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The committee of MPs who recommended last week that parliamentarians decamp to other Whitehall buildings while the Houses of Parliament undergo a £4bn revamp said success of the work will be dependent on the early involvement of SMEs.
The Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster concluded that the building “faces an impending crisis which we cannot responsibly ignore” and said the cheapest and safest option would be for MPs and Lords to move out for a six-year period while the work is carried out. Prime minster Theresa May is expected to back the plans.
It is expected they will move to nearby buildings as early as 2020 with MPs moving to the Department of Health’s headquarters and the Lords to the QEII conference centre to enable the radical refit.
However, they pointed out that conducting the works in one phase will make a significant demand on market capacity and capability and that it would be vital to engage with specialists to ensure the work could be skilled up.
“If Parliament ultimately decides to proceed via a full decant, the programme will be particularly dependent on specialist skills which, especially in the heritage sector, tend to be found in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We have therefore been advised, and agree, that market engagement should begin at the earliest possible opportunity.
“The RIBA told us that there was a great skills shortage issue resulting from declining investment into the conservation sector and a large pipeline of works in the UK that would divert resources from the R&R programme.”
The committee suggested that a Sponsor Board for the work should be set up in-house which would oversee an Olympic-style Delivery Board to carry out the work and said that a major role of both of these bodies would be to “consider how apprenticeships and other training schemes could be delivered as part of the restoration and renewal programme in order to increase capacity in this area and to provide a lasting legacy of skills from the programme”.
The report added: “The programme also provides an opportunity to engage with businesses, especially SMEs beyond London and the south-east of England. We recommend that the Sponsor Board and Delivery Authority begin market engagement early, and ensure that such engagement reaches out as widely as possible.”
It continued: “Requirements to engage with companies in the nations and regions of the United Kingdom could be built into the objectives for the Delivery Authority, as could a requirement to encourage and facilitate the involvement of SMEs.”
The Palace of Westminster is in need of extensive renovation because of its crumbling stonework, leaking roofs, and inadequate fire safety measures. The Victorian building also has problems with asbestos. But the main driver is the upgrade to M&E services.
Why do we need to spend so much restoring the Houses of Parliament?
The report says that the Palace of Westminster, a masterpiece of Victorian and medieval architecture and engineering, faces an impending crisis which if ignored would result in a catastrophic failure.
“There is a substantial and growing risk of either a single, catastrophic event, such as a major fire, or a succession of incremental failures in essential systems which would lead to Parliament no longer being able to occupy the Palace.”
The main driver of the refurbishment, said the report, was the “complete replacement of the Palace’s M&E systems, which is now very pressing”, but it said, “there are four other streams of work which will need to be carried out alongside the M&E refurbishment: dealing with the huge amount of asbestos present throughout the building, installing proper fire compartmentalisation and other fire safety measures, improving accessibility by bringing the building into conformity with modern standards of disabled access, and conserving the historic fabric of the building.”
“Unless an intensive programme of major remedial work is undertaken soon, it is likely that the building will become uninhabitable.”
The report recommends that parliamentarians move out while the work is done as this would be the cheapest option and and suggests that the House of Lords move to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, opposite Westminster Abbey and MPs to Richmond House.
The committee of MPs says that “the challenge of the Restoration and Renewal Programme is immense, but it also offers scope to deliver some significant improvements to the way the Palace works, turning a masterpiece of 19th Century architecture and design into a building that is fit for a 21st Century Parliament. It would be an error for Parliament to miss this rare opportunity to deliver a more open, efficient, inclusive and outward-facing Parliamentary building.”
International comparisons
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The Palace of Westminster is not the only parliamentary building in the world undergoing major renovation work. Over the past few years, the R&R Programme Team has been in contact with a number of other Parliaments who are in the process of restoring their buildings to gather ideas and to share lessons learned.
Four of the parliamentary programmes researched by the Programme Team (in Canada, the Netherlands, Austria and Finland) are being driven by the need to replace infrastructure, in a similar way to the R&R Programme.
In Canada, refurbishment has begun on several 19th and early 20th Century buildings on the parliamentary estate in Ottawa, involving the future relocation of both Chambers to temporary accommodation.
In the Netherlands, the group of buildings known as the Binnenhof (pictured above), where Parliament is located, now need major restoration.
In this case, it is proposed that all of the buildings should be closed at the same time in order to complete the work more quickly, requiring the relocation of both Houses of Parliament.
Austria is also engaged in a similar programme of works, with a full decant of its 19th Century Parliament building being planned from 2017.70 Finally, in Finland, the Parliament building is currently closed for a major refurbishment, scheduled to finish in 2017.71
