Happy New Year! The year of “levelling up,” according to Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. So at the end of the season of goodwill, here is a levelling-up proposal which, if implemented, would make a real improvement to the way Britain is governed for centuries to come: relocating parliament to Birmingham or Manchester.
There is an immediate practical issue which puts this on the agenda: the necessity and cost of the complete refurbishment of the early Victorian Palace of Westminster, nearly two centuries old and largely unmodernised, which is due to start this year unless a decision is taken to do something else.
The present plan is for both Houses to entirely “decant” from the Palace and move into temporary accommodation. Then all the infrastructure in the neo-gothic Victorian building—which includes the two chambers and most of the committee rooms and communal facilities for some 4,000 members and staff, plus the public who come to watch and lobby—can be modernised, fixing miles of dangerous wiring and plumbing, unsanitary and rat-infested premises, an almost complete lack of modern IT and dozens of entrances and thoroughfares which do not meet even basic disability requirements.
Cost estimates to be submitted to parliament in the next few weeks suggest that the bill for this mega project is heading towards £14bn, more than three times the initial projection, and that the time required for it to be completed is extending from six towards 20 years. This is on top of most of the work to maintain the fabric of the gothic exterior, including Big Ben, which has been ongoing for decades to prevent the building from falling down. The scaffolding on the famous clock face is slowly disappearing, after five years of it being entirely encased with not a bong from the bells apart from some new year specials.
If £14bn over 20 years is how it looks now, before a single floorboard has been lifted, the final cost and duration of the work could be of HS2 proportions for just one building, albeit an iconic one of immense size and complexity.
It is surely right to pause and consider whether there is a better option. The issue is not only the cost. We should also ask whether London remains the right place for the parliament of the United Kingdom, when the overwhelming dominance of London and the southeast in the UK’s decision-making, as well as in its economy and culture, is so hotly debated. With modern communications and transport links, notably HS2 itself, parliament might not need to be in London for reasons of practicality and accessibility. Many other democracies locate their parliaments in places other than their largest city and richest region.
HS2 will open from London to Birmingham by 2030 and proceed to Manchester a few years later. It will shrink the journey time from London to Birmingham to about 30 minutes, and an hour to Manchester. It will also slash the journey time from most other cities to Birmingham and Manchester and, for most people, will make those two cities quicker to get to than London. And whereas Westminster is a further inconvenient journey from London’s railway termini and airports, HS2 will have four stations in and around Birmingham and Manchester—including at Manchester Airport and Birmingham Airport, with the latter just across from the National Exhibition Centre. There is ample space for a new and immediately accessible parliament building.
A modern parliament building could be a powerful symbol of a modern democracy, as at Holyrood and the Senedd in Cardiff. The Senedd, designed by the late Richard Rogers, is in my view a democratic masterpiece, with its immense glass façade enabling visitors and passers-by from outside to observe the members in action in the debating chamber. “The Welsh Parliament is committed to transparent democracy and the Senedd was designed to reflect this,” runs the guide, which also explains how it is one of the most sustainable and disability-friendly parliament buildings in the world.
By contrast, Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin deliberately designed the Palace of Westminster in the 1840s to be exclusive and non-accessible, harking back to a fictionalised medieval society of hierarchies—not a future of democracy, which they feared. Hence the only large-scale entrance to the Palace is the Sovereign’s Entrance, used but once a year for the state opening of parliament. The architectural focus of the Palace is the immensely gilded House of Lords, dominated by its amazingly ornate throne, which is hardly the beating heart of a modern democracy.
The Palace of Westminster would be an amazing addition to the Victoria and Albert Museum. It would then ironically be far more accessible to visitors than it will ever be as a working parliament. The debating chambers could still be used for special and ceremonial occasions. The Palace could be gifted to the V&A with a dowry, which could come from just a fraction of the proceeds of selling off the expensive Westminster office buildings for members and staff which now surround the estate.
What of the prime minister and ministers who have regularly to attend parliament, and whose departments are located in neighbouring Whitehall? Shock, horror, maybe some of these could move north too! But if they stay put, a weekly trip by HS2 to Birmingham or Manchester would do them—and us—a lot of good. They could travel on the “levelling-up express.”
