Holocaust Memorial Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Viscount Eccles]

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 10, leave out from “of” to end of line 11 and insert “£75 million provided by Parliament and grants from The Holocaust Memorial Charitable Trust.”

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, in discussing funding and expenditure, I will consider the present funding and whether there are restrictions on how the money can be properly spent. This will entail consideration of the plans to build the Adjaye/Arad building in Victoria Tower Gardens.

The Holocaust memorial and accompanying learning centre are to be constructed in accordance with the recommendations made in Britain’s Promise to Remember, as accepted by Prime Minister Cameron in Methodist Central Hall on 27 January 2015. The then Prime Minister highlighted two recommendations. First, Britain should have a

“striking and prominent new National Memorial”

in central London. Secondly, there should be a “world-class learning centre” to accompany the national memorial. The Prime Minister also announced the creation of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, in response to the recommendation that there immediately be a permanent independent body to manage the project. He made the promise of £50 million of public money to kick-start fundraising, which was later increased to £75 million.

Page 53 of Britain’s Promise to Remember says:

“The Commission proposes that the permanent body seek to raise money from business and private philanthropy and that the government should match this, pound for pound, up to an agreed limit”.


That proposal has not been accepted; there is no permanent independent body and the Prime Minister’s kick-start has been ignored. Will my noble friend on the Front Bench and the Minister tell the House why the promoter made and maintains the decision not to implement these two recommendations from the commission?

Further, there has been no alternative effort to raise civil society money. Many memorials have been funded by civil society and the commission looked for philanthropy to show the way. Since 2019 there has been the Holocaust Memorial Charitable Trust, but no money has been raised. Funding and expenditure decisions are now necessary and urgent; the only funds available are the £75 million of public money. In the present circumstances, that needs to be accepted as a limit. In contrast, for the trustees of the charity, there is no limit; depending on the public’s response, the sky is the limit. Thus for funding there is £75 million and, prospectively, an unknown sum in charitable grants. The formal position remains that these funds must be spent on the commission’s recommendations. As the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation says, it is

“taking forward the recommendations of the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission”.

Given what we know from previous planning application proceedings, Committee on this Bill and recent explanations of plans in this House, the memorial and the learning centre are planned to be housed in one building. Unfortunately, this combination of both under one roof is not in accordance with the commission’s recommendations. The evidence is unarguably that the memorial and learning centre are to be closely associated as two distinct organisations in two nearby places. In 2016, the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation aimed to have the memorial constructed by the end of 2017 and the learning centre built and working before the next election. There cannot be any interpretation of Britain’s Promise to Remember that means “under one roof”.

In Committee, the Minister referred to “co-located”. Unusual in its use, “co-located” has a wide meaning, and as used by the commission, it clearly does not mean “under one roof”. The formal position remains that there are restrictions on expenditure, and the Adjaye-Arad building fails to meet the test. We need to agree an alternative that enables us to get on with the job.

Fortunately, there is one. There is widespread support for a conventional, stand-alone national memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens. There are many good reasons for simplifying the project in this way, and we will hear about them shortly. The world-class learning centre can be established nearby in Westminster. Because developing the centre will need both time and money, a newly established independent body may need to secure office space before doing anything more ambitious. How it develops the learning centre will depend upon charitable fundraising.

My amendment sets out on the face of the Bill the way in which a conforming compromise could be funded and how we can move ahead. I beg to move.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, bearing in mind the instructions that have come, it is the aim of all of us who oppose this project to be constructive; we want to improve it. It is not about nimbyism, or even the location, but delivering something worthy of the cause: worthy, as I say to myself, of the losses in my own family, which is what has driven me for the last nine years or so. It is in that spirit that we bring forward these amendments.

I support the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, in drawing attention to the financial non-management of this project in an era when every penny counts, and when proper education about the Jewish community of this country is crying out for funding and reform. The costs have escalated beyond the original estimates, without even a spade in the ground. The available figures are about two years old, no allowance for inflation has been made, the contingency is far higher than usual, private funds have not been identified publicly and, as I will come to, there is no management control.

As I have said before, I am struck by the contrast with the planned expenditure on a fitting memorial to the late Queen, reportedly to be erected, together with a space for pause and reflection, in Saint James’s Park at a cost of £46 million. The project will include the replacement of the Blue Bridge and is going to be ready in 2026. If such fiscal restraint is good enough for our late Queen, surely something has gone adrift in the financial plans for the memorial.

The petitioners before the Select Committee on the Bill asked that the Government present for the approval of Parliament a report on the capital and operating costs of the project, as well as the financial sustainability of the entity that will execute and operate it, before they present any new or amended proposal for planning permission. I have not seen such a financial report.

The original Government grant was £50 million; that has been raised to £75 million, and we believe the total cost will now be nearly £200 million. The latest estimate was made a couple of years ago.

There is no information about who will do the building, or indeed whether there are any builders willing to do it, given the security risks. The Commons Select Committee commented on this:

“We are particularly concerned about the costs around security of a Memorial and Learning Centre, which would need to be taken into account. Security is likely to be required around the clock, and this is, as yet, an unknown cost. Security is likely to become an expensive additional cost, which we urge the Government not to overlook … On this basis, we urge the Government to consider how ongoing costs are likely to be paid for and whether it offers appropriate use of public money”.

--- Later in debate ---

We should not seek to do this on the cheap. Nor should we place an unrealistic burden on charitable donors. We know that many people from all parts of the country and all backgrounds will wish to make some contribution to the memorial. However, as it is a national memorial, it is right that the bulk of the cost should be borne by public expenditure. The allocation of a budget and the oversight of expenditure for this programme will be part of the normal arrangements for settling departmental budgets, subject to the normal scrutiny by Parliament and the National Audit Office. There is no need to seek additional statutory controls, so I ask the noble Viscount to kindly withdraw his amendment.

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, this is not an easy debate to reply to. I thank noble Lords who have spoken but will not attempt to sum up what they said. Many things were said about what has happened so far, why we should have a memorial and what the dangers will be, but that is not my purpose, which is a narrow one.

I was 14 when the British Army went into Bergen-Belsen. I remember that circumstance very clearly: I remember what we thought about it, what we said to each other about it, and how we were held to think about it very carefully by our schoolmasters, one of whom was an Anglican priest. I have thought about that circumstance very carefully ever since; it comes back to me often.

My problem is that I do not think the memorial and the learning centre should be in one building. I have made a technical argument that simply says that if we were implement the commission’s recommendation, they would not be in one building—they would be in two buildings. I think that technical argument runs, but I do not want to make too much of it. What I want to see is a national memorial, and we have nearly all come to agree that it can be in Victoria Tower Gardens without wrecking and so altering the gardens so that they are not gardens any more.

If we were to construct an unmanned, conventional memorial in accordance with the commission’s recommendations, we would have done that and, of course, we would still have needed the learning centre. To my mind, going to the memorial to remember is very different from the research, the understanding and the learning of lessons. The commission was absolutely right when it recommended that the memorial and the learning centre should be two separate matters.

In addition—and I totally support my noble friend Lord King—there are huge problems with what is on the table at the moment, and it needs to be simplified. There is a will to construct a conventional, appropriate and, I hope, brilliantly designed national memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens. We should be getting on with getting that constructed. The foundation said it needed two years—if anyone thinks the present plans will be completed in two years, they need to think again.

My noble friend Lord Sassoon talked about public money. Of course I am conscious about public money; we all are in today’s circumstances. There is no doubt that £75 million would be sufficient to build a really impressive national memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens.

Should I ask the House to decide? It is not really very easy to be confident, given the position of the two main parties, but this is Report: there is time for noble Lords to think, change their minds and go for a perfectly conforming and satisfactory solution to the situation we are in, so I withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 1 withdrawn.