The Palace of Westminster, including the House of Commons, the House of Lords and Big Ben, is an unmistakable symbol of Britain. It is also a symbol of the nation’s sense of its own decline. The Palace of Westminster is falling apart and a crisis point is coming.
Working in this beautiful building is a privilege, but it is not without its challenges.
Parts of the palace estate, a Unesco world heritage site, are almost 1,000 years old. Sometimes it feels as if it must be that long since they upgraded the toilets. Political leaks don’t just happen when ministers siphon confidential documents to reporters. They flood through the roofs of the corridors all the time.
The heating system doesn’t work properly. The part of the press gallery where The Irish Times is stationed, high up above the Commons chamber, must surely be a contender for the coldest spot in London. The wind whistles through its ancient, rattling windows all winter long – this is what it must feel like to work on Striding Edge, the famous exposed mountain ridge in the Lake District.
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That would still be fine if the pre-Victorian heating system worked properly – but, of course, it doesn’t. It breaks down more often than it functions as it should, and the workers who come to fix it say it is so old, they don’t even know where the pipes go.
Last winter, shivering journalists started bringing in their own heating fans to take the chill out of the air on Burma Road, the name of the corridor where most of the biggest British newspapers keep their Westminster offices.
Then the heaters began overloading the electrical system, blowing out all the fuses. The palace authorities banned us from bringing in heaters and gave each office room a number of plug-in radiators instead. They started blowing out the electrics too.
Eventually, the main problems converged when the leaks from the dodgy plumbing system began pouring into the electrics. A disaster seemed inevitable.
Perhaps understandably for such an old complex built on the bank of a river, the palace also has a chronic rodent problem. A mouse could be seen scurrying along the back wall behind Kemi Badenoch last week when she was giving a live interview to ITV.
I’m sure I’ve met the same little chap in my office many times. I call every mouse I see in London Mr Jingles, after the magical rodent in the film The Green Mile. Mr Jingles is everywhere in this town. Forget Buckingham Palace. In the Palace of Westminster, Jingles is king.
The parliamentary authorities have long known they have a serious problem with the crumbling Westminster estate. Last week, the restoration and renewal board, an official state committee tasked with upgrading the place, released a long-awaited report on the options available.
It cited some alarming figures. Just 12 per cent of the floor space of the estate has step-free access. There have been 36 fires on the estate in the past decade, as well as a dozen “asbestos incidents”.
Each month there are 2,900 “reactive maintenance jobs”, while £1.5 million is spent each week on emergency repairs to the crumbling complex. In the House of Lords, it said, there is practically no heating system at all. No wonder they wear those big robes.
“Continuing in the same way is unsustainable [and] will lead to an expensive managed decline of the Palace of Westminster,” said the report.
Steeped in glorious history and democratic tradition but coming apart at the seams, the state of the Palace of Westminster is redolent of the state of modern Britain itself. Renewal cannot be postponed any longer. But it won’t come cheap.
There are several options, according to the renewal board. The cheapest one is what they refer to as a “full decant”, which means moving both houses of parliament off the estate for much of the time it would take to upgrade the place.
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However, that could still cost more than £15 billion (€17.2 billion) and take as long as two decades. For many MPs, representing their constituents in this grand old place is the privilege of their lives. The thought that in future, they might have to do it all from the belly of a modern conference centre elsewhere in London is, to say the least, politically unpopular in Westminster.
However, the report said it could cost up to £40 billion to revamp the estate bit by bit and take – wait for it – up to 60 years.
Other options include various halfway house approaches between these two extremes. No matter which option they pursue, both houses of parliament will have to move elsewhere for a period of time.
The Queen Elizabeth II conference centre across the road is seen as the most likely site for the House of Lords. The House of Commons could then move into the Lords while the peers went off campus. There is a precedent for that, after Nazi Germany bombed the Commons during the Blitz.
The restoration board wants the UK government to take a final decision by mid-2030. It is staggering to think that Britain could still be refurbishing its houses of parliament by the end of this century.
