Viscount Eccles (Con)

My Lords, I have always supported having a national memorial, and I am very keen to see it. I was 14 when we went into Belsen, and I have lived with the memory of the reports and photographs that came back ever since. As it happens, I live in a flat in Smith Square, but I can assure the noble Lord, Lord Austin, that I will not see the memorial that is being proposed at the present time, because I have been told that it will take three and half years to build. Before it even starts being built, and whatever problems may occur while it is being built, it is extremely unlikely that I would ever see it. I therefore do not have a personal interest. I strongly support my noble friend Lord Blencathra’s Amendment 16. It seems to me deeply irresponsible not to regroup, to have, as he said, a design of a stand-alone memorial compatible with the other memorials in the park, and to have it finished—as indeed the Holocaust Commission suggested—within a period of two years. That is somewhat less than three and a half, five or six years, or whatever the present proposal implies. It would also be completed at less cost than is expected now, probably within the £138 million, plus a contingency. I finish by saying that there is nothing in the Holocaust Commission’s report that says or implies that the memorial and the learning centre should be in the same building. It has always been a complete mistake that that was somehow agreed, subsequent to the report. Memorials are a matter for private remembrance and for, as it says in the Holocaust Commission’s report, paying respect, contemplating and praying. They are not buildings through which many people should tramp. If, indeed, we want another gallery to talk about what the British did or did not do between the Treaty of Versailles and 1942, let us have it in the Imperial War Museum, which would be the right place for it. Will the Government therefore please reconsider their position and take the obvious way forward, which is to have a memorial in the park, self-standing, with no visitors going into it, just visitors coming to see it to pay their respects, contemplate and pray?