Parliament is Falling Down

In this short 5-minute podcast from a former Health & Safety officer at the UK Parliament, Rich Bunn offers a personal glimpse on the hidden realities of the Palace of Westminster: its ageing fabric, fire risks, asbestos, and the delicate, often unseen work of managing health and safety within a historic seat of power.

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The Palace of Westminster, home of the UK Houses of Parliament, is in a bad way. That's a very British, very understated way of saying that it is now vastly more dangerous to occupy than a building that essentially is just a series of offices, meeting rooms, and auditoriums should be. But what exactly is happening? What are the options to deal with this? And why should we care? The UK Houses of Parliament have stood in some form or another on the site at which they currently stand for over a thousand years. But that statement gives an illusion of permanence that I think we need to interrogate. Because when I say that, what I mean essentially is that Westminster Hall has survived, along with an underground 13th-century chapel and a very, very small amount of surrounding infrastructure. The rest mostly burnt down in the 1830s. It was rebuilt at great expense and is now crumbling into the ground. And that isn't hyperbole, that is literally what's happening. But why? You can find debates on the deterioration of Parliament and what politicians might choose or not choose to do about it as far back as the 1970s. So what's happening, and why has no one done anything about it yet? Okay, this is quite a complex question. To understand what's going wrong in the Palace of Westminster, you have to look at how life was in Victorian England when it was built and how life is now. There was no underground tube station, and the level of seismic activity being caused by the Jubilee Line and others cannot be underestimated for the amount of stress it puts on the Palace of Westminster, which is directly above it. The trains that run underground are literally shaking the foundations of that building every day. There is a certain amount of additional stress placed on the building by dint of the fact that it is next to a river, and there is a level of air pollution associated with being on one of the busiest ring roads in London. And in case you don't think that factors into the use of the building, it's useful to remember how many different control measures have been retrofit into Parliament to try and deal with pollution and environmental impact and condensation and sustainability and all the things that are a consideration now, but weren't in the 1830s. In the 1830s, there was no need to install Wi-Fi. There wasn't even really much consideration given to electricity. There were no phone lines. There was no air conditioning. Most of the heating was provided by a steam boiler, and the rest by lighting fires in all of the main chambers and rooms. None of that can happen anymore, which means large swathes of all of the ducting and passageways and the natural venting that would have got rid of things like condensation have been blocked up with fiber optics and gas pipelines and electrical wires and even the copper cabling that was used to originally install the telephones. And then there's the materials that were used. Parliament was built heavily reliant on the Victorian Wonder substance, asbestos. It's full of it, and stripping it out is very complicated and very costly. If you were to make a modern working building now, you wouldn't include many of the building materials of Parliament. For a start, there'd be a lot less tapestry, wood panelling, and gold plating. I can even think of a particular scenario in which the toilets flooded and then no one could get to the plumbing because the utilities were behind walls which had been hung with several tons of marble. As to the question of why nothing has been done about it, well, plenty of things have been done, and there is always continual construction and renovation work at Parliament. However, a full renovation would cost an incredible amount of money. And frankly, that's a very controversial thing for any MP to suggest spending when you consider it's an amount that would come out of the public purse. Few MPs have been brave enough to suggest such a thing. And what tends to happen, and is still happening, is that a commission is formed. And it's very slow, and what's been happening since about 2015 is that various authorities have been formed, debated this widely, come up with a suite of options, decided that they didn't think they were able to make the decision, and then been gently dissolved again, only for a new authority or a new type of decision body to be created in its wake. Probably the most efficient option would be to close Parliament and do a large full-scale renovation. Doing that would take about 10 years and cost somewhere in the region of 40 billion pounds. It's been suggested that MPs could decant into a conference center, and also that perhaps the cost of doing that could be used to rebalance or level up a different area other than London. But I think it's fair to say that a significant number of politicians simply do not want to leave. And that may not just be ego, that may be an association with the history and prestige of the building, and the idea that the projection of soft power, the leveraging of the status and history of that building when you meet other diplomats and countries, has some merit. It's also been suggested that parliament could be sold off, could be renovated, could be used for a museum, could be closed bit by bit, or could go through some sort of gradual renovation. All of those things, however, are not without expense and controversy. But someone needs to make a decision. Every week that Parliament is continually occupied without a large-scale renovation, the level of risk increases. And also, perhaps this is the bit that is less talked about, the cost of keeping it safe increases. Parliament now has an entire army of maintenance teams and architects doing checks and fire safety officers doing patrols and health and safety persons. It takes a great deal of time, money, and effort to keep Parliament safe for occupation. And I should know that I used to be part of the team that did it.