Regulatory Impact Assessments Bill

Debate between Esther McVey and Edward Leigh

2nd reading
Friday 20th October 2023 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Above all, there has been no impact assessment for the poor people living north of Birmingham who live on the line, whose farms have been taken and who have perhaps been forced to give up a place that they have farmed for generations.

[Esther McVey]

I do not think there will ever be enough scrutiny of what went on with HS2. Is my right hon. Friend concerned at all that the cost went up from about £36 billion to—if Lord Berkeley, the Labour peer in the other place, is to be believed—£180 billion? Thankfully, it was stopped, but is my right hon. Friend concerned that an impact assessment was not done on those staggering changes of cost?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

It is just amazing how we walked into this disaster: how no one questioned why HS2 was so ludicrously over-engineered, with the trains running far faster than they do on the continent, for instance.

Before I end, I want to deal with a matter very close to where we are now standing: this building. The whole restoration and renewal saga of Parliament is an HS2 in bricks and mortar. There has never been any proper assessment of what we have been doing. I sat on the sponsor board and I have been dealing with this matter in various Committees for years. I am now on the programme board, which reports directly to Mr Speaker. Hundreds of millions of pounds have been sunk into making ever more complex and over-engineered plans for restoring and renewing this building. We should just have got on with it six years ago, but we still have not come to a final decision.

We are meeting on Tuesday—yet another meeting in which we are going to be asked, believe it or not, whether we should have a full decant. I have been arguing about this for years. We are still talking about going to Richmond House, if the House of Commons ever voted for a full decant, which is totally unsuitable. We would have to rip out the courtyard and knock down bits of a listed building. There would be years of argument, another public inquiry and more delays. This decant will not affect anybody who is now sitting in the House of Commons. It will not happen for years, but still we are returning to the same arguments. The delivery authority keeps returning to this; it keeps saying that it is cheaper, more cost-effective, and all the rest of it to have the full decant. However, we have got on with repairing Speaker’s House and Elizabeth Tower, and we are going to work on Victoria Tower. We should just get on with the work.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

As a former Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee, what I hate so much in politics is that people are so casual with the expenditure of taxpayers’ money. I loathe that attitude. If it was their own affairs in dealing with restoration and renewal, they would just get on with the job. They would get various estimates and do what was necessary—the minimum necessary—to make this building safe. But because it is public money, we set up committees and create these huge bodies such as the one running HS2 and the one running R and R, with people paid huge salaries and making endless, over-engineered plans. It is frankly disgraceful.

[Esther McVey]

Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that, should the House decant somewhere else, it may be to an inferior Chamber? It may be not as secure or safe. In such an inferior Chamber, everything we are talking about here—full scrutiny, proper debates and being held to account—might be overlooked, just as how we were not holding the Government to account during the lockdown period, when we missed some debates and some votes.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

We all know how a Chamber is so important. We saw that through the extraordinarily anaemic debates we had during the whole covid period, when there was, frankly, an appalling lack of scrutiny of the Government.

The Bill is extremely timely. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch, I cannot understand why the Government will not accept it, but I am sure that in a few moments this eminently sensible Minister will give it the green light.