As £750m is announced, CN he asks if a change of government will finally do the job
Parliament has alerted contractors to £750 million worth of works at the historic Palace of Westminster and its wider estate.
During the second half of this decade, a wide range of jobs are foreseen in the Houses of Parliament through a new framework of construction works.
Tasks covered by the Multi-Batch Parliamentary Building Works Framework, which will formally open for procurement in early autumn, include mechanical and electrical, roofing, heritage and conservation and mixed discipline works for less than 2.5 million pounds or up to 150 million pounds.
This latest tranche of projects comes after contractors were called in March for £70m of “significant repairs” to Parliament’s tallest structure, the iconic Grade II-listed Victoria Tower.
Sir Robert McAlpine last year completed the renovation of the Elizabeth Tower, often called Big Ben. Essential fire systems have been installed at the aging estate. And there are over 40 active projects underway.
So with so much activity, why did the Public Accounts Commission (PAC) warn in May that there was a “real and growing risk that a catastrophic event would destroy the Palace before it is ever repaired and restored”?
tip of the iceberg
Incredibly, all of the previous work is distinct from the long-discussed and as-yet-unstarted main program of restoration and renovation. Progress on this “critical” initiative has been “painfully slow,” the PAC said.
The state of the Palace of Westminster, which was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1834, was exposed by the latest report. It lacks “robust systems” to stop fire spreading, the committee said, and is unlikely to survive a major fire. This is not an abstract risk: there have been 44 fire incidents since 2016. There have also been eight asbestos-related incidents, with 2,500 massive areas feared to harbor the deadly substance. The report also noted 12 cases of falling masonry and a “staggering” 4,000 maintenance jobs per month.
It seems that all political parties agree on the need to act. So what has been done so far, why does the restoration project seem to have stalled, and where might it be going next?
Spiraling costs
Rewind the clock eight years to June 2015 and a consortium including Deloitte and Aecom published a report estimating that the cheapest renovation of the Houses of Parliament would cost £3.5 billion and require MPs to move for six years.
This would amount to £5.7 billion and take more than three decades if carried out as an ongoing programme.
MPs duly voted to go ahead with the work and the Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renovation) Act 2019 created the initial structure for it to happen. This set up project governance in the style of the 2012 Olympic Games construction success, with a sponsoring body overseeing a delivery authority.
So far so good. But in early 2022, the sponsoring body revealed that its work so far indicated a major escalation of the project by almost any metric. It would now take up to 28 years, cost up to £13 billion and require Britain’s most famous buildings to be empty for a decade or more.
Weeks later, the sponsoring body was unceremoniously dismissed by the senior officials who run the parliament: the
the so-called clerks of the Commons and Lords. The couple, John Benger and Simon Burton, decided to take direct control of the project.
The secretaries and committees of the House of Commons and the House of Lords on which they sit, created a program board to pull the levers of the renewal project. That oversees a new client team, he said
to be of about 30 members and to consist mainly of the same people who formed the sponsoring body before it was disbanded. Ultimately, it is these same people who are still commissioning work from the delivering authority.
A PAC report, published at the time of the change, found “no evidence to justify” the change of government. An independent panel, created after the decision, recognized that “fundamental changes in the structure of a program (such as those proposed here) can introduce substantial new risks.”
However, the client team is pressing ahead with preparing its own options for MPs to vote on later this year. Some of the scenarios outlined by the scrapped sponsoring body are understood to have been retained and reworked, while others may have been investigated.
Future options
The plan is to present a matrix of options to MPs who will be under intense pressure as they make a decision that will have a big impact on their working lives in more ways than one. A hot-button political issue with the public, the program involves the conservation of a cherished national asset, but also huge spending on MPs’ private jobs.
Whatever the final decision, nothing is likely to happen immediately on the ground. Considerable planning will be required and MPs will probably have to find another place to work.
In the background, a lot is being done to prepare the ground. Almost 5,000 hours of surveying work has been carried out, including the examination of 160 rooms and the drilling of holes 70 meters below the seat of the power. More survey appointments are imminent, while more offers are expected to hit the market in the coming months.
Meanwhile, the most critical and accessible jobs continue to be taken out of the megaprogram and delivered as stand-alone projects.
The change in governance of the restoration scheme appears to have facilitated this process by giving Benger, Burton and their teams oversight of both streams and the ability to shift tasks between the two.
In fact, the continued discrepancy on the form of the review of the estate could allow it to be gradually reduced by the leakage of individual projects to the market. This outcome might not be thematically ideal, but it could work to the benefit of all parties.
