Restoration and Renewal

Paul Beresford Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mr Brown]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Also, the Chamber of the House of Commons, of course, was rebuilt in the 1950s when asbestos was extensively used as a fire prevention and building material. The dangers were not as well known then, or were not as accepted as they are now. The survey work to see how much asbestos is there has not been fully undertaken yet. Some excursions have been made and, as he hints, it is not looking good. There was a large exercise in the 1990s, I think, to remove asbestos from the House of Lords. How well that was done needs to be checked. Asbestos is a killer. Mesothelioma is a terrible condition.

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

The thinking behind decanting is not just about the asbestos. There is a sewerage system that runs from one end of the building to the other. Stopping it halfway down—be it left or right—is not feasible because it would involve a sewerage system outside the building and considerable complications. Added to all the other facilities in there now, we would have the same problem.

[Mr Brown]

That problem goes back to the beginning of the debate about whether we could decant Chamber by Chamber, or whether it would all have to be done as one big decant because of the pooled facilities. Again, survey work is not completed yet. We have agreed the R&R estimate that should bring the survey work to completion, and I eagerly await the conclusions.

Re-routing has been thought of. The interesting thing about the article I referred to is that it had photographs of what the original conduits look like now. They have been colonised by electricity cables, which are not labelled. They have been colonised by gas and water pipes that run through the original utility that was supposed to draw in air, so that it would become hot air heated by the fires underneath, which, given the fate of the previous building, was quite a brave thing to install in Victorian times. Is it appropriate now? Probably not. A bolder solution might be to just concrete over the whole thing and put new services in. A great danger of being on a Members’ scrutiny Committee is that we start finding Members’ solutions to problems, and that is probably worse than calling in the experts.

We have made mistakes; we should admit it. I do not think they are quite as expensive as my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds thinks, but there are things that have not been done as well or as elegantly as they could have been. I do not think we will get another chance to make a major change because we are about to embark, in perhaps two years’ time, on really big expenditure, depending on the directions we choose. For certainty, that will require another decision of the House, perhaps in the next Parliament, but soon-ish in our terms, and then there is no going back. If the costs are to escalate dramatically, we need to get there first. If the time that we are decanted from this place is to be longer that we had hoped, given the starting point for this discussion—it could be a lot longer than we hope—we had better get the decision on that right and reconcile ourselves to it. I do not think there is a more rational way forward.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

I am delighted that you are guiding us through this, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) on securing this debate. It seems to have had a really good first effect, which is that a motion on the subject will be before the House on Tuesday. I think he can take credit for that, even if it is not quite justified.

As I think everybody in the Chamber would agree, this project must move forward. It is sad that there are not very many of us here. Two colleagues are here from compulsion, and three or four of us are here because we are interested, but out of 650, that is not a very good sign.

We have been looking at this issue for quite some time. The first reference that I could find to the House of Commons looking at it was from 1904, and we have done nothing much since. The need for the works has been set out by the professional here, my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds. I was intrigued when the right hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown) talked about concreting over. Of course, when we walk into the subterranean areas of this building, we see that we cannot concrete “over” everything, because we are talking about all along the floor, all across the walls and all across the ceiling. I am a little taller than the right hon. Gentleman, and I find it quite difficult to walk down there. If everything were cleaned out, it would be a straight walk, and we would not have to hunch down. That is an indication of the amount of stuff there. As he said, we are talking about sewage, water, electricity and fibre. Nobody knows whether some of the electric wires are working, and whether there is any power in them. The insulation is coming off. There are fire detectors from one end to the other, and somebody walks up and down checking it 24/7, because we do have fires.

The basic structure of the building seems to be in reasonable order, as far as I can tell, although we have learned a few lessons from the Elizabeth Tower, where, when we lifted a brick, we found a frog underneath it; I guess we will find that. I hope that we can explain to the public that if we come up with an assessment of costs, it will undoubtedly be expanded upon, because we do not know what is underneath, or some of the problems that we will find.

The services really need to be sorted. My belief, having walked up and down the basement and above it, is that they have to be taken right out from end to end—a complete removal and replacement. At the end of January 2019, we debated the state of the infrastructure, and we agreed that the work should be done, and that it should get moving, but nothing has really happened. I am delighted that we managed to get work on the Elizabeth Tower moving; mostly that has been done because it was separated out and totally independent. The task is absolutely enormous. However, one does not need to be an expert to realise, even before somebody gets down to the basement and has a look at it, just how enormous the task is. I have taken one or two members of the press down there who were scathing about the costs until they went. Even the most scathing of them, from The Telegraph, came back saying, “You’re right. It’s got to happen. It’s got to be done.” If we do not do it, we are in for real problems.

There are some little things that my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds, who is an expert in the field, did not mention. We have little problems, such as 86 vertical chimneys running right along one passageway. That is where the heated air was supposed to go up. If there is a fire in the basement, it will go through the building as if it was made of timber. The trouble is that those chimneys now carry a mass of the services that run horizontally and are then directed up. There was mention made of the Chamber being built in the ’50s; I was not around and did not see it, but I understand there is an awful lot of stuff behind the panels. The panels of the Chamber will have to be pulled off, and everything will have to be cleared from behind them. Replacements will have to be put in if necessary, and then the panelling needs to be put back. That makes it rather difficult to think we could use part of it alongside that work.

There are gas pipes, air conduits, steam pipes, telephones, and communication fibres, and then there is that ghastly, huge, overloaded sewage system. The infrastructure serves the whole building from end to end, and vertically through the chimneys, and there is a duplication of it in the roof. I do not know if anyone in the Chamber has been in the roof and seen it, but it is a smaller edition of the horrendous mess in the basement.

The dangers of asbestos are well known and talked about. When I went down to the basement, I asked the engineer, “Where is all the asbestos?” He replied, “Well, they didn’t know about asbestos when they put it in, and they went in with buckets of it and big brushes and sloshed it up and down over the walls.” In other words, it is absolutely everywhere.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The situation is actually more serious than my hon. Friend suggests. Each one of those ventilation chimneys is surrounded by asbestos. Virtually every Committee Room in this House has asbestos in it. The experts need to tell us whether it needs to be removed.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Paul Beresford]

The decision to do that would be so much easier if we were not occupying the building. Every time I cough, I think that a certain Committee Room has caused it. The thing that staggered me was the sewage system. It runs from end to end of the building, and it tends to run down, of course, toward the House of Commons. At that end, it has two very large steel bowls. They were installed in 1888. When we think of the volume of usage, and how it has gone up over time, I am amazed that they still work. I understand why it leaks, I understand why there is panic when it leaks, and why we have to seal it up and stop it. There is an added problem, in that one of the tanks is listed. If we are going to do anything with it, we will probably have to try to get it out; knowing English Heritage as I used to, it will probably want us to set up the listed tank as a symbol. That would be a complete waste of time and money.

For safety and efficiency, we have to have a full decant. We have debated that before. In the last main debate, we definitely came down on that side. There were one or two pseudo-engineers, who I would not give a Meccano kit to, who were saying we could do it bit by bit. However, logic says that we cannot. What complicates matters even more is that if we do decant and move, we need to cover the security requirements. They are now worse than when we first started them. We have to be within the enhanced security envelope; otherwise, we might find that we are severely damaged.

As I have said before, this is an enormous and extremely complex task. I am looking forward to the revelations we will get on Tuesday, and to learning how this is to be done. It has been more than 100 years since 1904. I am nervous that there will be yet another delay, and that 100 years from now, we will still have not done the job.