Restoration and Renewal

Nicholas Brown Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Mr Nicholas Brown (Newcastle upon Tyne East) (Lab)]

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg. We have long been colleagues in this place and you might say to me, “Who would have thought we’d both end up here?”, but we have done.

It is an even greater pleasure to take part in a debate secured by the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown). I could fairly describe him as a fellow traveller, but that might not help him in the 1922 Committee elections—although he can take comfort that the electorate seems to be changing quite substantially, which might be a good thing. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), I will call the hon. Member for The Cotswolds my hon. Friend. We have been at this for so long, have travelled over much the same ground together, and have come—as anybody who looks at this subject does—to very similar conclusions. There might be differences in nuance, but no more than that. It is also reasonable to place on record that we have served together not just on the Public Accounts Committee, but on the Finance Committee, which I have the honour and privilege of chairing for the second time in my long and exotic political career. The current leader of our party was kind enough to put me back where the previous leader found me, and has temporarily brought me back to other duties for the third time.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am wondering if by calling the first ever Joint Committee with the other House this week, my right hon. Friend—as I might call him—is envisaging an even longer career as Chair of the Finance Committee.

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[Mr Brown]

Who knows what the future holds, but I am full of fear and trepidation. My hon. Friend kindly refers to the historic meeting of the other place’s Finance Committee and our Finance Committee for the very first time. The first individual report that we considered was about the overrunning costs on the Elizabeth Tower. Every commentator has said how nice it looks and how well it has been done, and they are genuinely excited. Then they read a bit about us and say, “What about the cost overruns?” We have had a comprehensive explanation, which I find credible. There is nothing improper but, as my hon. Friend says, it would have been better if the costings had been much more realistic and subjected to more detailed professional advice at the beginning, because we would not have ended up where we have ended up. The report on this issue was a model of candour and contrition, and it was satisfactory, but it was in front of both the other place’s Committee and our Committee, so it was a pretty inquisitive audience.

That brings me to my next point: I believe that financial oversight is absolutely crucial in all this. I am astonished at the reluctance of officials to come to the Members’ base Committee, which wants to proceed on the basis of good will. We are not there to tell officials off; we are there to try to give our views, to ask penetrating questions and to try to help them with the decision making, rather than thwart them in it. Insufficient use was made of the mechanisms available—I am understating the case. It would also be fair to say that for the big projects, such as Richmond House and the northern estate before it, consulting a lot more Members would have greatly benefited the eventual outcome. For example, the northern estate programme was to be done under the current House estimates and did not draw on R&R at all. It involved Norman Shaw North being cleared and Richmond House being used for a decant. Then, Members would be put back and the Norman Shaw South Members would get their offices done.

We have ended up with Norman Shaw South not being in the programme at all, or being in the programme, some way to the right, in an ill-defined way—I am quite happy to be corrected if I have got this wrong. It will still fall to be paid for—it will not be paid for out of R&R; it is a legitimate charge on the House budget. However, the elegance of getting a whole chunk of the work done—finished—has been lost. I question the wisdom of that.

I would also question whether, if the Members had been taken through it at the time as thoroughly as they should have been, they would ever have agreed to it. I cannot help but feel that we just slipped into it, rather than had the facts put before us. There is a very good summary in The Observer of the journey that we have undertaken. It is elegantly written by a journalist whom I do not know, called Rowan Moore, and it is a fine piece of work. If someone wanted a plain man’s guide to the complexities of R&R, they could do a lot worse than start there.

There is an ideological divide between us. There is what I think is a minority, now, of the House, who do not really want to do this at all and would settle for giving the building a lick of paint, maybe replacing the Anaglypta, and calling it quits. Most of us—I would certainly say the majority of those who studied the questions, which are complex—would like to see us do something that is worthy of the building and what it stands for.

The decisions that we will be invited to make are crucial. I do not think that there is anything to be ashamed of in admitting that, on the structure of the two separate independent authorities, we were wrong. It is what I voted for in the original vote, and what I hoped would work. In other words, we would outline the things that needed doing and then hand the whole problem over to independent authorities. There was a thought that they would come back and talk to Members about what was being done for them and around them, or where they were to be decanted to. I still accept that the decant is an essential part of this, and that it would create more trouble than it would solve if we tried to go ahead, working piece by piece through the building.

I also agree strongly with the current Leader of the House, the right hon. Member for Sherwood (Mark Spencer), that it is correct to see what works could be done over a long summer recess. Could we, by agreement between the Government and the Opposition, alter a parliamentary year so that we had a longer recess period, where a longer run could be taken at some of the more extensive works? That has been looked at on our behalf, and my understanding is that that is not possible, but I would be open to returning to that to see if something were possible that would save money and get the work done in a more expeditious way. It may be possible to have the House meet in other buildings for specific purposes, or it may be possible to vote electronically; there are all sorts of things that might help us get the journey on its way.

[Mr Betts]

Some of us asked questions about that when we still had not decided on matters. We used to have a longer summer recess, when a lot of works could be done in this place, but it suddenly got shortened because some elements of the popular press criticised it as us simply going on 12 weeks’ holiday. However, there is a big problem here, which needs to be looked at and could save us a lot of money. I am not saying it is an absolute solution, but we at least ought to have a look at it to see if, in the long term, it would save us money and enable the place to work better.

[Mr Brown]

I agree with my hon. Friend. It is also the stated view of the current Leader of the House, who, I think, makes an entirely reasonable point. He is taking, more generally, from my point of view, a much more reasonable approach to all of this, and a much more consensual approach—or at least is trying to, in the current, troubled times—to bring this together and get us to a point where we are confident in the progress we are making.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way a second time—he is being very generous. Contrary to what I had understood, when the asbestos is removed, it is possible to seal individual areas. One area is sealed, the asbestos is removed, and then we move on to the next area. That is very time-consuming, whereas if we shut all of the Palace, or at least half of it, to do that work, it is much more cost-effective and takes much less time, so it might be better for us to decant for a little while, while that dangerous work is done, rather than try to do it piecemeal.

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[Mr Brown]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. Also, the Chamber of the House of Commons, of course, was rebuilt in the 1950s when asbestos was extensively used as a fire prevention and building material. The dangers were not as well known then, or were not as accepted as they are now. The survey work to see how much asbestos is there has not been fully undertaken yet. Some excursions have been made and, as he hints, it is not looking good. There was a large exercise in the 1990s, I think, to remove asbestos from the House of Lords. How well that was done needs to be checked. Asbestos is a killer. Mesothelioma is a terrible condition.

[Sir Paul Beresford (Mole Valley) (Con)]

The thinking behind decanting is not just about the asbestos. There is a sewerage system that runs from one end of the building to the other. Stopping it halfway down—be it left or right—is not feasible because it would involve a sewerage system outside the building and considerable complications. Added to all the other facilities in there now, we would have the same problem.

[Mr Brown]

That problem goes back to the beginning of the debate about whether we could decant Chamber by Chamber, or whether it would all have to be done as one big decant because of the pooled facilities. Again, survey work is not completed yet. We have agreed the R&R estimate that should bring the survey work to completion, and I eagerly await the conclusions.

Re-routing has been thought of. The interesting thing about the article I referred to is that it had photographs of what the original conduits look like now. They have been colonised by electricity cables, which are not labelled. They have been colonised by gas and water pipes that run through the original utility that was supposed to draw in air, so that it would become hot air heated by the fires underneath, which, given the fate of the previous building, was quite a brave thing to install in Victorian times. Is it appropriate now? Probably not. A bolder solution might be to just concrete over the whole thing and put new services in. A great danger of being on a Members’ scrutiny Committee is that we start finding Members’ solutions to problems, and that is probably worse than calling in the experts.

We have made mistakes; we should admit it. I do not think they are quite as expensive as my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds thinks, but there are things that have not been done as well or as elegantly as they could have been. I do not think we will get another chance to make a major change because we are about to embark, in perhaps two years’ time, on really big expenditure, depending on the directions we choose. For certainty, that will require another decision of the House, perhaps in the next Parliament, but soon-ish in our terms, and then there is no going back. If the costs are to escalate dramatically, we need to get there first. If the time that we are decanted from this place is to be longer that we had hoped, given the starting point for this discussion—it could be a lot longer than we hope—we had better get the decision on that right and reconcile ourselves to it. I do not think there is a more rational way forward.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

I am sorry to interrupt my right hon. Friend again, but it was in the early stages of the High Speed 2 project that the money got out of control. Once Parliament started getting quarterly reports based on an end cost, and once there were fixed dates for completion, it was able to see whether the trajectory was right. If we do that from the beginning with R and R, so that Parliament has control of the project, it has a much greater chance of being on time and on budget.

[Mr Brown]

I accept that point, and I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman does, too. We should keep a sharp eye and a controlling grip on the money—not on what we spent last year, which tends to be what we get told, but on what we will spend in two or five years’ time—and on where the programme takes us. There is a chance to—dare I say it?—reduce expenditure in other areas, and perhaps spread the cost over a longer period. Making absolutely certain that we have a grip on the project is key. That has to come out of the reorganisation that we will discuss next week and presumably bring in soon after.

This must be one of those rare occasions when we welcome the direct involvement of the Treasury as an adviser and overseer; that is the new proposal. This is almost an act of desperation, but I think it is the right thing to do. It is forced on us by the circumstances so ably described in the article in The Observer. It is important that we face up to them today.