Lord Blencathra (Con)

My Lords, I am a member of Conservative Friends of Israel and a supporter of its current fight against the new attempts to destroy the Jewish homeland from the river to the sea. I say that because I do not want my opposition to this Bill to be misconstrued. So why am I opposed to the Bill? It is because it fails in every way to implement the recommendations of the Holocaust Commission. The commission recommended a campus with large amounts of space: “The Learning Centre should include facilities to host lectures and seminars and to run educational courses and workshops, as well as the opportunity for Holocaust organisations to locate their offices, or set up satellite offices, within the wider physical campus”. This Adjaye design fails that requirement. The commission recommended a unique British design; Adjaye has given us a cast-off rejected by Canada. The commission said in its first recommendation that “it is also clear that a memorial on its own is not enough and that there must be somewhere close at hand where people can go to learn more”. about the Holocaust. “Close at hand” does not necessarily mean shoehorned into the wrong space, which is too small to do justice to the commission’s recommendations but far too large for this little garden. The commission recommended three possible solutions: the Imperial War Museum site, Potters Field and a site further along Millbank. Indeed, it waxed lyrical about the Imperial War Museum and a plan to build a whole new wing to house the campus on the extensive land around the museum in Lambeth. Victoria Tower Gardens never entered its contemplation because the experts on the commission knew it was entirely inappropriate. Ed Balls claimed that Victoria Tower Gardens was his suggestion, but we have never heard why the Imperial War Museum offer was turned down. Nothing has been produced regarding any comparison of the sites, why they were rejected and why Victoria Tower Gardens was picked on a political whim. I think I know why: politicians in my party took the arrogant view that Victoria Tower Gardens was an easy win, right next to Parliament and run by the Royal Parks, which would buckle to political domination. In summary, I am opposed to this project because it fails to implement the recommendations of the Holocaust Commission, is grotesquely ugly and is designed by a discredited architect whose previous iterations of this were rejected by Ottawa. It does nothing to properly commemorate the evils of the Holocaust nor the ongoing threat of a new one. I turn specifically to the cost issue, as in my Amendments 1 and 27. I shall use more temperate language and say this: successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable. There are major issues with project definition, schedule, budget, quality and/or benefits delivery that at this stage do not appear to be manageable or resolvable. “The project may need re-scoping and/or its overall viability reassessed”— that is not a Lord Blencathra observation but the words from the national Infrastructure and Projects Authority in its latest report of 16 January 2025. That is the third year in a row where the authority has given it its most damning “Red” categorisation. I cannot blame the present Government for pushing on with this out-of-control shambles. The Government whom I supported were more guilty, because they were told two years ago that the project was unachievable. Did the department do anything to sort out the project definition, the schedule or the budget, which the authority said was not manageable nor resolvable? No, of course not, because it was a big sacred cow—or, to mix metaphors, no one dared to suggest that this emperor had no clothes. Just as Jewish organisations were told, “You’d better back this proposal or there’ll be no Holocaust memorial”, so no one dared to admit that this project in Victoria Tower Gardens was out of control, for fear of being accused of not supporting Holocaust commemoration. The project was originally costed at under £100 million, and the Government proposed to finance it with at least £25 million in philanthropic funding. There has been no suggestion that the Government would not fund the rest of the project and its operating costs as well. The latest capital cost estimate for HMLC—the Holocaust memorial and learning centre—is £138.8 million without any contingency, which shows a substantial rise in the estimate before contingency of 36% between 2022 and 2023. This estimate was based on the expectation of starting construction before 2025. The only comments about costs which it has since been possible to extract from MHCLG has been a figure for the total spend to date of £18 million, given by the then Minister, Simon Hoare, to the Commons in May 2024 and a recent estimate of a further £2.1 million spent in the last six months. That would bring the total to £20.1 million. If the figures are correct and comparable, that would represent an acceleration on 2020 to 2024, when only £2.8 million was spent over 22 months. In July 2022, the National Audit Office delivered a report with a whole battery of criticisms of MHCLG’s performance in preparing, planning and managing the project to date, at a point when £15.1 million had been spent with absolutely no result. In particular, the NAO criticised the management of the project and the provision of data on cost escalation to justify the project costs between 2020 and 2022. The NAO report described at paragraph 23, among the “emerging risks” causing potential cost increases, the promoters’ failure to consider any alternative site or the possible effects of legislative delay, or “to quantify, or account for … the risks” that that has created, but there has been little subsequent evidence that this NAO criticism has been heeded by MHCLG. The NAO was critical of the fact that MHCLG had made no provision for defining the governance of the Holocaust memorial and learning centre. It commented that the MHCLG accepted the need for a non-departmental public body but insisted that it would set up a new, dedicated NDPB which, the NAO commented, would mean a minimum of 12 months to pass the requisite legislation—and it wants to set that up 12 months before the thing is due to open. MHCLG made an insubstantial reply in 2022 to the NAO’s criticisms but its statements since then show that it believes it has responded to those criticisms, even though no change is visible to the world outside the ministry. For instance, MHCLG has never provided any estimate of the inflation that would apply to construction costs based on starting construction in, say, 2026 and starting operations in, say, 2028. The Government have never made any provision for operating costs and have made the likely costs higher by agreeing in 2022 to make all entry to the learning centre free, although visitors will still have to register online. The operating costs will be high and have so far escalated from £6 million to £8 million per annum, but absolutely no detail has been provided about what the costs will cover. This is particularly important because it is not clear what provision the department has made for the costs of policing and other security measures required for the project if it is built. I also believe that MHCLG is not charging significant or even realistic amounts of civil servant management time to the project, which is either poor accounting or evidence that the project has insufficient governance, or both of those things. It is therefore no surprise that the Infrastructure and Projects Authority has three times now—in 2023, 2024 and 2025—classified the memorial project as undeliverable. In 2024, the MHCLG created the post of senior responsible officer for the project and gave that officer the power to act within cost overruns with a contingency of £53 million—£53 million as a contingency for a £138 million project, well above the normal 10% to 15%. There has been no explanation for why this contingency was pitched at that figure. The MHCLG budgeting process within the published management and other accounts remains completely untransparent about what the HMLC costs will be, what they are for and who is accountable for them. Finally, I note that, despite the MHCLG having stated in 2024 that it had suspended work on the project, thus partially justifying the suspension of Sir David Adjaye, it recently—this year—told the Lords Select Committee that its design team is already working on adjustments to the design in relation to the assurances provided to the Select Committee, so that shows that some design cost has continued to be spent. Here we are today, debating a Bill for a project which the Government’s own top infrastructure authority says, and has said for the last three years in a row, is undeliverable. I say that pushing on with a failed project with no proper cost control is treating Parliament with contempt. We need to know the best estimates for the operating costs and exactly who will be in charge. We will debate the possibility of a new NDPB to run this in Amendment 5, but it is legitimate to ask about the financial sustainability of the entity or entities which will execute and operate the project. A report on that should be laid before Parliament. If we pass the Bill, Parliament is entitled to see the legitimacy of what we have sanctioned. When the Minister replies, I do not want him to answer my points, I want him to answer the points raised by the Government’s own infrastructure authority. Let him tell us what the Government will do about “the major issues with project definition, the schedule, the budget, the quality and/or benefits delivery, which do not appear to be manageable or resolvable”. Will he do as it has asked and rescope the whole project and reassess its overall viability? Finally, I apologise to colleagues for speaking at length, as I probably will on some other amendments also. This is partly a reaction to the various gagging attempts we faced when giving evidence to the Commons and Lords Select Committees, where every other week we seemed to be copied in to a letter from those lawyers, Pinsent Masons, telling the committees that they could not ask this or that question and that they had to limit their inquiries. I thought it was appallingly arrogant to attempt to tie Select Committee hands in that way. Well, our hands will not be tied and we will not be gagged in these debates, except by our own rules of order and procedure. I beg to move.