Lord Blencathra (Con)

The noble Lord referred to me in his remarks and I wish to respond. It is a matter of numbers. I came through the park today, as I do every day, and there were a few people out exercising their little doggies and picking up their mess, and kiddies having little picnics, but if we are going to have these 40 busloads of people eating their sandwiches, the park will be absolutely overwhelmed by excessive numbers and all those other activities will be frozen out, because of the dominance of numbers of those visiting the centre. If I may say so, the noble Lord was absolutely wrong. I need to open my laptop and find the report. He may have talked to an expert who said that the Holocaust will be the only thing commemorated, but that is not what the official report says. The official report mentions other genocides that will also be commemorated. Of course, it does not refer to them as a Holocaust, because they are not, but it refers to the commemoration of other genocides. That was mentioned in the official Holocaust Commission report and it is referred to in the report published by the department, so it is incorrect to say that the centre will purely be for the Holocaust. I wish it were and I would like to see amendments saying that it should be devoted to the Holocaust only. The other point about the size is also utterly wrong. As the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, said, it will be four pokey little rooms underground and 48% of the construction underground will not be available to the public: it is ducts, stairways and non-usable space. So we will have an inadequate learning centre far too small for the purpose but far too large for the park, visited, if the Government are right, by tens of thousands of people who will inevitably, in the nicest possible way, with their picnics and so on, squeeze out the other users of that park whom I see every single day.