Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster

Meg Hillier Excerpts

Thursday 20th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), but there is a danger that he is doing what I am very concerned about, which is keeping going the debates about many options. He is, of course, entitled to his opinion, but we are getting to the crunch point now. It does feel a bit like groundhog day. We are, once again, debating these options and, in essence, what has changed?

What has changed, as others, including the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), have said, is that we are spending more money: £127 million a year, according to the National Audit Office. What has not changed is that we still need to do a major refurbishment. What has changed is the personnel involved. I caution new Members in particular that it can be tempting to say—I think the Leader of the House is dangling this in front of us regularly—that Parliament has changed, people have changed and there are new views. But that is the thing about this place: it is a constantly renewing democracy and place. Unfortunately, with the byzantine structure of Committees and Members changing all the time, if we take the view that we always have to revisit everything because it is a new group of people working here, we will never settle on tough decisions. The Government are the same. How long does a Government Minister last or indeed a permanent secretary in Whitehall? I have been the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee for six years. Only one permanent secretary is still in post, in a different Department, from six years ago. We therefore have to recognise, as the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) said, that we are the custodians now and we need to make the decision.

It is worth noting—this is a bit of a back-of-the-envelope calculation, so there is probably somebody I have missed out—that there have been three Clerks of the House, two Mr Speakers, at least three Leaders of the House, three Prime Ministers and three Parliaments since the Joint Committee reported in 2016. As others have pointed out, it was on 31 January 2018 that this House made a decision to get on with it. It has been a very slow process since. There is a danger that this will be endlessly revisited, with new Parliaments, changes to the public finances and everyone coming up with a great new idea about what the different needs are.

Let me re-emphasise, as the former Leader of the House the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire did, that there is a risk of catastrophic fire here. There have been 29 incidents between 2015 and 2020. There are 24 fire wardens on three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Not long before lockdown, one of the fires was found on a weekday. If it had been a weekend, the wardens’ patrolling pattern meant that they might not have picked it up. Mechanical and engineering is a mess. Anyone who has been down to the basement can see the problems there, with hot water next to electricity. This has all been highlighted many times, as have issues with the sewers; you do not need to ask someone where the lavatories are in this place because you can sniff them out most of the time, and staff have to work in that stinking smell. The great stink got the sewers of London built, but the great stink might finally get us out of this place. There are holes in carpets, with more seeming to emerge even in lockdown, and dangerous voids, top and bottom of the building.

The main change is that a lot of money has been spent to keep people safe in the event of a catastrophic fire. So we have all got fire alarms in our rooms and in Committee Rooms, but that does not save the building; if the worst happened, that is what would happen. That is a real issue because this is a grade I listed building, a heritage building and a UNESCO site, so there is no option here. Ultimately, the Government—it is the Treasury’s responsibility—under UNESCO rules, have to make sure that this building survives. Much of the work that has been done, with this £127 million a year, will have to be redone once major works start.

The Leader of the House has used his position to delay, not progress. Of course we have to keep an eye on things, but we have set up a structure that allows us to do that. I agree with the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) that there is a danger that it is seen as self-indulgent to discuss this today. We should not be discussing the principle of what we do and when we do it; if more Members were here talking about the businesses that could benefit from this, that would be a good thing. There are many other issues we could be discussing. Rather than this, we could be talking about jobs and opportunities for people who have had a really tough time over the past year. The Leader of the House is proposing options that would put staff at risk. I do not want to be responsible for any staff in this building once we start ripping out asbestos. He is also proposing options that would lead to a lack of clarity over who is responsible. If we had a hybrid set of working, are the contractors, the Sponsor Body or the Delivery Authority responsible, or is the Clerk of the House? If something went wrong, who is in charge in that complex set-up? We need to be clear that those are dangerous and risky options.

The Leader of the House speaks of Parliament agreeing it, but I remind him, as others have, that Parliament has agreed with this. We must be careful about endlessly opening up options, and having a start-and-stop approach. There is a sense that this is a bit like musical chairs, with everybody believing or hoping that they will not be standing when the music stops, a bit like as it is with covid-19. I recall that just over a decade ago, probably about 12 years ago, I was serving on a pandemic planning sub-committee of a Cabinet Sub-Committee, where I was a bit-part player in discussing then how to deal with a pandemic. It is apparent that over time that drops down the agenda because nobody thinks that they are going to be the Minister in charge when the pandemic hits. It dropped down the priority list, but this issue cannot, as we know what we want to do and there is a real risk here.

Of course, value for money is very important—I am clear about that. I chair the Public Accounts Committee for a reason: I believe that every pound of public money saved is a pound for the Government of the day to spend on something else that they consider to be important, on the basis of the manifesto on which our voters elected them. That means that the business case is important, but it will cost billions and billions of pounds to do this work. Let us be honest about that. Let us forget this £4 billion figure that is being bandied around. We know it will cost a lot of money, but it cannot be done on the cheap—there is not a cheap option for a building such as this. We have to acknowledge that and accept that we are the custodians and we have to make the tough choices. This must be value for money and in response to the hon. Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) let me say that, yes, there needs to be an envelope of costs, contingency needs to be built in and we need to be rigorous about testing and pursuing people on that. That is why we have made sure that the National Audit Office looks regularly at this and that the Sponsor Body works closely with the Infrastructure and Projects Authority, so that each step of the way the project planning is in place to make sure we are doing this.

Of course we should not gold-plate things. We certainly do not need to gold-plate temporary provision, because it will be temporary. It needs to be functional and workable. We have shown over the past year that we can be very adaptable and their lordships seem to be even more adaptable, able to work in different ways. We work in our constituencies and in all sorts of different environments. We do not have to have the perfect solution, but we need a solution for the time we are out of the building.

We must also plan to ensure that businesses up and down the country are enabled and prepared to bid for the contracts that will come up. Some years ago, I visited New South Wales ahead of the London Olympics to see how businesses in New South Wales had been worked with to get them ready to understand what they needed to do to bid for contracts for the Olympics. We can do a similar engagement project, but while we are debating whether or not we do it, we are going to be a long way off getting to that point of supporting such businesses to get jobs.

All the evidence shows that any major project will get more expensive and more complex the longer it goes on, so we need to decide and we need to get on with it quickly. We should not be prolonging it, and we need to have a focus on what needs to be done, including setting the parameters and making sure that good governance is in place to get on with it. This will also help us control costs, which of course we are all concerned about, but we must not be concerned about the big figure at the beginning, because there will be a big price tag. There is no getting around that.

Let us just run through the governance. We have the Sponsor Body, which is a group of professionals who understand how to manage projects, and it will oversee the Delivery Authority. Of course, Members—we have heard from some of them—are represented on those bodies. In the House in the past, and let us look at the Elizabeth Tower as an example, reporting to the Clerk of the House through the system in the House has not worked. The Elizabeth Tower refurbishment started off with a price tag of £29 million, and it ended up at £80 million. So the idea that somehow we are passing responsibility over and losing control of costs is hardly borne out. We need to keep a close eye on the costs, but the idea that it can be done in the old-fashioned way through the House systems has not proved to work. I will not highlight it, but I recommend to Members the National Audit Office report of last year that looked at the Elizabeth Tower, when the House’s own auditors recognised some of the challenges and problems, such as mission creep and the inability to bottom-out costs at the beginning.

We need to get on with it, and we need to open up the opportunities. As the right hon. Member for East Hampshire says, doing nothing is not an option. We must not reopen every option every time we debate this. We all aspire to run the country—sadly, my party is not running the country at the moment—but if we want to be in that position, we need to show that we can boldly take difficult decisions. Government is not about being popular and always choosing an easy option; it is usually the opposite. Proper governance is actually about making difficult decisions.

I want to put on record my thanks to the right hon. Member for South Northamptonshire. She did not mince her words today, and I thank her for that. It is not a political game. It is not about pitting London against the country. It has just got to be done, and if we do it well and we do it right, we will be thanked, ultimately, because we will have saved this building and created jobs around our country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

May I begin with the point mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Sir David Amess) and by you, Mr Deputy Speaker: our mutual friend, Mike Weatherley, whose death was sadly reported today? He and I coincided—we were elected to Parliament at the same time—and he was a friend to every Member of this House. He was a kindly, good, decent, hard-working person. We send our deepest sympathies to his family and pray for the repose of his soul.

This has indeed been an excellent debate. I am grateful to everyone who participated, particularly the shadow Leader of the House, the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire), who has taken a very constructive and thoughtful approach to this matter. I think that we can work together, because it is one of those occasions where there is much more agreement than perhaps there appears to be on the surface. I will try to go through that and, at the same time, try to respond to all the contributions that have been made.

First, let me record my gratitude to my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) for representing us on the Sponsor Body, for the work that he is doing, and for the extremely measured and thoughtful approach that he characteristically takes, pointing out to us that ultimately we will have to make choices. We will have to decide on what we want, to consider phasing, and to work out how much is renewal and how much is straight restoration. This will be fundamental to how the scheme is costed in the end.

I also thank my predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom), who unfortunately is not in her place for the wind-ups. Given that she was the Leader of the House, she knows where this programme began and piloted it through its beginning stages very successfully. She made some important points about recognising that the work has to be done. That is fundamental. There is nobody who disagrees with that at all. The work needs to be done, and it needs to be done as soon as is practicable. There has been absolutely no delay in my period as Leader of the House. Indeed, I would argue the reverse.

Interestingly, my right hon. Friend gave an example of the stone falling on to the car of our right hon. and learned Friend the Attorney General. That was not at the Palace; it was at Norman Shaw. That is why the works that we are doing have to be phased, and the work on Norman Shaw is taking place. I can tell the House that the plans for Norman Shaw are under way and the proposals are being made, and, as we are not now intending effectively to bulldoze Richmond House, they are going ahead faster. The planning permission went in, I think, in March and the work on Norman Shaw North should have its own decant in December 2021, with external works commencing in January 2022 and completion of the project in October 2025.

I have to tell the House that if we were continuing with the Richmond House programme, were waiting for that to happen and had not used Richmond House as the decant option for Norman Shaw, we would not even have started on Norman Shaw until 2025, let alone completed it. I must therefore reject the idea that things have not been happening.

Derby Gate, which of course creates some of the space for people moving out of Norman Shaw, will see people moving into it on 31 July this year. The preliminary works are taking place, and they are taking place faster because we have been trying to get the scheme under control. That is the second part of the work. The first part was to recognise that it needed to be done, but the second part was to look at the cost.

When I became Leader of the House, in one of my early meetings on restoration and renewal, it was suggested to me—this is not a formal forecast—that the cost range was likely to be £10 billion to £20 billion. That is ridiculous. It is not an amount that even those of us who are most committed to the project think is reasonable. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said in his excellent speech that the figures for Richmond House had risen to £1.6 billion. I knew that the combined cost of moving the two Chambers was £1.5 billion, but my right hon. Friend was suggesting £1.6 billion just for Richmond House.

The right hon. Member for Alyn and Deeside (Mark Tami), as always, made a thoughtful contribution in which he spoke about decant. My opposition to decant has never been decant per se; it has always been a means to an end on cost. We were getting schemes that were so ridiculously expensive that one had to push back and say, “Surely there is a better and cheaper way of doing it.” Whether we can get it down to the £46 million suggested by my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough, I am not certain, but £1.6 billion is not proper stewardship of public funds.

[Meg Hillier]

The right hon. Gentleman talks about cost, but we of course do not know what the cost is until the business case comes through, and I think that needs to be clear. Is he really suggesting that if we do the work around us, that will be cheaper than if we move out and do it in one hit and then come back?

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I have not begun to suggest that, and I am very glad that the hon. Lady has intervened on me, because the figures given by the Public Accounts Committee on the £127 million of running costs that we are expending are not very well explained in the Committee’s report. If she wants to explain them, I would be delighted to give way.

[Meg Hillier]

The figures quoted are from the National Audit Office, and the full details are in the National Audit Office’s work. They are then simply quoted in the Public Accounts Committee report. It is National Audit Office work that is done to get those figures in the report.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Those figures seem to relate to the £44 million spent on the Northern Estate project, the £24.6 million for Canon Row, the £15.9 million for fire safety, the £12.6 million for the Elizabeth Tower and the £4.8 million for IT, almost all of which will continue regardless of how R and R is done. Therefore I am concerned about the impression being given by this figure that there is a massive increase in cost because we have not yet moved out. I do not think that is accurate, but if the hon. Lady would like to give more elaboration on the figures, I would find it very helpful.

I have tried to look for further details to understand what is being quoted in that £127 million figure that was mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire and alluded to by the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier). I think it is important to get an understanding that a lot of the costs we are being told are extra are actually preliminary, because we are getting on with the work to get things ready.

There is the crucial work—a number of people have mentioned Notre Dame—on fire safety. We should bear in mind that the fire safety work has been tested and completed, with the exception of the Victoria Tower, in the past few months, and includes: 7,112 automatic fire detection devices; 1,364 locations for fire stopping compartmentation, dividing the Palace into 16 compartments; 4,126 sprinkler heads in the basement of the Palace, so the risk that we have heard about of a conflagration from the basement is very, very significantly reduced; and the 8 miles of pipe that I have referred to before.

It is really important to understand that a lot of work is already going on and ties in with the outline business case, which is being carried out to schedule by the Sponsor Body and the Delivery Authority. That is the right way to proceed, because a number of people have mentioned the Elizabeth Tower, including the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch, and what went wrong there with the cost going up from £29 million to £80 million. The key thing we learn from that is that we need to do the outline business case in detail.

I actually think that had we said to the British people, “To redo Big Ben, a national symbol, would cost us £80 million”, the British people would have said that that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. I think the criticism came because the expense rose as the process unfolded. We want to ensure that that does not happen with restoration and renewal and that we get a figure that is realistic.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

Absolutely, but within limits. The £10 billion to £20 billion would, I think, test the patience of most of our voters. That is why I do not think that this House should go blindly into approving or delegating this scheme without knowing precisely what the cost is. This debate is therefore important, because the outline business case is being worked on as we speak. Those involved have begun the survey work, and they are getting on with it, which is really important. But if they come back to us in early 2023 and say, “The cost is going to be £10 billion to £20 billion.” there will be a vote in this House to approve it or not. I have a nasty feeling that if it is at that level, we will not approve it, and yet the work must be done. So now is the time to give the message that we are willing to accept a little inconvenience and to have more restoration than renewal, and that while we have to ensure that disability access is done properly, we recognise that the last percentage of disability access is the most expensive. There are therefore compromises that we will be called upon to make.

[Meg Hillier]

On the Elizabeth Tower—I alluded to this, but perhaps I should quote directly from the NAO report—Parliament’s internal auditors identified, among other things,

“inadequate project governance; high turnover of project staff; and poor cost estimation.”

That really encapsulates the things that we do not want to get wrong with this project. It will cost a lot of money, but we need to be sure that we have had proper governance and proper cost destination and that we are presenting to the public a figure that is real, even though it will not be cheap.

[Mr Rees-Mogg]

I am absolutely at one with the hon. Lady, and I am grateful for that helpful intervention. That is why the outline business case is being worked on now. We hope to have some preliminary idea about it early next year, with the vote on it in 2023.

Let me return to some of the individual contributions. My neighbour and right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) emphasised the symbolism, the need to get on with things and the stonework. It is important that, under the Act, the Commission—I can assure the House that the Commission is very aware of this—is allowed to carry out repairs before the R and R body takes over. We have scaffolding up, so it seems sensible to try to do repairs where we can. There is no point in having scaffolding, as it currently is, just acting like the slips, waiting to see what catches come its way, although of stonework rather than cricket balls. So I agree with what my right hon. Friend said.

The hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) seemed to want to become Old Father Thames, which was a rather charming way of suggesting how we should rebuild the Palace. My hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes) emphasised the limits on public money, as did the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). He also encouraged, as did many others, UK-wide working and opportunities, and pressed for answers on timescales, which we will get in the outline business case.

I find myself in a very high level of agreement with my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller), who pointed out that this is a place of work. Although it is nice that tourists come to see it, that must not interfere with its work as a legislature, and if we need to do building work in August, it cannot be open to the public in that time. Getting that priority right is very important.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) said, “Get on with it!” I hope that I have persuaded him that we are getting on with it, and that is what everybody wants to do. As I have set out, the preliminary works are very much already happening.

My hon. Friend the Member for Southend West wanted a date for the Elizabeth Tower, and I will give him a date. I am told that the bells will ring in early 2022. Now, “early”, when used by the civil service, is one of those things that I have learned about in my brief time in Government, and early 2022 could mean some time in December, but it would be early December. However, there is a better promise, which is that the scaffolding will be down by summer 2022—“summer”, of course, is an equally elastic term. What particular point in summer, I do not know, but we are almost there. The bells were being tested this morning, and it was really rather wonderful to hear them—it was uplifting. My hon. Friend made the crucial point, which was so helpful to the argument, that the Richmond House planning would have delayed us until 2027, which would have been an added complication and problem with the whole programme.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Norfolk (Duncan Baker) brought his own experience to bear in a very interesting way, and talked about how we look after customers. He said that we do not inconvenience them, but that we sometimes have to recognise the need to keep going regardless.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bishop Auckland (Dehenna Davison) made an inspiring and sparkling speech. She was against gold-plating, as am I, and did not want a blank cheque in these economic circumstances. She reminded us of Churchill’s view of how buildings shaped our democracy. She also talked about what it would look like to our constituents if we decided to do things in a sort of Liberace way—I am not very keen on doing things in a Liberace way. [Interruption.] I am being mobbed out from the Front Bench by the Deputy Chief Whip. As he has 330 votes in his pocket, I must not ever dare to disagree with him; otherwise, Government business might become problematic.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich West (Shaun Bailey) mentioned opportunities and the need for there to be a plan for jobs. I think his basic plea was for every member of his constituency to be employed on the parliamentary estate. He referred to apprenticeships. Apprenticeships will be important and will have a long-running benefit for the heritage of this country because the stonemasons who are trained here will then be stonemasons who work on our great cathedrals and other heritage buildings.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Sara Britcliffe) mentioned the symbolism of this place and told us very clearly—I think this is the right way to put it—that we cannot duck the question. If we duck the question, we will end up grousing, to carry the bird thought through. But that is what we are doing now: we are not ducking the question.

I was delighted that my hon. Friend the Member for Sedgefield (Paul Howell) spoke. I fear that even now, nearly 18 months after the general election, one’s heart still leaps at the thought that Sedgefield is a Conservative seat. Leaving that little point aside, he mentioned what an iconic institution this is with its 1 million visitors. Follow the cash, as his old boss used to say to him, is what we must definitely be doing. The important point is that it is very hard to future-proof in terms of technology, because we think we are future-proofing but the technology goes off in some other direction that we did not think about. So we have to be open to a variety of opportunities.

This is a long-term project and it will come at very considerable cost to the taxpayer. The solutions we arrive at must therefore be the best option for the preservation of the Palace of Westminster and in the public interest, prioritising value for money. This is fundamentally a parliamentary project. I cannot remember who said that actually it is a fundamentally House of Commons project, because the symbolism of this House as the democratic House is what people think about when they look at the Palace of Westminster. I have the greatest admiration and respect for their lordships, but when people look at this palace, they think of the home of the world’s oldest democracy. My right hon. Friend the Member for North Somerset made that fundamentally important point. It is a parliamentary project. It is a House of Commons project. We are the ones who are accountable to taxpayers.

I have set out my Government’s views and other hon. and right hon. Members have set out theirs. I am confident that the restoration and renewal programme team will listen to those carefully, and in the coming months the Sponsor Body will engage with MPs and peers to seek their views on how the proposals should develop. It is vital that parliamentarians give their time, energy and expertise to this process so that collectively we shape a programme that safeguards both the Palace of Westminster and taxpayers’ money, and will make St Peter proud.