Restoration and Renewal

Robin Millar Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Robin Millar (Aberconwy) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) on securing this important debate; he and I have spoken about this issue outside the Chamber, and he knows that we share concerns about it. I will start by paying tribute to those involved in what I have heard already this afternoon, because many people have already worked on this project. I am a relatively new member of the Sponsor Body—an interest that I am happy to declare. In the few months I have been on the Sponsor Body, it has already become clear that a number of people attached to this project and who have taken an interest in it have both developed great knowledge and expertise about it, and demonstrated a clear passion and care for its effective delivery, as reflected in this debate.

For the purpose of declaring interests and making clear the relevance of my comments, I note that I trained in civil and structural engineering at university. During my first few years working in that field, a lot of my work was on older buildings and their conservation and restoration—in fact, on one occasion, I had the great privilege of crawling through the ceiling space over the Commons Chamber, little knowing that I would come back years later to sit on the green Benches. Having said that, I do not presume to second-guess the real experts who are working on the projects: the engineers, or the procurement, management and administrative experts who will help with decisions about the formation of the governance and other bodies that will be set up. As I have said, I joined late in the process. That should not be interpreted as a way of distancing myself from previous decisions, which I recognise; it is more to explain my focus on what lies ahead, and on the future of the restoration and renewal project.

In the time I have, I offer three observations, drawn from the time I have spent on the Sponsor Body and the discussions I have heard. My hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds mentioned the importance of not allowing specification creep—a problem that plagues so many projects—whereby what was intended is embellished, enhanced and even replaced, very often with the best of intentions. At its heart, it should be possible to boil every project down to three things: how much it costs, how long it will take, and what the client will get for their money and time. If a project cannot be boiled down to that simple description, I would suggest that it is not properly understood. Those three parameters define the scope of the project.

The scope of this project was set in law, which presents the danger of that scope becoming fixed and immovable. I suspect that may be what happened in this case. I have heard the criticisms made of the Sponsor Body, but there is another factor, which is that the Sponsor Body was dealt a fixed hand of cards. I have been impressed with the knowledge and care of the people I have met, and suggest that another way of looking at the Sponsor Body’s role is that it was asked to deliver a set of proposals against fixed legislation, and has done its best to do so. I would not want to cast doubt on that, but the inflexibility that was created through legislation is at the heart of the problem. I will return to that at the end of my speech.

In any construction project, there has to be a dynamic relationship between the client and the contractor—the person who wants it and the person who is building it. The difficulty with legislation is that unless the client is absolutely clear from the start about exactly what they want, they are stuck with it once the gun has been fired, once the document has been signed and the law has been passed. While that works for what we might call a black box project—the client commissions it, walks away from it, and returns in time to cut a ribbon, pull a rabbit out of a hat or what have you—in the case of a project like restoration and renewal, where a key part of the scope has been the ongoing function of the site, that is not necessarily the case. That is where some of the confusion and disappointment might have crept in.

I stress that point on continuity of function. As a new MP who has spent just two and a half years here—and for some of that, I decamped to my constituency because of the pandemic—I have seen that this place really deserves the reputation of being the mother of Parliaments. I therefore take very seriously the need for it to continue to function in that way. It should not tip over into being just a relic or memory of what it once was, preserved for the past and for future generations in a historical sense, rather than remaining a living and dynamic mother of Parliaments around the world.

My second point is on procurement. Every commission has a buy-or-build stage. A decision is made about whether the solution will be bought or procured, or whether it will be developed in-house. That is true of this project too. With a project of this scale, complexity and importance, it is important to recognise the knowledge that develops along the way. By way of illustration, we can look at other Government procurement exercises. Perhaps I should not draw this comparison, but one of the difficulties that the Dreadnought programme has run into—it will replace the ageing Vanguard submarine fleet—is that the level of knowledge developed with the contractor responsible is so great that there is no alternative; they cannot be told, “It is taking too long and costing too much; we will switch to another contractor.” There is a real danger of a different kind with this project, in that the knowledge, understanding and professional expertise developed needs to be carefully curated, and we need to think carefully about where that resides.

I am not scared by the prospect of making a buy-or-build decision and deciding to bring things in house, and I am not overly worried by others’ observations that the Clerks may not have the necessary expertise, because we are talking about a commitment to a way of working, not an expectation of instant expertise. We need to make a strategic decision about where the knowledge that will come through working on the delivery of the project over time will accrete. Does it rest here, or does it go out into the marketplace? I have a very conservative question about where that fits, and how well it fits in the private sector.

I draw the analogy with what happens in France, especially in work on large, old buildings. There, there is recognition that such projects are ongoing and will take decades, if not a lifetime. Indeed, the old cathedrals very often took centuries to build—longer than the life of the architects who conceived them. Generations of builders worked on them. We need to adjust our timeframe, and our mindset to thinking in that way. The advantage is that a master craftsman commissioned to work on a building like this would have plenty of time to bring up the next generation—or generations—of apprentices, who would also work and develop expertise. They could then be deployed to other parts of the UK. The question of knowledge and where is it held becomes one of how that knowledge is best used, and how the restoration, refurbishment and renewal of this site is used to leverage improvement around the rest of the UK. Enhancing the number of workers skilled in this kind of work is a key way of doing that.

I will quickly make one point about innovation. A project of this scale, complexity, timeframe and cost should demand innovation from us. In looking at this place, we think it is so great, expensive and time consuming that we need to go with what is familiar and certain. I argue the opposite. Where is the innovation in governance structures? Time does not allow, but I could point to construction projects such as T5 at Heathrow, where an innovative relationship between client and contractor ensured that risks were managed better. I can see an opportunity for that here; in fact, the official documentation sets out that a third priority of the new approach is

“establishing a governance structure that is receptive to Parliament’s requirements as a working legislature”,

which links to my first point on concerns about scope.

I could say more, but I will conclude. I share the concerns about cost and timescale, but in defence of the Sponsor Body, it has been working within the constraints placed on it. I welcome this debate and the transparency of understanding that it offers. I look forward to the new arrangements, because this is a Parliament of which this country can be proud and a project of which MPs can be proud. Being involved on behalf of colleagues is a privilege of which I am proud, too.