Refurbishing the Palace of Westminster will be extremely expensive, but so too will be doing nothing

Earlier this month, yet another report on the renovation of the Palace of Westminster in London was published. For almost the past seven decades — since the repair of bomb damage to the House of Commons after the Second World War — Parliament has repeatedly baulked at the cost and inconvenience of properly maintaining its home, a complex architectural palimpsest with a history stretching back a millennium to the reign of Edward the Confessor (1042–66).

As this latest report generously expresses it: ‘The requirement to avoid significant disruption to the business of Parliament has often resulted in underlying issues in the building not being fully addressed. Continuing in the same way is unsustainable, and will lead to an expensive managed decline.’

The cumulative impact of this neglect is sobering. According to the report, it currently costs about £1.5 million every week to maintain and repair the Palace and reactive maintenance is increasing sharply. In the past month, there has been a heating failure, plus significant problems with the sewerage system, the compelled closure of lavatories and leaks. Since 2016, there have been 36 fires, 12 ‘asbestos incidents’ and 19 falls of masonry. To compound these, the report states that only 12% of the Palace’s total floor area has step-free access.

Four possible remedies are set out in the report, but only two are recommended. The cheapest involves decanting Parliament entirely from the Palace for 19–24 years and is expected to cost between £8.5 billion and £11.5 billion. Athena imagines, however, that peers and MPs will go for the alternative, a partial decampment costing between £11.8 billion and £18.7 billion and lasting between 38 and 61 years. Every year of delay will reportedly cost an additional £70 million per year in maintenance at present prices and an additional £250 million to £350 million in inflationary rises.

Athena struggles to believe that these vast sums and timescales are accurate reflections of what is actually necessary. Peers and MPs need to interrogate this report carefully and work out what the project ought to cost. That said, they also need to bite the bullet and get on with the work. After all, the money they waste in dithering is ours.

She would also warn against those who have used these costs to argue that the Palace of Westminster should be abandoned in favour of a new Parliament building. Even viewed from a narrowly financial perspective, it’s hard to see this being a cheap or easy option.

Certainly, the necessary building and infrastructure will be vastly expensive. Nor are the precedents propitious. The proposed budget for the Scottish Parliament in 1998 was £90 million, but the final bill for the—delayed—building in 2004 was £414 million. In today’s values, that’s three-quarters of £1 billion. No less significant is the fact that it will leave the Palace itself neglected and requiring both repair and a function.