Lord Blunkett (Lab)

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the Senior Deputy Speaker. I put on record my thanks to him and all those on the two commissions, the programme board for its work and the client team. I apologise to the Committee because I will be saying nothing that I have not said before, and therefore nothing original, but there is nothing new about that in our House. I recommend again that people read Mr Barry’s War, because it is instrumental in understanding the nightmare of getting any kind of renovation of this place and what happened in 1834 and beyond. I fear that we are on the same trajectory today, although perhaps not of 160 years or whatever it is. I would like to say two things this afternoon. First, I appreciate the email that went out two days ago to request comments and engagement from Members of both Houses; reinforcing that has been very helpful. Secondly, the reason we are here now is the way in which we have had stop/start and not just hiccups but complete reversals. I was very interested in what the Senior Deputy Speaker had to say about the bore-hole. “Bore” is a very good word in these circumstances because we appear now to be doing things that have been done previously. We appear to be covering ground that I thought had been covered by the sponsor body in the early days following the 2019 Act. I thought we went over quite a lot of the ground in the original joint scrutiny committee of 2018, on which I had the genuine pleasure of serving. I thought it was going to be the most unhappy period of my life in politics, but it turned out to be fascinating. Then, of course, we had the debate on the 2019 Act. I just want to reinforce that we have an Act of Parliament. When I have talked to those working on this programme, past and present, it has struck me that the Act of Parliament is the last thing people turn to. If we are to change elements of that Act, we should bring forward legislation to do so rather than presume that we can override it; I will come back to that in a moment. It is not easy. I do not underestimate for a minute the difficulty that people have gone through. The decision was taken back in February 2022 to change the formula and therefore to change the personnel, many of whom had lived with the programme for quite a long time and had become experts in the challenges. Those recruited to the client team and the new programme board were therefore people coming into it new. Of course, at the moment we are faced with more than half the House of Commons being new Members from July last year and, as a consequence, coming at this issue fresh. That brings a wholly new challenge. One of the benefits of the House of Lords, of which there are many, is some degree of continuity. We in this House are in the position of having voted on more than one occasion on the options—because the options really have not changed over this past eight and a half years, have they? The options that have been spelt out this afternoon are full decant, which is by far the most economic and practical option; partial decant, which means that, whatever happens, the House of Lords decants; or a muddle over something like 48 years in trying to do this piecemeal. We have been doing piecemeal for several decades. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, for indicating the costs and expenditure that are necessary to keep the building and Parliament functioning but lack transparency. He mentioned the word “transparency”, for which I am grateful, but, like others, the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, has been doing his best to try to get into some of the detail on how decisions are made and who actually makes them in the end. I know that, theoretically, the commissions do, but the Peers’ Entrance fiasco—it has been a fiasco, with the kind of money we have spent on it—is an example of the way in which minds have been changed over the years. If we can, we must make some progress in 2025 on either reaffirming or changing the decision—but determining it with a manageable timetable, with commitment from both Houses and without interference by single individuals who do not like a particular programme, timetable or outcome and have, over the past three years, grossly interfered with making progress. Let us speak a language that we all understand in saying that that has happened, and try to address the future. The political consequences of the decisions made are never talked about. Particularly in this House, we need to understand the decisions that will be made by Members about whether they stay on as active Peers and work through the consequences that will have for planning the decant and the office, administrative and support systems that will be required, the political consequences for the balance of groups in our House, and the nature of how we plan for that in a way that we have not done so far. Reducing the numbers in this House, which I am totally in favour of, requires us to take account of personal decisions that will be made once people know what the true timetable will be, even if they believe it is likely to slip. My final point is, as ever, about access. I welcome very strongly in the introduction this afternoon the commitment to reach 70% access into and within the Palace of Westminster. That is a substantial improvement on previous commitments. It is not what was expected in the 2019 Act, when we envisaged between 80% and 90% access, but it is progress. I want to reinforce that with new members of the client team and new people brought into the delivery authority, it is really important that they understand that it is about not just restoration but renewal. That was spelled out in the Act after considerable negotiations across groups and with Ministers at the time, who were extremely helpful in understanding that we are thinking of 50, 100 or 200 years ahead, not just the immediate future. My final final point is: why do we keep on rolling up the total cost in a way that frightens everyone to death? It frightens parliamentarians, it frightens the public and it is a gift to the media. Why do we not talk about the annualised expenditure over the period of time we are talking about? If we had that, people would understand the nature of the investment and the possibilities of managing it within very tight budgets —and whatever the future might hold, they will continue to be very tight—and they might understand that we will then have the kind of ambition that occurred when Notre-Dame, or at least a substantial part of the interior, burned down. The ambition of the French was to make sure that they did a thorough and tremendous job of both restoration and renewal, and they did it in a timescale at which we can only be amazed. We have a history in this country of failing to be able to deliver major projects. This one should be an exemplar. It should be one where we get the costings right to begin with and get the timetable realistic. With artificial intelligence and the use of new technology, we can do things now that we could not even have envisaged back in 2016. It is time to move on from the sterile debates that we have had and to look to the future.