have relocated to Church House indefinitely. We have to accept that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Tami (Alyn and Deeside) (Lab)]

It is four and a half years since we reached our decision and I think it has been said that it is seven years since we started the whole process, and where are we? Nowhere. We are back where we started.

I should say that I am a member of the Sponsor Body—until we abolish it, that is. I believe it has carried out the task that it was set. The fact that certain individuals do not like the recommendation for a full decant is not the fault of the Sponsor Body. If the House wants to change the remit or scope of the project, that is fine, but let us not blame the Sponsor Body. Let us at least have the good grace to be honest about that, and let us not make up stories such as “Restoral and renewal was responsible for the change of Speaker”, because that simply is not true: it had absolutely nothing to do with R&R.

As a number of Members have pointed out, we should not forget why we chose the structure that we did choose, learning from the Olympics and recognising that this place would change. In the event of a project which, however it is carried out, will continue for many years, Members will change, Governments will change and there will be different views, but what we recognised at the time was that that should not be allowed to undermine this project—which is exactly what has happened. The project has been derailed by a constant stream of new asks, all with one aim: to delay. We have heard suggestions that the House of Lords should move to York, or, more recently, to Wolverhampton, Stoke, Burnley, Edinburgh, Sunderland or Plymouth. I am sure that they are all fine places, but those suggestions were not realistic.

More time was wasted by the suggestion that we should not decant at all. I challenge any Member to come up with any report or any figures that suggest that it is cheaper to stay here than to move out. We need to be honest about that. Then we had the Richmond House debacle. Those who were opposed to a decant seized on Richmond House: they became great defenders of it, which, surprisingly, very few of them had seemed to be previously. Why was that? Because they saw Richmond House as a convenient vehicle for more dither and delay.

So what is the plan now? It is to get rid of the Sponsor Body and bring the function in-house, creating some new department and some hotchpotch of a new governance structure.

In all honesty, we are being asked to rubber-stamp a decision that has already been made. That is the reality of the situation. Parliament decided something, but that does not matter because behind closed doors, the two Commissions have decided to do something completely different. That is the reality of the situation. We can dress it up as much as we like but that is effectively what has happened.

As a number of Members have mentioned, we do not have a great record on doing things internally. I know that the cast iron roofs are always wheeled out as a great example, but the Elizabeth Tower has been mentioned, and Derby Gate is another project that went massively over cost and time. One of my favourites—not one of the biggest projects—was the Cromwell Green security entrance, which I think was condemned after 10 years because of leaks, with water pouring through when it is raining. So we have to be honest: we are not very good at doing this. We do not have the experience or the expertise to manage such projects. I am not blaming the people in-house; it is not their fault, but we sometimes set them tasks that they are unable to do because they do not have that expertise. That is why we drew up the model that we did, but if we go down the road that we are going down, we are going to repeat those mistakes.

One thing I will challenge, which I have heard being put about, is that one of the failings of the Sponsor Body was that it did not consult Members. Actually, there have been loads of consultations and loads of individual consultations. I have had the pleasure, or misfortune, of chairing numerous meetings where one, two or three people—and sometimes no people—would turn up. Maybe that was me; maybe it was just the fact that I was chairing them and nobody wanted to go. But this is the nature of politicians. We moan and groan about people not consulting us, but we do not take up the consultation when it is available. So I think that is a really unfair criticism of the Sponsor Body, because a lot of people worked extremely hard to make sure that Members had the opportunity to express their views.

[Kirsty Blackman]

Just to link that to the hon. Member’s earlier point, does he think there is much point in consulting all the Members when the House of Commons Commissioners are going to make a decision anyway that might be totally different from what Members have said?

[Mark Tami]

That is a very fair point. As I said, the decision has effectively been made.

Let us be honest: it is not about the cost; it is not about the time it will take; and it is certainly not about the people who actually work in here. So what is it about? It is about people who want to stay in here, come what may, with some fantasy vision that we can somehow live in a little bubble in here, that we can stay put, come what may, while everyone works around us, and that we can come up with some costings and then say, “We don’t like that costing so we are going to halve it or quarter it”, and somehow the project can be done for that amount. We are ignoring the reality, and just because the Sponsor Body gave us that reality, we do not like it. The Leader of the House does not like it, so he says we are going to come up with something else and do it on a cheaper basis. It is as if we did not look at these things seven years ago. But this is where we are. As I said, I do not really know why we are having this debate, because the decision was made behind closed doors some time ago. That is a very sad state of affairs, and the House will rue this decision.