Parliamentary Buildings (Restoration and Renewal) Bill — House of Lords, 2019-07-22
Topic: Government Operations
Jennifer Jones (Green Party, Left): My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group and some of the later ones, particularly those in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Bethell, and the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Basildon. I was sad that I was not able to take part in the Second Reading but I hope to make up for it now For me, the pertinent questions are: who is the restoration and renewal project for, and what is it intended to achieve? The Bill is incredibly unambitious. It is designed to keep things roughly as they are—or, in some cases, exactly as they are—to serve those people who currently occupy the building, whether MPs, Peers or staff. I love the idea of a coffee bar in the Royal Gallery—it might warm it up—because it is almost unusable at most times of the year. However, it is only partly right if we look to MPs, Peers and staff for what is appropriate for the future Public engagement has to be at the heart of the project. If we do not engage the public properly, they will not see this as a good use of money. We are talking about billions of pounds of public funds from the Treasury and it must not look like an upgrade for our offices; it has to look like part of the national fabric. We must therefore involve the public in renewing the heart of our democracy It is a fundamental principle of our parliamentary democracy that no Parliament can bind its successors in law, and yet this Bill will do exactly that. This building will be set in stone for decades. It will take a decade to start the work and a decade to complete it and in that time we will not take into account the fact that our society is moving on. The public can be more radical than we are. We tend to get stuck in mud with our processes. We have a new clock, a new system with the Lord Speaker and so on, but these changes have been incredibly slow. Public engagement will suggest more radical things than we do here Once the building is done, there will be no opportunities for moving on, changing our systems or doing anything new or perhaps more democratic. Whether it is introducing an elected Chamber, electronic voting or whatever, it will be much harder because people will say, "We cannot do that because we have just spent billions on recreating what we had before. It will not fit and we cannot spend any more money". This country has undergone massive constitutional changes over the past couple of decades and it is illogical to persist in the way we are going when society is moving on. We cannot afford to be blinkered about what is happening around us. For these reasons, the amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, are essential. The sponsor body must have as one of its central purposes the duty to ensure that its work accommodates future concerns, changes and political developments. If it does not do that, it will be seen as a huge waste of money I would go even further with public engagement and say that we should parallel the sponsor body’s work on restoring and renewing the building with establishing a citizens’ assembly, which is what Theresa May should have done with Brexit. Such an assembly could offer a way in which to restore and renew our whole political system. A Government with vision past the next few months would breathe life into a new era of citizenship and change public engagement for the better. This place is not a museum but a working building, and we have to accept that work sometimes changes These amendments are vital. I regret that they have been watered down—I would have supported the unwatered-down version—but I will support them at any further point in our work.