Restoration and Renewal

Thangam Debbonaire Excerpts

Thursday 7th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Thangam Debbonaire (Bristol West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Twigg.

I congratulate the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) on securing this debate and on giving us the time to air the arguments before we come to a possible parliamentary vote next week. I appreciate it a great deal, and I appreciate the consensual way in which most of this debate has been conducted. It has been heartening to hear Members’ understanding of the warp and weft of this debate, and the warp and weft of the wiring and sewerage.

I am particularly impressed with the description of the ventilation shafts provided by the hon. Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford). I am obsessed with the shafts, partly because they provide a good illustration of what happens when hon. and right hon. Members mistake themselves for civil engineers. I understand that some of us are, but most of us are not. If we come up with too many wizard wheezes, we run the risk of building into the fabric of the building, which we all love, something that future generations will come to rue and regret. I heartily endorse what pretty much everyone has said, that whatever we do after next Tuesday’s parliamentary vote, it has to involve both scrutiny of the process and real consultation and engagement with Members, the public and, importantly, the thousands of people who work here. Scrutiny and engagement are the two pillars to which I want to draw everyone’s attention.

I completely agree with the hon. Member for The Cotswolds that there are concerns, and rightly so, about value for money, and I commend the Public Accounts Committee’s excellent work in that regard. It has scrutinised, line by line, in a way that is really impressive and we will need it to continue to do that work.

Similarly, my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown) referred to financial oversight and accountability. He also rightly raised the role of the Finance Committee, on which he plays such an excellent role as Chair. As a former Whip, I was obviously distraught to lose him as our Chief Whip, but I am glad that he is now in charge of the finances of this estate. It comforts me to know that his eagle eye will be on every single line, as will be that of the hon. Member for The Cotswolds.

My hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield South East (Mr Betts), who is no longer in his place, raised concerns, which I think are shared by everybody, about what would happen if we brought this process back in-house. Are there problems of oversight, political meddling and ventilation shafts that turn out to be fire risks? It is important that we hang on to at least some of the consensus that we have achieved here today. We all think that the building is worth preserving. We all have our own ideas about how we would do it if we were in charge, and we all know that we are going to have to compromise.

I think pretty much everybody here also knows that we will have to move out. For too long, this debate has been very binary: it is either a full decant or continued presence. That has not been helpful. I share the view of my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East that the current Leader of the House has done a great deal to create more consensus, and I have watched his view shift from being, “I’m not sure we need to move out,” to, “Actually, we will probably need to and it will probably be for about eight years or so”. Personally, I think it will be for a bit longer than that, considering what the experts are telling us, but the Leader of the House, who is currently in the Cabinet of course, has done a great deal to try to bring people and the Commissions with him.

The hon. Member for The Cotswolds criticised the Commissions over transparency. His points were well made and they have been heard by this commissioner. When I suddenly found myself on the Commission, by virtue of being the shadow Leader of the House, I was somewhat surprised by the fact that commissioners are not provided with a manual explaining what the Commission is, what it is for and how it is accountable to Members. There is a lot that we need to do, and I will return to that in a different debate on another day.

We all agree that the honour of working in a UNESCO world heritage site comes with the duty of being a responsible custodian, and we are that custodian. It is on us, this generation of politicians, to make sure that we carry out the necessary preservation. As the hon. Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (John Nicolson) has said, we must do so without making the preservation the enemy of good working practices. I have to correct him slightly, though: it may have been a terminology issue, but one bar has certainly been converted into an excellent nursery. If he is saying that the crèche should be open for 24 hours a day, a whole load of questions would need to be answered. I have heard many colleagues talk about this building being very family friendly, but my initial impression was that it is not. Many Members have told me that they feel that their children are very welcome in this building, but the hon. Member and others raised an important point about accessibility.

We agree that work is pressing. I know that all Members of the House want to see improved fire, mechanical and electrical systems. As they have also said, however, just having a monumental and iconic building does not mean that we can accept lack of safety or asbestos. We are going to have to make sure that the experts can do their job. As the hon. Member for The Cotswolds said, they will need to be able to access the asbestos in order to know what can be done about it and, frankly, to establish whether we are surrounded by it.

As the hon. Member for Aberconwy (Robin Millar) has said, there are issues regarding how we learn about the best practice in commissioning and ensure that we deal in advance with, or at least have prior knowledge of, the tensions involved with such an iconic building. Once we have a contractor, a set of contractors or a supply chain, it will be very difficult to unglue that relationship, because they will need to get to know the minutiae of the building, its quirks and idiosyncrasies, but also our quirks and idiosyncrasies, and it would be strange if we did not admit that we have them.

It is important to say that this is not the same as the Olympics. I love the fact that we decided that the sponsor body and delivery authority for the Olympics would be separate. That was a good model. I was not here at the time, but I applaud that decision. Voting for it was the right thing to do. This is different, however, because it is about a sponsor body for the works on our own House. This is our place of work, but it is not just ours; it is also the people’s place of democracy. I want everyone to feel that they have a stake in Parliament. I want them to feel the same way they feel when they come out of Westminster tube station and look up at the Elizabeth Tower. That is a wonderful experience, and I want everybody to feel the same way about the whole of this lovely estate. Instead, at the moment there is an awful lot of scaffolding and, in my case, a certain amount of trepidation because I know too much about why the scaffolding is there.

I am afraid to say that there has been political interference. Ironically, the Sponsor Body was set up to remove political interference and yet political interference, or certainly obstruction, there has been. Certain Government Members have continued to ask unreasonable things of the Sponsor Body. I also note, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East and others have said, that the Sponsor Body has not always engaged as well as it could have done, for all sorts of reasons.

There is asbestos, sewage, wires, plumbing that nobody knows the function of, flood risk and regular fires. It is testament to the hard-working members of House staff and contractors—I pay tribute to them—that, thankfully, we have not yet witnessed a catastrophic failure of the building, as has happened to other buildings around the world, such as Notre Dame and other Parliaments. But, at some stage, that will not be enough. At some stage, a piece of masonry will fall on somebody’s head, one of the fires will become catastrophic or the asbestos will cause health problems that many of us will not know about in our lifetimes, but others in the future will suffer.

We will have to move out. We have to accept that. It is the right thing to do, for the patriotic reasons of celebrating our democracy and our history, whatever different interpretations we may have of it. As the hon. Members for Mole Valley and for Aberconwy said, this is also an opportunity for apprenticeships in all of our constituencies, and for every single one of us to be able to point to a bit of the building and say, “That bit of rock got quarried from my constituency.”

We have no choice. Both Houses are going to have to move out at some point, but we are going to be the generation that says to the next generation and the one beyond, and to the public, “We did this because we love democracy.” It is not just because we love the building, although we do, but because we love democracy. We know it is worth celebrating. We know that this is not just a tourist site, although it is an important tourist site. Therefore, if there is a vote on Tuesday—I do not yet know what will happen—I will be support the motion. Will the Minister assure us that the Government will do everything necessary to ensure that support will be provided to enable maximum financial accountability and that there will be minimal unnecessary political interference?

[Derek Twigg (in the Chair)]

I remind the Minister to leave a minute or two at the end for Sir Geoffrey Clifton- Brown to wind up.