List it – MPs should leave
A “full decant” would see MPs and peers vacate the Palace of Westminster for 19 to 24 years, at a total cost of between £11.1 billion and £15.6 billion once inflation is included. It is currently costing around £1.5 million a week just to carry out basic maintenance and repairs to the building.
Former Labour minister Lord Hain told Big Issue that parliamentarians should move out as soon as possible.
“It is significantly cheaper to decant the palace and restore and renew it than to conduct piecemeal repairs which is what has been going on for years,” he said.
Throughout the palace there are roughly 250 miles of cabling, mainly electrical but also telephone, digital and broadcasting. The estate covers more than 28 acres, over 1,100 rooms and approximately 4,000 windows. These ageing systems present a serious fire risk, Lord Hain continued.
“It’s extremely congested. Nobody knows what many of these cables or pipes are, or even whether they are redundant,” he said.
“Because nobody has wanted to disrupt the work of parliament, things have got exponentially worse and worse.”
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Failure to tackle these issues, he warned, could lead to a “Notre Dame-style inferno”.
Lib Dem MP Edward Morello posted on social media: “Unpopular opinion: Move us out permanently. Make it a museum.”
Love it – MPs should stay
Staying put also won’t come cheap. Delaying major works is estimated to cost around £70 million per year in additional reactive, according to the Restoration and Renewal report.
Considering this, the board has now ruled out previous options for “rolling programmes of maintenance”. MPs and peers will definitely have to leave in some capacity.
The less dramatic option, then, is a “partial decant”. This would see peers leave the House of Lords for between eight and 13 years, with the Commons moving into the Lords’ chamber for up to two of those years.
Work would continue during this period – and carry on afterwards for up to 61 years. This is the lengthier and more expensive option, with total costs, once inflation is included, reaching up to around £39 billion.
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Despite the price tag, many MPs and peers favour an approach that would keep them in the building. Jacob Rees-Mogg is among them.
“I was on the committee that looked into it [restoration] in the 2010-2015 Parliament, when we were told that the whole place would be ruined if we didn’t act immediately,” he told BBC.
“And here we are 10 years or more later – we haven’t acted immediately and the place still seems to be standing… Once you move out that’s when the builders really have you and that’s when the prices go up. Builders are wonderful people, and many of them are voters, so they’re great people, but they have a commercial interest.”
Conservative MP Sir Edward Leigh also opposes a full decant. On X, he called instead for restoration to be done in stages while MPs continue to work in the house.
“The whole R+R report is so biased in favour of their gold-plated plans. How can we sign a blank cheque to spend eye-watering sums on ourselves with the economy in this state?” he posted on X. “I’ve argued for a decade we should scrap the September sitting and have them get on with as much of the works as possible around us. There are better ways to do this.”
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