Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill

Debate between Meg Hillier and Nick Smith

2nd reading: House of Commons & Money resolution: House of Commons & Programme motion: House of Commons
Tuesday 21st May 2019 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) and to hear his wisdom. He is right that if we do not start by being open and honest about the challenges, we will be on a hiding to nothing. In that respect, the project has been bedevilled with problems, which I will touch on, but I hope that today, when it seems there is broad consensus for the Second Reading, we will be able to move forward.

I welcome the Bill and the personal determination of the Leader of the House to get it through. Her predecessors, for understandable reasons and the reality of politics, were a bit nervous about taking this forward, and there were challenges in getting the vote through in January 2018, but we are here today, with huge progress having been made, and I congratulate her on getting us to this point.

As the Leader of the House knows, this is just the beginning. I want to touch on the history—though that has been well covered by others; on the very real risks; and on the future plans, including the costs. I have the privilege of chairing the Public Accounts Committee. The right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) was one of my predecessors, and although we do not agree on every aspect of this issue, we absolutely agree that we need to watch taxpayers’ money very closely. As he rightly says, it is not other people’s money; it is the money our constituents work hard for and expect to be spent wisely.

As others have said, we have put this off for far too long. The hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) talked about 1904; others talked about what happened 40 years ago. We have pushed this problem away for far too long. It is heartening that it was only seven years ago that the former Clerk of the House commissioned a survey to look at the matter. He feels that that is a long time, but in the grand scheme of things he should be congratulated because it has moved things on much faster than at any time in the previous many decades.

I had the privilege of looking at this on the Public Accounts Committee—I will touch on that and the finances a little later—and while serving on the Joint Committee under the chairmanship of the right hon. Member for Meriden (Dame Caroline Spelman). I thank her again for her stewardship of that Committee. We saw the shadow Sponsor Body at that time.

Others have talked about the risks. It is worth remembering that there have been 66 fires since 2008, as you will be aware, Mr Deputy Speaker. At any one time, there are eight fire wardens patrolling this building. As the Leader of the House said on the radio this morning, only at the end of last year there was one that could have been catastrophic, not for the whole building, but for a certain section of it. It was lucky that it happened during the week, because the patrol pattern must be a bit different at weekends. If it had happened at the weekend, it might not have been discovered so quickly.

My hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant), in eloquent fashion, highlighted the “big stink”. The big stink of previous times led MPs to decide that it was time to build a sewerage system for London, but we are now suffering our own big stink in parts of the building. It is not nice, it is not healthy, and it is really pretty terrible for the staff working in, particularly, the basement rooms who have to put up with it. We must keep remembering that it is the staff who matter.

Mice are rife in the building. Unlike the Leader of the House, I have not yet seen a mouse in my office, but men repeatedly crawl into the cavity above my office, which is close to the roof, and often, especially when I am here during a recess, I see men crawling into holes in different parts of the building such as the upper corridors. They are doing excellent work, and I applaud them for that, but I know that it is more expensive for them to do it at times when we are not here than it would be if we could decant. That is another reason why the Bill is so important. Of course, asbestos is also a huge problem, and one whose full extent we do not know at this point.

Future plans are critical, and even given the consensus here, different opinions have been expressed about what should happen next. It was heartening to speak to representatives of the Sponsor Body in the Committee, and I have had an opportunity to meet its chair, Liz Peace, on other occasions. She has made clear that its role must be to make it easier for us to make the decisions about how we work, but not to tell us how to do it. That would include ensuring that the building has a connectivity that will be future-proof. For example, we could, if we chose, have video booths instead of the phone booths that still exist across this place. The body could allow discussions about how we vote and how we operate, but could not impose them on us. A building shapes us, and, as we said in the Joint Committee, it is important that not just MPs and Members of the House of Lords but everyone—including the members of the public who use this building—is consulted about what they want to see.

The pressing issue, of course, is that of the mechanical and electrical “guts” of the building. Dealing with that will involve about 80% of the work, the bit that we shall never see. We shall come back, and it will have been sorted out. It currently costs several million pounds to remove all the wiring from a riser. The riser must be replicated outside the building while people inside, working in asbestos conditions, in shifts, in spaces the size of a small fireplace, remove all the old wiring and other equipment and replace it. That takes more than a year, sometimes two years, and, as I have said, it costs millions of pounds.

There is, however, a huge opportunity for us to renew this UNESCO world heritage site. The right hon. Member for Gainsborough made some important points. Like a number of other Members, he talked rather disparagingly about an IKEA Chamber. I do not think that we are seeking an IKEA Chamber, but I hear what those Members are saying. The “replica” Chamber has been portrayed as though it would be an exact replica of this place, but the plans are actually quite flexible. We have an opportunity to shape its future and decide how permanent it is: whether it can turn into something else later, or whether it can become an overflow, either permanently or as a flexible space. It is important for us to become involved in a positive way, and nail that now, so that eventually the Sponsor Body will be able to take over.

It is vital that we improve access for those with, for instance, mobility issues. The right hon. Member for Meriden touched on the issue of the frankly embarrassing loop system in this place. As a teenager, a member of my family was very embarrassed about admitting her deafness, and would have been mortified by the idea of coming to a building like this and having to wear what is effectively a big necklace with a clunky thing attached to it. She would not have felt able to participate. We need to be sensitive to the way in which we label people, as we currently have to do.

In fact, we were surprised to learn that there was a loop system. It was only because we had the privilege of serving on the Committee with Lord Stunell that we learned about it. Otherwise, we would never have known. I think of all the people who have visited the House during the 14 years for which I have been here, and whom I have never been able to inform about the loop because I simply did not know about it.

We also have an opportunity to use the “dead space” between buildings better. I think of the restoration of Hackney town hall, a beautiful 1930s building. Glassing over courtyards has provided a usable space while preserving the beauty and integrity of the building. When people talk about IKEA, we think of the light wood for which it is famous. When old buildings are restored—when workmen go back to the wood and re-polish it—it often turns out not to be dingy and dark, but a great deal brighter and lighter. However, it is a long time since that was done in this place.

Safety is, of course, critical. I sometimes joke, rather cruelly, that at least I am based near a stone staircase, but the reality of that cruel joke is that many staff are in little cubby-holes a long way from a proper fire exit route, and it is not acceptable that we have left it so long for them to be supported. We need to allow for smarter technology to be built in so we future-proof this building, and we need to think, as we allow the Sponsor Body and Delivery Authority to get on with it, about our vision for what we would like to see in this place: not tinkering with it every step of the way, not changing the business case and the plans once they are set in stone, but allowing that flexibility to be built in. We must also make it clear at the beginning if there are areas where we do or do not want to see big change.

There are huge opportunities to secure better access for visitors, and to make some money out of this building when we are not sitting. I work in the old Palace now thanks to the privilege of the office I hold; it provides me with a beautiful office. I get to see the House differently from when I was working in other parts of the building, and it is like the Mary Celeste in recess or on a Friday when Members are not around. There is an opportunity if we think flexibly to make sure this place is used more effectively by the very public we are here to serve.

The Bill Committee focused a great deal on the governance aspects. The Sponsor Body is critical because we effectively hold it to account for the money that will be granted for this project. Its chief executive, who is not yet appointed, will be the accounting officer. It is important to get that on the record now, because we might not all be here in future and I hope that future Members will hold that accounting officer personally to account for how the money is spent in this place—and not just here on the Floor of the House when we are discussing estimates but in other forums as well.

The Sponsor Body will set up the Delivery Authority. The people on the Sponsor Body, which has been set up in shadow form, are key figures at the moment. They were appointed for a three-year term and they are less than one year into their term. I echo the comments made by the right hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (Sir Patrick McLoughlin) about the need for continuity. I am absolutely in favour of open recruitment, but given that these people went through a full and open recruitment process for the very same job—albeit that it is in shadow form rather than in statute and were appointed less than a year ago—there is scope to roll their term over to at least the end of their three-year term and then have the recruitment process continue as normal. I hope the Leader of the House will consider that so we can get started now on this project.

As the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Neil Gray) said, we discussed in Committee the Government having a Treasury Minister on the Sponsor Body to get Government buy-in. I know there can be issues either way, but we must consider that in Committee to see what skin the Government of the day need to have in the game. Of course, the risk is that the Government of the day could decide to pull the plug; one Treasury Minister would not be able to stop it, but would be able to keep a beady eye on taxpayers’ money, alongside other Members of the House on the Committee.

We talked too about the election of Members to the board, which I naturally support, with one caveat.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making some very thoughtful remarks. Has she given thought to how parliamentary questions can be laid and a Minister respond to scrutiny from the Chamber?

[Meg Hillier]

The Joint Committee gave some thought to this, and the view was that members of the Sponsor Body should come to the House as Members representing the House of Commons Commission and others representing the Church Commissioners do to answer from the Back Benches. We learned from the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) that the more open we are the better, so I would say that that infrequent appearance might not be enough, and at certain points in the project we might want to have far more open access both to Members of this House and the media, because it is not just Members of this House who need to know about it; this is a taxpayer-funded project that the people of the UK need to know about and they need to know that questions can be asked about it.

We need to make sure we scrutinise this fully and properly. I talked about the election of members to the Sponsor Body. We on the Committee wanted that, but the Government did not accept it. My one caveat about having elections is that we must make sure we have full balance across the House. I will probably want to press this in Committee, because we want to make sure that, for example, smaller parties such as the SNP are not disadvantaged if there is an open vote across the House and Members vote on party lines, as may happen. Given the excellent support and input of the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts and others, it would be invidious to cut out a Member because their party label meant they would not secure the votes. That must be considered, but of course in principle I support elections for all the reasons that others have highlighted.

The scrutiny of this project is vital. This House will scrutinise it, the Estimates Commission will put the proposals forward and, thanks to the mechanism worked up with the Procedure Committee through the Backbench Business Committee, we can get those estimates and discuss them and the detail here.

We have made sure that under the Bill the National Audit Office will have the powers to audit the Sponsor Body, the Delivery Authority and the project. The Public Accounts Committee will, as of right, be able to hold evidence sessions on the National Audit Office reports and examine the numbers in detail. I will no longer be the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee when all this happens, although I hope to have some input in the early stages. I am laying down a marker for my successors, however, because the length of the project means that at least another couple of Select Committee Chairs will be looking at this.

Carillion

Debate between Meg Hillier and Nick Smith

Thursday 24th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Meg Hillier]

As we have heard, other Committees are looking at other aspects of Carillion. I am delighted that our sister Committees—the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee, and the Work and Pensions Committee—are looking at those aspects, and particularly pensions. I will leave other expert Committees to look at that area of work so that we can motor on and ensure we produce a useful report to the House by the summer recess.

[Nick Smith (Blaenau Gwent) (Lab)]

I, too, commend my hon. Friend for her important work. The Public Accounts Committee is again proving itself to be very effective. She points out that the system is broken, with sharp practice, a poor service to the public, and a relationship that is too cosy between the Government and their suppliers. How does she think the civil service could improve the reporting of at-risk companies such as Carillion to stop such problems recurring?

[Meg Hillier]

My hon. Friend, who served with distinction on the Public Accounts Committee in the previous Parliament, highlights a really important point. The Committee constantly highlights the need for more transparency in relation to these contracts. This is taxpayers’ money funding public services, albeit delivered by private companies. I would hope that the Government share our view that where we shine sunlight, we can also see benefits. Sharp practice comes to the fore if it is hidden away under the guise of commercial confidentiality. When taxpayers are funding something, commercial confidentiality needs to be treated very differently from when private companies are doing business between themselves. Taxpayers’ hard-earned money is handed to the Government to deliver a public service, and when companies do not deliver, we need to see that very clearly and the Government should not be afraid to call it out.