Nick calls for ambitious restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster
Lord Herbert of South Downs
My Lords, if today’s approach to restoration and renewal of the Palace of Westminster had been taken in 1835, we would not be here in this majestic building. The decision then to establish a royal commission, with a competition for designs, produced 97 entries and Barry’s visionary new Palace. It might have been three times overbudget and taken 24 years to complete rather than six, but it was done.
Two centuries later, as inheriting custodians of the Parliament that was created then and repaired after the war, it is surely nothing less than our duty to maintain and repair it. Of course we must control costs, but we are talking about a capital sum spent over a period of years to renew a world heritage site for a further 200 years.
In an overreaction to the scale of earlier proposals, all ambition truly to renew this royal Palace seems to have gone. Instead, we have a deliberately more modest proposal to deal with the safety of the building first, perhaps last. Of course we must heed the warnings. Our predecessors did not, ignoring the public alarm sounded by leading architects of the day, Sir John Soane and Robert Adam among them, that the Palace was a fire risk. The rest is history.
Of course we must act to protect this building and the thousands of people who work here, but essential repair, though it might be an argument from which the naysayers cannot so easily escape, should not be the limit of our ambition. This building is not fit for today’s purposes—for modern meetings with technology, for greater public engagement, for the number of staff who now have to work here, for the disabled.
If you go to Canberra, you can visit the pokey old Parliament building, which is now a museum. You can still smell the tobacco in it. Up the hill, there is a purpose-built Parliament, with the space and facilities which a modern legislature needs. I am not suggesting—at least not today—that we move out of this place altogether, but we need to do more than repair the building. We know about the importance of public and shared space; a Parliament especially, where meetings and discussion are fundamental to our life and work, needs such space. We know that performance improves when people work in a good environment, yet we cram staff into appalling conditions. My ministerial office beneath the Commons Chamber was overrun with rodents and alarming spores were growing on the walls. A shocked eminent doctor visited me and pronounced my office a health hazard, but it was also occupied by members of my staff because there was nowhere else for them to work. This is true even of Cabinet Ministers’ parliamentary offices, such is the overcrowding.
Piecemeal improvement, which is now to be institutionalised in these arrangements, has led to suboptimal development. The ugly visitor centre that has been added on to the western end of the Palace is a great facility for schoolchildren, but it shamefully obscures the aspect of the Palace from Victoria Gardens. The visitor centre at the United States Capitol is not an eyesore; it has been built underground. By the way, the environment around Capitol Hill is immaculately tidy, free of the litter which blows around Whitehall and chewing-gum mashed into the floors of this Palace—a detritus which is somehow a metaphor for the disregard we collectively have for this special place.
Of course we should decant while the work is done. Disliking the prospect of leaving, or fearing never returning because parliamentarians are approaching retirement age, is neither an honourable nor an acceptable reason to stand in the way of a cheaper and necessary temporary measure.
“Restoration and renewal cannot just be about health and safety; it needs to support a renewal of our democracy. That requires ambition, not reactionary opposition”
I agreed with everything the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said. Restoration and renewal cannot just be about health and safety; it needs to support a renewal of our democracy. That requires ambition, not reactionary opposition. If we had vision, for instance, we might consider ideas such as those of the Commission for Smart Government, which I had the honour to chair, to build a new ministerial centre as part of a revamped Parliamentary Estate. Ideas such as this might improve the performance of government.
I suppose I agree, albeit reluctantly, with what noble Lords have said: the proposals put before us are the only way forward now. But this is worse than a menu without prices; we have now been told that what might be on offer for the main course and pudding cannot be seen at all. All we are left with is the starter: the essential safety-critical work, apparently the only thing we can agree on. I am afraid it reflects badly on us. This is not our building; it belongs to the nation. It is an international symbol of who we are, where we came from, and the parliamentary democracy that we stand for and are known for.
That we should repair this building urgently, now, should be beyond debate. But I believe we should do more, lift our sights, and try to show at least a measure of the same leadership, ambition and foresight which a few good parliamentarians and a great architect showed 200 years ago.
You can read the full debate here.