Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill

Lord Wallace of Tankerness Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard - continued): House of Lords
Monday 22nd July 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Andrews]

No, my Lords, I did not say that. I was making a hypothetical case that, were such a grant to be considered—I am not saying that it would be—it would have to satisfy different conditions. Of course I agree that this is a public project for national Treasury funding.

I have now lost my thread completely. This is the second time that my noble friend has interrupted me when I was developing my strategic thinking. I return to the principle. It is extremely important, for all the reasons we know, that this change is owned by the people we are here to serve. It is absurd not to recognise them in the Bill or to give them a voice.

We know how to do this, although it is complicated. At what point do you start involving people? How do you structure it? How do you reach out? How do you collect the voices, as it were? But we do it every day in major and minor projects around the country. It is not a miracle; it is a science.

To take just one example before I close, the National Museum Wales has, I am delighted to say, just won a national museum of the year award. In its redevelopment, which involved a great deal of new building, it involved thousands of people from all manner of excluded groups in the local and national community. The result has been transformational in their and our understanding of what people expect from a national museum.

This is not a museum. We have a much greater duty. But those principles and methodologies can certainly be adopted and followed.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness (LD)]

My Lords, I support the amendments and the spirit in which they have been moved and spoken to by the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Bethell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews.

In my involvement both in the Joint Committee and in taking part in debates, I have been very conscious that we are here as trustees. That has implications not only because we have responsibility—we have to get on with it, because we would not be thanked by the public if we dithered and an accident happened which destroyed part of this important part of our national heritage—but, as trustees, we are temporary. There are 650 Members of the other place here by election. Those of us who are here are, as the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said, at the hand of the grim reaper or may choose to take retirement. That makes it important to remember that we are here but there is a great public out there, to whom we owe responsibility. As the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said, it is important that we try to understand what they want from what is, in fact, their Parliament—a place where they can engage with not only Members of Parliament but Members of your Lordships’ House. How can they get their views across? How can we use this place for education, so that we bring up a new generation of citizens who want to take part in the democratic process?

The amendments are directed at engaging the public more in what we are doing at the moment; I suspect that those who know about it are somewhat cynical about it, so an explanation of why a large amount of money is being spent might go a long way. They are also trying to gauge what the public wish to see in how we spend that money. When the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, talked about access and people wanting to talk to their MPs, I reflected on the fact that, when we voted earlier this evening, my noble friend Lord Foster of Bath asked me, if I got a chance when I spoke this evening, to say that he thinks that it would be a good idea to have a coffee shop in the Royal Gallery because it is a large space that is not used for much else, except on historic occasions, but which could clearly be adapted and changed. I rather suspect that, on first hearing, people would say, “Oh, we can’t do that”, but has anyone ever asked? It would be a good place for that, in the same way that Portcullis House has become a meeting place for discussion and discourse for Members of the House of Commons—you can take people there. That is perhaps worth thinking about if we want to engage the public more.

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I certainly agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, that we are trustees, or custodians, of this Palace of Westminster, which ultimately belongs to the public that we exist to serve. Clearly, we need to ensure that, through this programme of works, the Palace that belongs to the public and the people who occupy it are in a position to serve the public better.

I also support the need for public engagement with and consultation on these works. I would counsel one thing, however. During the debate, I have been a little worried by comments about attempts by us to help the public to understand better what this project is all about. At the moment, those of us in positions of great privilege and some power think—too often and mistakenly—that we are the ones with all the information and that we need to impart it and impose it on other people. As has been made clear by other noble Lords in their contributions, we want to understand better what the public expect from their Parliament and reflect on what they want so as to influence how we change.

However, I would go one step further: we must be frank and understand that the process of consulting people is another opportunity for us to show that we are changing and that we want to serve them better. I want us to ask about what it is that people want to see us change in terms of our behaviour as parliamentarians. If we can understand better what they want from us in terms of how we behave—to show that we take them seriously and listen to them in carrying out our work—we should consider what we need to do differently in terms of how our building is formatted, refurbished and renewed to make sure that we are better placed to show that we are listening and responding, and to give people confidence that that is what this is all about.

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Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

21: Clause 5, page 4, line 33, at end insert—
“( ) Any strategy or revised strategy published under this section must include the Sponsor Body’s best estimate of the timeline for the Palace restoration works, including likely dates for the decant of each House and the estimated date of completion.”

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I promise to be as brief as I can. This is a probing amendment that I do not seek to push further. Clause 5 is about consultation strategy. It indicates that the sponsor body must prepare a strategy for consulting Members of each House of Parliament and must keep that strategy under review and revise it where appropriate. The purpose of my amendment is to require that the strategy or any revised strategy which is published under this section includes the sponsor body’s best estimate of the timeline for the Palace restoration works, including likely dates for the decants of each House and, when they have taken place, the estimated date of completion.

In one of the earlier debates, the noble Lord, Lord McNicol, talked about large infrastructure projects and the many that have run over budget or over time. Clearly if we are trying to engage the public and keep them on side, that can often be the thing that makes them less receptive to a major project. Therefore, it is important that we ensure that there is some focus on the timeline so that the public are well aware of the likely dates. If there is any reason—there might be a very good reason—why things fall behind schedule, it is important that people know why and that a proper explanation is offered.

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To sum up, while I have considerable sympathy with the noble and learned Lord’s desire for clarity on the R&R timescale at the point when parliamentarians are being asked for their views on it, I believe that this is an unrealistic aim, for the reasons I have given. I am sure that the sponsor body will be as helpful as it can to parliamentarians at the consultation stage, but, with the best will in the world, the precise timescale of the works at that juncture will be subject to too many “what ifs”.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I am very grateful to those who have taken part in this debate and indicated some support for the general approach I was taking. I am very grateful to the Minister for his response and thank him specifically for his update on the planning in relation to Richmond House—although I think it was very clear, or at least implicit in what he said, that there are still possibilities of that taking time. There is the possibility of a challenge if Westminster City Council were to give positive approval. So it is quite clear that there could be some factors that could delay decant.

As the debate unfolded, it seemed that there was some support for having some kind of reporting back to Parliament. I note and understand the point the noble Earl made that if we do it at the consultation stage it could raise expectations, and that the appropriate point would be after the outline business case had been made. He said that if there was a material change, the sponsor body might have to come back. I will reflect and consult with others on whether we want to put something in the Bill on that, rather than just leaving it open-ended about what would be a material change. We may want to do something that would require the sponsor body to continue to update us after the initial approval of the outline business case.

[Lord Adonis]

I thank the noble and learned Lord for giving way. To some extent, this debate is unreal, because there are already dates out there. We have been debating the dates of 2025 for the decant and 2035 for moving in. At every stage of the preparation of the plans, the questions that will be asked are, “Are you sticking to the 2025 date or not? If not, when is it moving to and how long will it be before you get back?”. The idea that the sponsor body—with its chair and chief exec—will be able to avoid publishing and giving its view on this issue is entirely unreal.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

The noble Lord makes an important point. When I was on the Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster, our expectation was that we might decant in 2023, but it is now clear that that is no longer the case. Dates have been put out there. We need to maintain public confidence in the project, in terms of not only time but cost. Having been one of the first Members of the Scottish Parliament, I recall well what that can mean in relation to building a parliamentary building. To maintain public confidence, it is important that explanations are given. Often things are no fault of anyone—they are just circumstance —but often it helps to explain what the circumstances are. Therefore, it might merit considering whether we can come back to this at a later stage. In the meantime, I beg leave to withdraw this amendment.

Amendment 21 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

22: Clause 6, page 5, line 6, at end insert—
“( ) The Sponsor Body shall nominate from among its members a member of the House of Commons and a member of the House of Lords who shall be the principal spokesperson for the Sponsor Body in their respective House.”

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, the purpose of this amendment is that the sponsor body should nominate from among its members a Member of the House of Commons and of the House of Lords to be its principal spokespersons in their respective Houses. This was considered by the Joint Committee looking at the Bill. It thought it a worthwhile thing to do but said that it should not be in primary legislation. Indeed, I would not necessarily want to press the amendment, but this is a useful opportunity for us to be updated on where we are and on the thinking on how we will report back to this House and the Commons on the sponsor body’s work.

As I understand it, the Leader of the House of Commons and the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, wrote to the shadow sponsor body with the Joint Committee’s findings and asked specifically about the importance of having a political figurehead for the programme. It replied:

“We note that analogous arrangements already exist in both Houses, with the spokespeople for each Commission responding to oral and written questions”,


and it anticipated that the sponsor body would,

“be invited to consider and agree its preferred approach to the appointment of spokespeople in the autumn, ahead of its transition to the substantive stage”.

It occurred to me on more than one occasion this evening that it might have been helpful if we had a spokesperson from the shadow sponsor body to tell us where it had got to on various things. My noble friend Lady Scott of Needham Market, who has had to leave, has sought to do that in a personal capacity. I am not criticising the fact that it has not happened—we are still at a shadow sponsor body level—but one can foresee situations where issues will arise. It would be helpful to have someone at Oral Questions, answering Written Questions or debates in your Lordships’ House, or making Statements and reporting back, just as the Senior Deputy Speaker comes to the Dispatch Box to present reports and respond to them.

I understand that the question of how we deal with this issue might have gone, or is going, to the Procedure Committee. The purpose of the amendment is to get on the record how the House anticipates it might deal with it, so that we can have somebody who comes to your Lordships’ House—and for that matter to the House of Commons—to update us and, to some extent, to be the face of the sponsor body and to answer for it. I beg to move.

[Lord Bethell]

My Lords, I will first say a few words in support of the excellent amendment from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace. It makes complete sense to have someone in the Chamber who is able to explain to us the proceedings and progress of the project whom we can ask questions of. To have that in the Bill makes sense. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on how that could be achieved.

My amendments have a different purpose, which is to get the voice of the public on the sponsor body from the outset. There is some flexibility in its current composition, described in Part 1 of Schedule 1: the sponsor body will have between seven and 13 members, between three and five of whom will be external members, including a chair. Between four and eight will be Members of Parliament. Members of Parliament or Peers will be in the majority, which makes sense. But there is not much room in those numbers for somebody who could perhaps represent the public and champion issues such as access and education. One of them will need to be a chair, whose focus will be on driving the project forward and managing the sponsor body itself. I imagine one might be a leading person from the construction industry, and another might have major project experience or heritage experience. That is why I would like to ask the Minister how the voice of the public could be best represented at a very high level from the beginning, when the brief for this project is being decided and the strategy formulated.

In many ways, there are fewer concerns about the delivery authority. It will have nine members, who will be more broadly recruited, with only two executive directors and the rest non-executive directors. It is really the sponsor body where I detect a bottleneck. It would be extremely helpful if the Minister explained how it could be tweaked to give more access to a voice from the public.

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I really do think that provisions of this nature, which are essentially matters of practical implementation, would be better served within the PRA than in the Bill itself. In framing that agreement, it will be for the sponsor body and corporate officers of both Houses to agree what is covered. For these reasons, the Government’s formal advice to the Committee is to express reservations about these amendments.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

Again, I am grateful to noble Lords who have taken part in this debate, and particularly to the Minister for his reply. All the amendments in this group raise important issues. The Minister made a valid argument about how we might use the parliamentary relationship agreement to deal with some of them. As I indicated, provision for how the sponsor body would report to Parliament need not necessarily be in the Bill; the amendment was an opportunity to get an idea of current thinking. I was not reassured by the Minister saying that it would be put back into the court of the chair of the sponsor body, but no doubt that can be worked through and may well be the subject of a Written Parliamentary Question later in the year—it will be interesting to see who answers it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 22 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Quin (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendment 29 is in my name and those of my noble friend Lord Adonis and the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake. I did not speak at Second Reading as, owing to previous commitments, I knew that I could not be present for the opening and closing of the debate, but I attended for a good part of it and followed it closely. As we know, one of the frustrations of our work is that we often do not know business long enough in advance to prevent such diary clashes. I was struck by some of the speeches at Second Reading: in particular those of my noble friend Lady Andrews and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Needham Market, who both showed me that the building I had worked in for so many years as a Member of either this House or the other House was in such a dramatic state of dereliction and decay and just how huge the task facing us is.

A colleague and friend, looking at this amendment, said, “Is this the Geordie amendment, then?”. As much as I would like Parliament to be based in Newcastle or Gateshead, the amendment is much less ambitious. It asks simply that the sponsor body prepare and publish a report giving an assessment of relocating the Houses of Parliament for the duration of the parliamentary building works to a location outside London; and that the sponsor body must make arrangements for the report to be laid before and debated by both Houses of Parliament. That seems a very reasonable amendment, particularly as the study would be prepared concurrently with all the other things being done and therefore not involve delaying the timetable further. Although the idea of relocating Parliament outside London in the way proposed has been mentioned before and some have talked about the cost of doing so, as far as I am aware, no official work on such an option or the cost of doing so has yet been be produced.

At Second Reading, my noble friends Lord Adonis and Lord Foulkes spoke of the desirability of locating Parliament outside London; by doing so, they spoke effectively against overcentralisation and overconcentration in our capital city. Both my noble friends and I know that the idea of relocating Parliament, either temporarily or permanently, has been around for a long time. Indeed, in her Second Reading speech, my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon reminded us of ideas from the 1960s, such as for a new, permanent capital called “Elizabetha” to be built on land between Harrogate and York. Even as a schoolgirl, I remember that idea giving rise to a lot of excited comments in local newspapers in and around Tyneside as a result.

For the avoidance of doubt, I should make it clear that I am emphatically not in favour of building on that attractive landscape and I am not proposing the Elizabetha solution. Even the name “Elizabetha” for such a new capital reminded me of that hugely entertaining book by Bill Bryson, Down Under; noble Lords may know of it. Bryson describes the debates that went on in Australia over the construction of the new capital, Canberra, as the seat of Parliament and the occasionally ludicrous names that were suggested, such as “Sydmeladperbrisho”—I think that noble Lords get the point—or, even more weirdly, “Thirstyville”; I can just imagine the comments in the press about MPs and Peers moving there.

I also looked at some of the Hansard entries from the time when the Elizabetha idea was put forward. Some Members in the other place spoke in favour of Parliament being established north of the Trent—it seemed like a good idea to me—midway between Thameside and Clydeside. However, some of those debates make for depressing reading. For example, that oft-controversial MP, Willie Hamilton, bemoaned that our building here was not built and not equipped for a 20th-century role. Here we are, saying rather similar things, except that we are now in the 21st century. Through my amendment, I hope simply to look at out-of-London options; for example, looking at either using existing buildings outside London or at what new facilities that might be suitable could be found outside the capital.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I am interested in what the noble Baroness says. Does she accept that, if you take the United Kingdom from the top of Shetland to Land’s End, the midpoint falls round about Dundee? Would she favour that option? It would make my journey shorter.

[Baroness Quin]

I would, yes, partly because there is a direct train from my local station—Alnmouth—to Dundee.

There is much that I could say but the hour is late so I will truncate my comments. I noticed that, in response to my noble friend Lord Adonis at Second Reading, my noble friend Lady Smith talked of concerns about the costs of relocation. She also mentioned the European Parliament’s different centres of activity. As a former MEP, I am conscious of the European Parliament’s travelling circus—although, in its defence, the Parliament is sadly unable to take or address that decision because, by treaty, the member states must agree unanimously on a seat for the Parliament; they have so far failed to do so, which is both costly and wearing for all those involved. However, I am not suggesting anything like the European Parliament arrangements in my amendment.

In response to my noble friend at Second Reading, the noble Earl, Lord Howe, said that,

“in October 2012, the House of Commons Commission, and at that time the House Committee in the Lords … ruled out the option of constructing a brand new building away from Westminster and no further analysis will be undertaken of this option”.—[Official Report, 8/7/19; col. 1682.]

Those remarks are not relevant to this amendment, however, because nothing in this amendment calls for either a brand-new building or permanent relocation. I note that the noble Earl also said, in response to a question from my noble friend Lord Foulkes, that he would make some information available to my noble friend and other noble Lords who spoke at Second Reading, about past debates and decisions on this subject. Obviously, since I did not speak at Second Reading, I have not received that information, but I would be grateful to see it before Report.

Finally, I know that my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon is very supportive of the idea that all regions and nations should benefit from the restoration and renewal project. Indeed, there has been a general welcome across the House for that approach. However, as noble Lords will appreciate, that is somewhat separate and does not in any way negate the issue raised in my amendment.

In conclusion, this is a modest amendment asking merely that the sponsor body prepare a report about the costings of a temporary relocation outside London and report back to Parliament. Given that that body has to come back to Parliament in any case with a number of other estimates, it would be perfectly feasible for us to ask the sponsor body to undertake this study. What I and my co-signatories are asking for is reasonable and feasible, and I hope—even at this late hour—that the amendment finds some favour this evening.