Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 11th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation, as I have been for nearly a decade, and a resident of Westminster who walks my dog in the park.

I remind us all that this is Report, not Second Reading, and I will attempt to resist the huge temptation to remind noble Lords that the foundation considered more than 50 sites and that there is huge value in collocating the memorial with the learning centre—I could go on. Instead, I would just like to focus on this actual amendment.

We all know that putting the costs in nominal pounds in the Bill is a bad idea. It does not matter what the building is or what we are trying to do: putting costs in a Bill makes for bad legislation. Each of the speeches we have heard today has been a Second Reading speech, because this is really an amendment designed to wreck the memorial. I think we should be honest about that.

We should not put costs in the Bill. It is not surprising that the costs have escalated over the last decade—we have been living through a period of very high inflation. We have not put a spade in the ground precisely because of the planning process that has taken so long. This is not unique to the Holocaust memorial; sadly, it is a fact of life for every major building project in this country, which is a subject for a much broader debate.

It is not surprising that fundraising has not been started, because it cannot be until there is planning permission to build something. So I am afraid that the arguments being used in favour of this amendment are actually arguments against a Second Reading of the Bill, and therefore we should dismiss them.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest in that I am also a member of the foundation. In fact, I am one of the co-chairs and trustees. I can confirm what the noble Baroness said: we cannot start fundraising until there is planning permission.

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[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My noble friend has been talking about planning permission. Would he confirm that Westminster Council, both Labour and Conservative councillors, rejected planning permission here? In fact, it is only because that was called in and pushed through by the Government that we have got to this stage. He talks about local democracy, but local democracy was overruled.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

I remind my noble friend that, in Committee, I ticked him off by saying that, if planning permissions are taken by political groups, it is illegal. A planning authority has a right and an applicant has a right. Frankly, his objection that the political parties had a vote is entirely bogus and entirely wrong, and would be grounds for overturning the decision of Westminster Council. I say that as someone who was responsible for planning for five years.

There is a strong reason why the two buildings should be co-located. This is likely to be a memorial of not just national significance but global significance. It is the view of Yad Vashem—the Israeli Holocaust museum—of Auschwitz, and of the American holocaust memorial that this will be the most visited Holocaust museum in the world and will play an enormous part in pushing back against Holocaust distortion. That is an important reason.

I take the point that this is not a Second Reading debate. In conclusion, there is a strong reason why we should not place a figure on this. Members will recall that, very sadly, at the first meeting of the Committee, the Committee got itself into all kinds of hot water when a Member—inadvertently, I think—repeated an antisemitic trope, suggesting that the Jewish community should pay more because they were rich people. This amendment seeks to achieve exactly that. If the amount is limited, there will be a shortfall of £46 million, and by implication that has to come from the community and beyond. Given what happened in Committee, it is singularly unfortunate. I do not believe for one moment that that was my noble friend’s intention, but you do not get an opportunity to explain the motivation of noble Lords in this House when it goes out to the public. There is a grave risk, should we put this to the vote, of unfortunate motivations being ascribed to your Lordships’ House.

[Lord Harper (Con)]

My Lords, I will briefly speak to this amendment. As a former Secretary of State for Transport, I have some knowledge of construction projects, the time they take and the reasons why costs may escalate. There is a decision for people to make, and I strongly agree with what my noble friend Lady Harding of Winscombe said.

Looking at the Explanatory Notes, I reminded myself of just how long ago my noble friend Lord Cameron first proposed this project; it was when I was in government as an Immigration Minister. That seems a very long time ago, because it was. It is not surprising, given the passage of time, that the costs set out then will clearly be much larger now.

I am a great supporter of spending public money wisely, and I have listened carefully to all the comments and concerns that people have made. I will not ascribe motives for this amendment; all I will say is that the Minister needs to reassure the House that, if this Bill proceeds—and if the memorial and the learning centre are approved and constructed, as I very much hope they are—the Government need to put in place strong controls to make sure that public money is spent wisely.

Also relevant to the many construction projects for which I have been responsible in government is that costs escalate partly because it takes a long time before the design and content of those projects are finalised. In part, it is parliamentary processes—which are perfectly good and understandable—that then cause the cost to escalate. The most obvious example of that in the projects for which I was responsible—part-way down the track—was HS2. People complain about how much that cost, but part of the reason it cost so much was that both Houses of Parliament—it, too, was a hybrid Bill—altered the design and put lots of extra requirements into it. Members of the other place and of your Lordships’ House then expressed surprise that the cost had escalated. I very much want to get on and build this memorial and learning centre, and the more delays there are and the more we debate what it looks like and where it goes, the more the cost will increase.

Finally, I strongly agree with what my noble friend Lady Harding said: putting a figure in nominal terms in the legislation is unwise. We have existing processes, including the National Audit Office and the various structures that the Government have for managing major projects. They are not perfect, but we need to make sure that those structures are used. Ministers must be accountable to both this House and the House of Commons in regularly reporting and accounting for themselves, and we must be able to ask them questions. I suggest that this is an unwise amendment, and I hope that it is not accepted and added to the Bill.

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For a comparison, I shall talk a bit about the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, which is the most visited Holocaust museum in the world. Since 1993, it has had nearly 50 million visitors; if you annualise that figure, it is about 1.5 million a year. It obviously went down a bit during Covid. I think the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, said that the vision was for this to be the most visited Holocaust memorial—I may have misheard.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

This is Report stage, so the noble Lord can intervene if it is on a point of fact.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

What I said was that it was the opinion of the American museum and of Auschwitz and Yad Vashem that this would be the most visited.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I thank the noble Lord; I will still use that as evidence. Many of your Lordships may have seen the model that was in the Royal Gallery last week. If noble Lords can envisage more than 1.5 million people being able to go through the memorial and learning centre on an annualised basis, they are much better at logistics than I am because I find that hard to envisage.

I want to point out briefly what the Levine institute, the education centre at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, is doing and has done brilliantly, and think about comparing that with what one might be able to do with the learning centre as currently designed. The Levine institute has educated more than 272,000 professionals during the intervening years. I am not talking about children going through: I am talking about education where it matters. It has educated almost 70,000 military professionals, nearly 7,000 civil servants and 27,500 federal and state legal professionals. It has also conducted programmes on this in 45 states, and in Canada and Puerto Rico. It has delivered educational programmes to almost 170 federal, state and local law-enforcement officials across the United States. As far as I am concerned, that is that is real education. That is not simply trying to get to young people, but going to a whole variety of areas in society where people often have to make judgments about antisemitic or racial behaviour. For me, that is what education is, and really should be, about.

I just ask your Lordships to reflect on the contrast between what could be possible with a world-class learning centre, and what is going to be practical to deliver in the learning centre as envisaged. I beg to move.

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[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

My Lords, I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Russell. I was not aware of his grandfather, but I have made a note and I am certainly going to purchase his book, The Scourge of the Swastika. A memorial without a learning centre would fail to meet the objectives of the Prime Minister’s commission of 10 years ago in 2015. The report promised for us to remember and, as was mentioned earlier, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, said that it is

“the right idea, in the right place and at the right time”.—[Official Report, 4/9/24; col. 1169.]

That was the Prime Minister in 2015. The Prime Minister for the 2017 general election, the noble Baroness, Lady May, agreed with that, as did subsequent Prime Ministers in 2019 and 2024. The Conservatives and Labour had this proposal in their manifestos.

The other place has voted on this, so now it has come to this House. This House is a revising Chamber. Some of the amendments may be well intentioned but, from listening to them, I think some of them are meant to wreck the Bill, because a memorial without the learning centre, as I say, would not work. Without an integral learning centre, the memorial would lack context. We would miss the opportunity to help millions of visitors learn the facts of the Holocaust and its significance for Britain.

The noble Lord, Lord Moore, mentioned how the Cenotaph came about. As we walk past, we see “The Glorious Dead”, and, as he rightly says, those who served in the First and Second World Wars would know about that. But we are talking about the future here. The generations to come—our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren—need to be educated on what happened. That is the whole point of having this centre there. It is fanciful to suggest that a learning centre could be placed elsewhere without losing this opportunity for visitors to learn.

Abandoning the proposed design for Victoria Tower Gardens would mean setting the programme back many years. Perhaps that is the intent of the amendment. It is wholly unrealistic to imagine that a new site in any remotely suitable location would gather universal support. We would at best spend many more years facing and listening to objections from a new set of voices. I am sorry to say that, but it is the feeling that I have. The Government are right to bring this to the House as previous Governments have done, so I will not be supporting this amendment.

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, I am asked two questions that I always find really irritating. The first is whether I am Jewish and, if I am not, why I am interested in this. The second is, “What got you interested in the Holocaust?” I can tell the House that when I was 10 years old, in 1962, my grandfather got me as a birthday present a copy of The Scourge of the Swastika, which I read from cover to cover. It put the living daylights into me and I have always been fascinated by it. I am sorry that I had not made the connection with the noble Lord. It is a wonderful contribution not just to this country’s history but to its literature.

The noble Baroness made an important point about the loss of the Jewish Museum, which I mourn; I thought it was a really good museum. I am sure she was a regular visitor and I have to tell her that I was too. Without going into detail, there were some management problems that accelerated the problems there, but I make it clear that you can count me in for any revival of the Jewish Museum, because it is important. It fulfils the role that the noble Lord, Lord Moore, referred to in his excellent column about the importance of the POLIN museum in Warsaw. It is a wonderful museum about Polish life and about an understanding of the importance of Jewry in Poland. The hard truth is that the heart was ripped out of Poland by the Holocaust, and Poland has simply not recovered.

I hope noble Lords will not mind me reminding them that the POLIN museum is subterranean. I hope they will not mind me reminding them that the size of the Holocaust section of the POLIN museum is just fractionally larger than the learning centre proposed for Victoria Tower Gardens. I hope they will not be too upset if I remind them that the Berlin Holocaust museum, which goes along with that interesting memorial, is subterranean, and I hope they will not mind me reminding them that it is considerably smaller than the learning centre. Part of the Washington museum is subterranean and, when that museum decided to look at its country during the Holocaust, as we intend to look at ours, the size of its exhibit was smaller than ours. The proposed museum is not exceptionally small. If you look across the world, you will see that, by and large, it meets the numbers.

We have to make it clear that we have the full support of the Imperial War Museum to build it here. We have on the foundation people from the museum in Washington and from the 9/11 museum in New York. We have people who represent the Imperial War Museum. Forgive me, but I have learned throughout this debate what a distinguished historian is: it is a historian who agrees with you. We have a whole list of distinguished Holocaust historians on our academic board who support the memorial.

If we were now to say, “Let’s just build a memorial and find a learning centre elsewhere”, that would be a big missed opportunity, because we are living in a post-Holocaust world. We have just seen the election of a Polish President who has allegations against him of being a Holocaust denier. We cannot wait to do this. This would be an important global institution, and we should not throw it away.

I shall quote two small paragraphs from a letter that we have received from the Holocaust Education Trust, which each Member has received. It is from our friend Mala Tribich, the sister of the late Sir Ben Helfgott. She says:

“I was liberated in Bergen-Belsen by the exceptional British Army in 1945 and London has been my home for most of my life. It feels entirely fitting that a memorial should stand in the country that so many survivors are grateful to and have called their home. My brother and fellow survivor Sir Ben Helfgott … campaigned passionately for this national Holocaust Memorial and dreamed of seeing its opening—it saddens me that he did not live to see it come to pass. It is my hope I will be able to attend the opening and remember Ben and all the family we lost”.


Karen Pollock says in the same letter that more than 10 years ago the memorial was first proposed, and now is the time to act:

“Many survivors like Mala still dream of being present at its opening. Tragically, others—like Sir Ben Helfgott and Lily Ebert MBE—will never have that chance”.


If we split the memorial from the learning centre and do not go along with these proposals, it will be decades, or maybe never, before it is built, and that would be unforgivable.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords—

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[Lord Robathan (Con)]

My Lords, may I briefly intervene? I hate to disagree with my noble friend Lord Howard, not least because I have great respect for him, but I was made to speak on this by listening to the noble Lord, Lord Russell, who spoke extremely well, if I may say so. I too have read The Scourge of the Swastika—I was appalled by what I read, when I was about 15 or 16—and The Knights of Bushido. It is appalling.

Yesterday when I went to lunch, purely coincidentally, there was a man there who told me that his mother had been on the last train to Auschwitz. She was a German Jew, and her father had been killed on the eastern front. The mother, who was Jewish, put the girl in a convent, but she was found in the last few weeks of the war and sent to Auschwitz—and, luckily, survived, obviously, because this young man was there.

The point about that story is that it is not just the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, and everybody else in this Chamber; there are people still alive who saw the awful things that happened in the Second World War, and we need to remember that. I know that many people here will have been to Yad Vashem. What an astonishing experience that is, to go to Jerusalem and to see that shocking display—certainly shocking to me, anyway.

I have also been to Poland, only once. I went courtesy of the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz, and thanked them for it. It was amazing. Again, it was literally tear-jerking. By the way, I would point out to my noble friend Lord Pickles, who mentioned the underground bit of the Polish war memorial, that it obviously has not had very much effect on the Polish president, whom he said might have anti-Holocaust beliefs. Is that right?

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My noble friend asks me specifically, so I shall tell him that when I arranged a meeting in Milan with the curator of the POLIN museum, he was frightened to leave the museum, because if he did so, the then Government—the same party as that of the new president—were going to sack him. What my noble friend needs to understand is that there is a battle going on about Holocaust memorials, and if we are to preserve things like the POLIN museum we need to preserve the truth. This will be an important part of it.

[Lord Robathan (Con)]

I agree with my noble friend 100% about preserving the truth, but I do not think the truth is necessarily preserved by this particular proposed learning centre. We need something a lot better, frankly. It was said in 2015, as I understand it, that the Imperial War Museum wanted the learning centre there. I went round the galleries of the Imperial War Museum on the Holocaust—I think they are permanent—and they too are very impressive. We can enhance them. I am not a planner, but I would not object to that. The Imperial War Museum has space and can enhance the view and have an impressive learning centre. We need an impressive learning centre for this appalling crime against humanity—and, to back up what the noble Lord, Lord Russell, said, I am afraid that this proposal is not for an impressive centre.