page_title: Scottish Parliament Building
section_title: Controversy
hierarchical_section_title: Scottish Parliament Building / Problems / Controversy
caption_attribution_description: The buildings of the Scottish Parliament, Edinburgh, with police deployed for the 31st G8 summit.
context_page_description: The Scottish Parliament Building is the home of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood, within the UNESCO World Heritage Site in central Edinburgh. Construction of the building commenced in June 1999 and the Members of the Scottish Parliament held their first debate in the new building on 7 September 2004. The formal opening by Queen Elizabeth II took place on 9 October 2004. Enric Miralles, the Spanish architect who designed the building, died before its completion.
  From 1999 until the opening of the new building in 2004, committee rooms and the debating chamber of the Scottish Parliament were housed in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland located on The Mound in Edinburgh. Office and administrative accommodation in support of the Parliament were provided in buildings leased from the City of Edinburgh Council. The new Scottish Parliament Building brought together these different elements into one purpose-built parliamentary complex, housing 129 MSPs and more than 1,000 staff and civil servants.
  From the outset, the building and its construction have been controversial.
context_section_description: Notwithstanding the level of controversy surrounding cost, the Scottish Parliament Building proved controversial in a number of other respects: the decision to construct a new building, the choice of site, the selection of a non-Scottish architect, and the selection of Bovis as construction manager after having earlier been excluded from the shortlist. In 1997, the initial cost of constructing a new Parliament building was given as £40 million, a figure produced by the Scottish Office, prior to the September 1997 devolution referendum, and subsequently revealed to be the figure for housing MSPs. Further controversy surrounding the project sprang from the selection of the Holyrood site, which was a late entrant onto the list of sites to be considered, and the rejection of the Royal High School on Calton Hill, long thought to be the home of any future devolved Scottish Parliament. After a formal visit to the Royal High School by Dewar and his aides on 30 May 1997, it was rejected as unsuitable on the grounds of size and location.
  Control of the building project passed from the Scottish Office to the cross-party Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB) on 1 June 1999, headed by the Parliament's then Presiding Officer, Sir David Steel, at a time of increasing costs. Rising costs sprang from the need for a formal entrance and the need to accommodate parliamentary staff in light of better knowledge of how Parliament was working at its primary location on the Royal Mile, where it was clear there were staff overcrowding problems. With the cost increases in mind, and heightened media interest in the Holyrood Project, the Members of the Scottish Parliament held a debate on whether to continue with construction on 17 June 1999 voting by a majority of 66 to 57 in favour to complete the project.
  In August 1999, the architect informed the project group that the Parliament would need to be further increased in size by 4,000 square metres (43,000 sq ft). A subsequent costing revealed that taking into account the increased floorspace net construction costs had risen to £115m by September 1999. Early in 2000, the SPCB commissioned an independent report by the architect John Spencely. The report concluded that savings of 20% could be made on the current project and that scrapping the project completely at that stage or moving to another site would entail additional costs of £30m. Spencely also cited poor communication between the SPCB and construction officials as increasingly costly. Given the outcomes of the Spencely report, MSPs voted to continue with the construction project on the Holyrood site in a debate in the Scottish Parliament on 5 April 2000.
  The project was also complicated by the deaths of Miralles in July 2000, of Dewar the following October and the existence of a multi-headed client consisting of the SPCB, the Presiding Officer and an architectural advisor. The client took over the running of the project from the Scottish Executive (formerly the Scottish Office) while it was already under construction. Subsequently, the events of 9/11 led to further design changes, especially with regard to security, which again resulted in rising costs. However, it was later rejected that the re-designs required to incorporate greater security into the building structure were the "single biggest" factor affecting the increased costs of the project.
  By March 2004 the cost had reached the sum of £430m (compared to an original budget of £55m in July 1998 when the architects were appointed). This equates to £85 for each of the 5.1 million people in Scotland. A report published by the Auditor General for Scotland in July 2004 specifically identified elements that contributed to both increasing costs and the delay in completing the project. His report criticised the overall management of the project and stated that had the management and construction process been executed better, costs could have been reduced. The report attempted to identify the reasons why there had been an acceleration in cost from £195m in September 2000 to £431m in Febr
caption: The unique architecture of the Scottish Parliament was complicated by design changes and cost increases.
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